Word: bosnias
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Until recently, Bosnia-Herzegovina was often described as a shining example of succesful international effort in post-conflict reconstruction and nation building. Since the war ended eleven years ago, hardly a shot was fired, towns and villages were repaired, and many refugees have returned to their homes. But now, a month ahead of crucial presidential and parliamentary polls, ethnic tension spurred by local political leaders is running so high that Bosnia's relapse into war no longer seems unthinkable...
...Bosnian Muslims, the largest ethnic group in the region, are pushing to dismantle Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity created by the 1995 Dayton peace accord and one of the two ethnically centered statelets, or entities, that comprise Bosnia. The other is the Muslim-Croat federation. Each has its own parliament, government and president. (Bosnia as a whole has a weak central government and a three-member presidency: one Serb, one Muslim and one Croat.) Bosnian Serbs are threatening to secede and merge with neighboring Serbia. "When I hear people talk on the news and in the cafes...
...Although Bosnian politicians have so far refrained from calling up voters in their constituencies to reach for the guns, they have done just about everything else to provoke and insult the opposing ethnic groups. Last Sunday Borislav Paravac, the Serbian member of Bosnia's collective Presidency, stated that the behavior of his Muslim colleague Sulejman Tihic was "idiotic." Tihic had previously said that those Serbs who do not accept his vision of Bosnia as a centralized state should pack up and move out of the country...
...Considering the intensity and the general tone of Bosnia's dirty election campaign, it's almost a miracle that violent incidents involving Serbs and Muslims - who share many cultural traits, but not a religion - have been relatively few. Yet there were some: on August 11, an explosive device damaged the tomb of Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia's wartime (and Muslim) president; most Muslims blamed the Serbs, who for their part insisted that Muslims staged the explosion; the ongoing investigation has so far been fruitless...
...forces in Iraq, but their own elastic now seems fully stretched. "The Afghan effort is one people still very much support," says a defense official from France, which has more than 1,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan, "but we've got forces in the Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chad, Congo and Lebanon; there's only so much we can do." Unless NATO members "push this through to a successful end, and all together," says this official, "we may find ourselves back at the drawing board before long." Gianni Vernetti, an Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, praises ISAF as "efficient...