It has been ten years since the Dayton Accords ended officially ended the war in Bosnia, which killed over 200,000 people and displaced over a million more. The agreement marked a peaceful separation of nations into a loose, autonomous confederacy of three peoples who had been forced together under Soviet totalitarianism and left to kill each other after its fall. But after all these years, it’s possible that these people are willing to begin the move toward living — together — under a unified nation. The first step will be reforms to enable more effective governance, along with the capture of Bosnian Serb war criminals so that the country will be able to reconcile with its past and join the European Union.

WASHINGTON (AP) – With a prod from the United States, leaders of Bosnia’s three major ethnic factions agreed Tuesday to remake their divided government a decade after the end of their bloody civil war, Europe’s bloodiest fighting since World War II.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heralded the Balkan accord struck in Washington, but warned that international patience has run out for the accused war criminals who walk free in Bosnia.

ééThere can be no more excuses and no more delays,” Rice said at a State Department luncheon celebrating the 10th anniversary of a U.S.-brokered peace settlement. ééTen years is long enough.”

Rice spoke at a luncheon with Bosnian political leaders and diplomats from the Clinton administration.

The 1995 agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio, ended a three-year civil war only by allowing Serbs, Croats and Muslims to preside over separate political spheres. The result was an inefficient, three-headed government that Rice said was appropriate for its day, but is now outmoded.

And not too far away another nation of people recently ravaged by genocide are to begin talks on the status of their tiny province of Kosovo. It is a land composed mostly of Albanians vying for independence, but as a part of Serbia, the government intervened with a policy of ethnic cleansing in 1999 with troops and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. After NATO intervened, the country has been administered by the United Nations until these talks finalize the province’s final status.

The United Nations can’t govern Kosovo forever, nor do the Kosovans want it to. However, the talks promise to be brutal and uncompromising, as Serbian leadership has once again vowed to never allow the territory to break away from the country. To them, it is a matter of national and historical pride. To the Kosovans, it is a matter of justice and independence from the government that directed an apartheid against the people there. They have been autonomous from the mainland for so long that any claim to territorial integrity by the Serbs is pointless. Many even go as far as saying that Kosovo should just have its independence.

But the real trick will be negotiating through these different options that will be laid out, as each will have a profound impact on the stability of the rest of the region. Perhaps that’s why we’re seeing all of these actions for both Bosnia and Kosovo culminating at once. Under the current international auspicies, there is no way that, for example, the Serbian government will be allowed to wreck havoc on Kosovo again. The end goal must therefore be to sort out these problems and claims to statehood so as to prioritize them for European Union integration, which would help stabilize the region so that it can finally further development.

It will also serve as an important example for nation-building in other parts of the world, with the ongoing political process in Iraq. If countries can be put together in the Balkans with historically rival ethnic groups, though the circumstances are obviously different, why wouldn’t this be possible in the Middle East?