Eleven years on from the forging of a nation from a war that claimed 100,000 lives, the big winners are set to be the nationalists from the three ethnic blocs, political heirs of the leaders who led them into the 1992-1995 war that ended with the Dayton Peace Accords. The complex power structure born of those accords in 1995 has left a state consisting of two entities: the autonomous Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic . . . overseen by a powerful international envoy.

Despite the international community's desire to declare its Bosnia experiment a success, the current German envoy Christian SchwarzSchilling's call on candidates to leave the past behind has been roundly ignored. His message to voters . . . that "the leaders elected in the forthcoming poll have to take responsibility for the future of the country and to lead it toward Europe" . . . seems increasingly forlorn.

The agenda for most candidates has been stubbornly focused on the narrow interests of their own ethnic group, or as Social-Democrat Zlatko Lagumdzija put it: "Parties had no concrete programmes. It was only about who [what ethnic group] did what to whom. We are further from the European Union than ever before."

Where the future is concerned, Muslim Bosnians insist on greater central authority of Sarajevo. The Catholic Croats, the smallest group, claim their existence is threatened without an entity of their own. And Orthodox Serbs continue to eye closer ties with Serbia proper . . . disregarding completely the fact that they live in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international officials' optimism and the reality on the ground continue to differ profoundly, analysts have warned.

While the officials tend to paint the picture of peace and security, leading human-rights groups such as the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights argue that the country looks as if the ethnic cleansing, the gruesome trademark of the war, "has entered its final stage".

The return of some 2.2 million refugees displaced by the war, half of the population, was at the heart of the Dayton accords. The aim was to recreate the pre-war ethnic balance in the country. This has not happened. Instead, people have settled in the areas where their ethnic group was in the majority when the fighting stopped.

Despite official figures of about million returns, human rights experts say the real figure is nearer 300,000. For this reason, the Dayton Peace accords are seen as a failure by many in BosniaHerzegovina. Critics say, no census was ever held in the country after the war as it would show the clear failure.