Can foreigners fix Bosnia?

A charismatic salesman, Ashdown peddles his plan for the coherent structures and centralized institutions crucial to a functioning market-based democracy with the slogan "Jobs and Justice." He's pushed through a massive reevaluation of government staffers in an effort to end endemic graft and patronage. He's backed a cleansing of the judiciary in hopes of undergirding the rule of law. And he convened a so-called Bulldozer Committee of businesspeople that eliminated 50 key bureaucratic and legal obstructions to transparency and initiative.

"Ashdown's greatest triumph is enlisting hope in the future," says Mark Wheeler, country director for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO. "People expect more of Paddy than of their own political structures."

Small wonder. For a country of under 4 million, Bosnia has a dizzying number of political parties and levels of government bureaucracies, and a paucity of meaningful paths or options. Doctors, teachers, even police, are on strike. Young people, sitting dead-eyed in sidewalk cafes, dream of a future abroad. Ordinary Bosnians say they see no improvement in their circumstances, though domestic mafia figures seem to grow ever richer. Half of the dispirited population didn't even vote in the last election.

That contest brought victory to an improbable alliance of nationalist parties - the very Serb, Muslim, and Croat parties whose extreme views ignited the war in the first place. Now each faction fights for its share of the spoils. The ethnic Serb nationalist party, the SDS, for example, has blocked the joint customs service, which would have had the effect of clamping down on a black-market economy said to be dominated by key SDS backers.

Most troublingly, nearly eight years after the end of a war between ethnic Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims - in which a quarter of a million died and millions more were displaced from their homes - the core dispute remains unresolved.

"It's a ceasefire, nothing more," says one ordinary Bos-nian. "There won't be war, but there will be no real peace."

The fissure was confirmed in August, when a poll of Republika Srpska residents found two-thirds amenable to the idea of ditching Bosnia altogether to join neighboring Serbia and Montenegro - up from one-third in a previous study.

Still, there are signs of progress here. Some nationalists have proved surprisingly open to Ashdown's initiatives, acknowledging that only by stabilizing the domestic situation can they gain admission to the European Community and attendant economic benefits. The massive foreign-funded rebuilding throughout the country is cause for buoyed spirits. And Bosnia, a country with almost universal literacy, is beginning to replace a generation of talented young workers and intellectuals who died or fled.

To many, this is not yet the right moment for sink-or-swim. "We think another couple of years of intrusive tutelage is necessary," says ICG's Wheeler. He pauses for just a second. "The dilemma is, the deeper you get in, the harder it is to get out."

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