Bosnia no model of nation-building

I never caught the American congresswoman's name, but I doubt I'll be forgetting her words anytime soon.

It was mid-May. I was in an apartment in Sarajevo,getting ready to head out for a day of work, with my ear half-tuned to CNBC. The program centered on a debate about postwar Iraq and whether the United States should be planning a long-term commitment to "nation-building" in that country.

What finally caught my full attention were the congresswoman's words, almost parenthetically dropped into a longer comment about Iraq: "Well, when we've been successful in nation-building in the past, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, it's because we've stayed a while."

Bosnia? A successful example of nation-building? I couldn't believe what she had just casually declared. This might have seemed unremarkable to anyone who hasn't followed events in this Balkan nation since war ended in 1995. But I've been working on a photo documentary project about the aftermath of war in Bosnia-Herzegovinasince the fall of 2000 and to call Bosnia a success story is to ignore all the ways nation-building has failed to take root here.

To be sure, the presence of the international community has made a huge difference in a country that was nearly torn apart by nationalistic rivalries. Thousands of homes destroyed in the war have been rebuilt with international aid; a multitude of social-service and civic-minded programs funded by foreign donors have helped seed a local network of homegrown, nongovernmental organizations; and the international community - in the form of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), which still has the final say in the country - has pushed (sometimes forced) legal reforms aimed at ending ethnic and religious discrimination.

It all sounds like nation-building. It is. But it's no success - yet.

For one thing, the country's postcommunist, postconflict economy is still a shambles: The unemployment rate is 49 percent. For another, the electoral process has failed to deliver badly needed visionary leadership; in fact, Bosnians have become so discouraged with the process that about half of eligible voters stayed home from the polls last fall. As a result, the same nationalist parties that were considered to be a huge part of Bosnia's postwar problems back in 1996 - and which had been out of power in recent years - were voted back in.

There are many other examples of "nation-building" in Bosnia that have yet to achieve even the semblance of a sturdy foundation. But perhaps the most worrisome is the division created in the country by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, the very agreements meant to reunite and stabilize the country.

Under Dayton, a national government was set up to handle foreign, economic, and fiscal policy - it's a tripartite presidency (with Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic representatives), a parliament, and a ministry of foreign affairs. Under that umbrella are two internal governing entities: The Bosniak/Croat Federation is mainly Muslim and Catholic Croats who make up 52 percent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serb Republic (RS), with 48 percent of the nation's population, is made up almost entirely of Orthodox Serbs.

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