Can Bosnia's Peace Survive?

As Bosnian Serb politicians go, Milorad Dodik was considered one of the good guys. The former businessman took over the job of Prime Minister of the Bosnian Serb Republic in Banja Luka shortly after the end of the Bosnian war in 1995, helping to purge the local government of cronies of the wartime leader Radovan Karadzic. He battled [an error occurred while processing this directive] corruption and helped international investigators send indicted war criminals to the Hague. But these days, Dodik sounds like a changed man.

In the past two months he has questioned the underlying agreement that ended the war, attacked Muslim politicians for "consorting" with war criminals and asserted that his Serb-dominated Republic may try to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina and ultimately join Serbia. Meanwhile, Bosnian Muslim leaders in Sarajevo are matching him word for word: Haris Silajdzic, a former Bosnian Muslim Prime Minister, and another erstwhile moderate, told Time that the boundaries imposed at the end of the war should be erased because "they are not natural. They are based on genocide."

Between them, the two former moderates have cranked up the heat for Bosnia's upcoming general elections, scheduled for Oct. 1, to a level not seen since the war ended, alarming international officials who oversee the country and ordinary citizens who fear a return to violence. "These men are feeding off each other. They are not real nationalists, but they are using it to get elected. This is our catastrophe," says Senad Pecanin, editor of the Sarajevo weekly Dani. The concern is all the more urgent because Silajdzic and Dodik, if current public opinion polls are borne out, could be the first postwar Bosnian political leaders to wield significant political power; the group of Western countries that has overseen Bosnia since 1995 is scheduled to scale back its authority next year, and although it will hand over duties to the E.U., the scope of those duties may be sharply reduced.

"There is a lot of fear," Bosnia's High Representative Christian Schwarz-Schilling told Time recently in Sarajevo. "People remember the same rhetoric from the early 1990s. And that ended in war. There is risk of it going too far." While he and other diplomats say a return to war is unlikely, Pecanin is less sanguine: for the first time since the war, he said, "I am afraid for the peace here."

The tensions are rooted in the Dayton peace accords, named for the Ohio town where they were hammered out in 1995. To silence the guns, the agreement created two separate ethnically based "entities," the Muslim-Croat Federation, which comprises 51% of the country, and the Serb Republic, the majority Serb area that makes up the rest.

More than a decade on, these areas still have the appearance of separate countries. They have their own Prime Ministers and parliaments; their own languages, religions and mobile-phone networks. Although the army was finally unified under one command last year, the Serb Republic is crucially resisting efforts to centralize the police force.