A decade ago, Samira Hasanvasic said, her parents huddled in a nearby village as Bosnian Serbs hunted down Muslims, torching their houses and driving many into exile. Others they killed, dumping the bodies into the muddy shallows of the Sava River.
This week, Hasanvasic, 17, completed her second year in a high school that now integrates Muslims, Serbs and Croats -- children of the groups that fought so bitterly over the right to live apart. It is the only city in Bosnia where the three main ethnic groups are mandated to go to school together.
PHOTO:NY TIMES
"At first, everyone was afraid because of what happened during the war," said Hasanvasic, gesturing to her friend, Romana Stjepic, a Croat. "But then we got to know each other, and the fear went away."
Hasanvasic still dreams of leaving her hometown behind, but not because it was once a killing ground. For her, Brcko (pronounced BIRCH-ko) is just run-of-the-mill boring.
Brcko's transition from deadly to merely dull is a remarkable success story -- one of the few in the seven long, hard years that Americans, Europeans and other foreigners have been trying to fix this broken land, and one that offers lessons for the US as it embarks on its latest adventure in nation-building in Iraq.
"This was a snake pit, the worst place you could imagine in Bosnia," said Mark Wheeler, the director of the Bosnia Project at the International Crisis Group, a research organization. "But the international community equipped people with enough authority to get their jobs done."
Today, this river port of 85,000 on the northeastern border of Bosnia has the highest per capita income in the country, a balanced budget and a skyline alive with construction cranes. Ethnic tensions, while not gone, seem to have been relegated to the status of a distraction for which the busy people have no time.
Some of Brcko's success is due to money. Treated as an international protectorate of the US since the war, it has received US$2 million a year in direct US assistance, plus an estimated US$65 million in other foreign aid.
Yet dollars alone do not explain the rebound. Bosnia as a whole has been flooded with anywhere from US$5 billion to US$15 billion -- more precise estimates are hard to come by -- and it still languishes.
The lesson of Brkco, Wheeler said, is that would-be nation-builders should install a powerful interim administrator, who is unafraid of defying the local political bosses. With a whip and some cash in hand, this proconsul can override ethnic loyalties and turn local attention to establishing the rule of law and business-friendly policies.
Ambassador Henry Clarke, an American diplomat who became Brcko's third supervisor in April 2001, turned the tide.
He has imposed one law -- on integrating the schools -- over the objections of the city council. He has annulled two others, dismissed local officials and business chiefs, and rammed through reforms at a pace his counterparts in the capital, Sarajevo, can only envy.
"The powers are broad, I won't deny that," Clarke said over dinner. "But the way you get reforms done is with the cooperation of the people. You don't get it by acting like a little Tito."
The colony the US took over was a shambles. More than 9,000 houses, a third of the total housing stock, had been destroyed during and after the war. The town's port was moribund, its food-processing plants were rusting hulks, and land mines lurked in the surrounding fields.
Perhaps because of his mild manner, Clarke has stirred little open resentment in Brcko. The Serbian mayor, Sinisa Kisic, describes him as an "adviser rather than one who orders." Only when he forcibly integrated the schools did he provoke a backlash among Serbs, some of whom dubbed the decision "Clarke's Law." Even then, they put up no violent resistance.
Clarke's latest project is the Arizona Market, which is now a sprawling, seedy collection of hawkers who have set up stalls on the edge of town.
When Arizona first sprouted in the first months after Dayton was signed, it was hailed as something of a hopeful sign because its location on the point where Serb, Muslim and Croat territories met made it a place for meetings, trade and business deals that had ceased during the war.
But now Brcko's appointed city council has given control of the land to an Italian developer, who is investing more than US$100 million to turn this third-world bazaar into a first-world shopping center.
Critics have a cynical take on Clarke's activism: that he keeps inventing new jobs to avoid leaving. "The Americans don't want elections because they're afraid the bad guys will win," Wheeler said.
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