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Bosnia works on constitution 10 years after pact ended war

WASHINGTON - Bosnia's leaders seem close to an agreement on constitutional changes aimed at further unifying the still-fractured country, a top State Department official said Monday.

U.S. and Bosnian officials have been negotiating ways to revise the unwieldy constitution created at peace talks in Dayton, Ohio. Their efforts coincide with Monday's 10th anniversary of that pact, which ended Bosnia's war.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said he hoped they would have an agreement to announce today during a ceremony in Washington with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"We're not there yet. We don't have an agreement yet," Burns said. "But I'm confident that they're heading in that direction."

Burns praised the Dayton accords "as a seminal moment in American diplomacy," which ended a war that killed 260,000 people and drove 1.8-million from their homes. It marked Europe's worst fighting since World War II.

To ensure a balance of power among rival Serb, Croat and Muslim factions, the accords divided the country into two ethnic ministates with broad autonomy, a shared government and a three-man presidency.

But, Burns said, "simply put, the Dayton accords need to be modernized. They served Bosnia well over the last decade, but they were never meant to be immutable or set in stone."

Officials hope a revised constitution would establish one president, strengthen the Parliament and clear the way for Bosnia's goal of joining the European Union. That goal came a step closer Monday when EU foreign ministers authorized the start of negotiations on an agreement to prepare Bosnia for EU membership. Negotiations are to start Friday in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Also Monday, the U.N. Security Council extended the European Union peacekeeping force in Bosnia for a year and also extended NATO's mandate to assist that mission.

The chairman of Bosnia's presidential troika, Ivo Miro Jovic, a Croat, called the current constitution an obstacle to building a modern country and urged the other two presidents, both of whom were at Monday's event commemorating the Dayton anniversary, to agree on changes to the document.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who brokered the Dayton deal under President Clinton, praised the efforts of the Bush administration to fix what he called Dayton's mistakes after "four years of inattention and neglect."

The most pressing reform, he said, is to eliminate the three-man presidency, which shares the presidency on an eight-month-rotation schedule. "The goal has to be a single president," Holbrooke said.

Burns also pressed Bosnia's Serbian leaders to hunt down the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, both fugitives from a U.N. tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

The United States, he said, will not support Bosnia's membership in NATO until war crimes fugitives are in custody.

Burns said Bosnian officials told him they would issue a statement Tuesday calling for Karadzic, who's believed to be living mainly in the Serbian part of Bosnia, to turn himself in and face trial. Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia-Montenegro, he said.

[Last modified November 22, 2005, 02:15:27]