Three decades after peace deal, Bosnia still struggles with division

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By Daria Sito-Sucic

SARAJEVO/BRCKO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Reuters) -Franjo Sola remembers November 21, 1995, as the best day of his life, when a U.S.-brokered peace deal ended war in Bosnia and allowed him to leave the army and return to his studies at Sarajevo University. 

“I swore to myself that I will celebrate it as my second birthday,” Sola said this week as the Balkan country marks the 30th anniversary of the Dayton peace accord that halted an ethnic conflict between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks that killed some 100,000 people after Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia.

Since then, however, Sola’s optimism has faded. While the deal has maintained peace, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains divided along ethnic lines, its two regions barely held together by a weak umbrella government. Peace has failed to bring prosperity, and hundreds of thousands of young people – including Sola’s son – are estimated to have left in search of better prospects abroad. 

“Dayton was good to stop the war but…it was not good for the development of the country,” said Sola, who works as a technical expert for EUFOR, the EU peacekeeping mission that remains in the country to oversee the implementation of the peace deal.

“It should be revised, the country cannot function like this anymore.”

CORRUPTION AND DIVISION HOLD BOSNIA BACK 

The Dayton accords, named after the city in Ohio where they were ratified, split Bosnia into two autonomous regions, the Orthodox Serb-dominated Serb Republic and the Federation shared by Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. A tripartite presidency presides but has little actual power.  

The agreement has kept the peace, and Bosnia is now being considered for EU membership – an unthinkable prospect in the 1990s when much of the country’s infrastructure had been destroyed by war.

The economy saw some strong post-war gains, bolstered by aid that poured in for reconstruction, and annual growth today is above 2%. Yet development is hamstrung by corruption and slow decision-making.

According to unofficial reports, at least 600,000 people have left the country in the last 12 years, although no-one has an exact figure because the country has not completed a census since 2013.

Bosnia remains politically divided. Until a state court banned him from public office in February, Milorad Dodik, the former head of the Serb Republic, had long sought to secede from Bosnia and join Serbia. 

In the Croat village of Donja Skakava in northern Bosnia, many people have left. Most Bosnian Croats have been able to get Croatian passports, allowing them to move freely around the EU.

“The people have no economic stability whatsoever. The situation has worsened, not improved, after Dayton,” resident Anto Maticic said, standing in front of the remains of houses destroyed in the war. He reckons that at least 80% of Croats from the northern Posavina region, bordering Croatia, have moved out.

“Many of them rebuilt their houses but they remain empty,” he said.

(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic and Amel Emric; Editing by Edward McAllister and Hugh Lawson)