PRAGUE -- The international community's envoy in Bosnia moved Friday to invoke extraordinary legal powers over the country after Bosnian Serb leaders passed legislation that he said undermined the Dayton peace accords, which ended Bosnia's brutal war in 1995.
Aides to the envoy, Valentin Inzko, said the decision to assert special legal authority was necessary to hold the fragile multiethnic country together. Mr. Inzko invoked the special authority, which will take effect on Saturday, to rescind the legislation approved by the Bosnian Serbs' National Assembly, the aides said.
The European Union and the United States are determined to maintain the Dayton agreement, which divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbian Republic, with a decentralized political system that appears to have reinforced rather than healed ethnic divisions.
| No kidding. Give each group their own fiefdom and then expect them to play nice together. Who would ever have thought that it would work? |
| Of course, keeping them under one government had already not worked quite spectacularly. This particular Gorgon's knot requires a King Solomon, I fear. |
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