Bosnian teens fight for progress

The 1995 peace accord has outlived its shelf life, one 15-year-old said.
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Ten years after Bosnia's bloodshed ended in a peace accord reached 5,000 miles away in Dayton, Ohio, a bunch of Bosnian teenagers set out to determine why their country is still dysfunctional.
They soon discovered what a new generation of Bosnians has learned the hard way: Dayton was a road map to peace, not a blueprint for the future. So they have written a new mock constitution for a nation with an unwieldy power-sharing system that is designed -- but often fails -- to satisfy everyone.
"Dayton may have worked at the time to stop the war, but its shelf life has expired," said 15-year-old Senad. "On the state level, we have three presidents, and they don't get along. Such a country cannot work."
The high school students' work has drawn the attention of the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia, Douglas McElhaney, who says he will take it to Washington, where negotiations are under way for changes in the existing constitution. But the negotiators face many of the same problems that bedeviled the authors of the Dayton accord -- rival claims, rooted in ancient historical, ethnic and religious grievances, over a corner of the Balkans smaller than West Virginia.
The accord
Brokered by the United States in the privacy of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the accord was announced on Nov. 21, 1995, just outside Dayton and signed in Paris three weeks later. It ended a 1992-95 war among Muslims who call themselves Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats that claimed 260,000 lives and drove another 1.8 million people from their homes.
The accord recognized Bosnia, formerly a piece of an imploded Yugoslavia, as an independent country. NATO deployed 60,000 peacekeepers to keep its armies apart. Now a force of 7,000 European Union troops fights organized crime and illegal logging in Bosnia's lush forests. Bosnia's own army, 13,000-strong and multiethnic, is being formed.
More than 1 million refugees have returned to their homes, and this week Bosnia is expected to sign an agreement to prepare it for its cherished long-term goal of joining the prosperous, democratic European Union.
"The peace stabilization has been a miracle," said British diplomat Paddy Ashdown, Bosnia's international administrator for the past 31/2 years. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who brokered the Dayton deal, says: "It is hard to think of any other peace process in the last decade that has done nearly as well as this one."
Bisera Dzidic, a 46-year-old news editor, says of Bosnia's new army: "I never expected soldiers who shot at each other 10 years ago in such a brutal war to now be serving a unified army under one flag."
Dissatisfaction
The Dayton accord divided the nation of 3.2 million into two ethnic mini-states with broad autonomy, a shared parliament and government, and a three-man presidency. But the power to impose laws and fire officials is in the hands of a foreigner, currently Ashdown.
A consensus has emerged that Bosnia has outgrown Dayton. "The current constitution of Bosnia is not really sufficient. If they want progress with Europe, they have to amend it," said European analyst Tomas Markert.
Parallel or overlapping agencies compound Bosnia's problems of poverty, corruption and 40 percent unemployment. Sixty-two percent of Bosnia's youths want to leave, a recent U.N. study found.
But Senad and his friends who spent their summer writing a constitution are resolved to stay and wear clothespins on their collars to symbolize the effort to hold Bosnia together.
"Our constitution erases the mini-states, foresees one president and does not separate 'us' from 'them,'" Senad said.