Sarajevo Letter: Visiting Sarajevo, even a decade after the Dayton agreement was signed, you can still all too easily become a camera-clicking war tourist. Walking along Zmaja Od Bosne, which leads into the road once known as Sniper's Alley, you have plenty of opportunities to inspect bullet-ridden and shell-damaged buildings up close.
The old parliament building, despite the reconstruction boom that has gripped the rest of the city, remains an ugly, gloomy and forbidding structure, bearing its shell damage and mortar holes with a certain air of nonchalance. At night it looms like a large grey ghost. Nowadays this building, which played such a central part in the early stages of the Bosnian conflict, appears of little interest to locals. When this reporter was visiting, a protest by farmers about agricultural prices was taking place outside, but passers-by were too engrossed in their own lives to read their placards.
Across the road, the Holiday Inn, the home of the western media for most of the conflict, is doing a brisk trade nowadays. Urban legend has it that during the siege of Sarajevo the advice for arriving guests was don't take a room above the fifth floor (the Serb snipers could hit any window above this) and make sure the room is at the back (anti-aircraft fire sometimes raked the front sections).
Thankfully, as the 10th anniversary of Dayton approaches, guests can now happily ignore such grim events. Sarajevo is a remarkably safe city considering the number of military demobilised after the conflict ended.
"This is a very safe environment, a very pleasant city," Kevin Carty says. He is an assistant commissioner of the Garda Síochána and currently head of the EU Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its mission is to establish sustainable policing arrangements in Bosnia.
"It's much safer than most other Europeans cities. I've been here nearly two years now and I've yet to see any violence engaged in by young people here or any of the loutish behaviour that unfortunately I'm very familiar with from Ireland."
His assessment seems accurate. Travelling outside the pleasant environment of Sarajevo, one gets a sense that while ethnic tension hangs like a cloud over Kosovo, Bosnia is settling into a sort of normality.
EU membership is broached regularly in conversation and the recent opening of EU accession talks with neighbouring Croatia has whetted the public appetite..
Unfortunately, a lack of qualified plasterers appears to be the more practical problem in the meantime.
Every time you turn a corner it's impossible not to be jolted by the way some buildings have papier-mâché type exteriors. While the popular coffee houses and bars of the old town will help to sell this city to tourists, the fractured physical landscape must make attracting foreign investment difficult.
Locals believe the reluctance of some foreign investors to come is more complex than that. Whatever the reason, Bosnia is still coping with an unemployment rate of approximately 20 per cent.
The issue of war criminals is still highly controversial. While people are willing to talk openly about the issue, most Bosniaks and Serbs are never going to agree on the issue of arresting Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. This reporter spent a short time in Han Pijesak, a town near Sarajevo, where Mladic is rumoured to have been hiding.
Local police stared warily and there was a strange atmosphere in the town, but one had a feeling the man wanted so desperately in The Hague was hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away.
Despite such unfinished business, organisations like the EU Police Mission see no sign of ethnic tensions re-emerging. While this may be because post-ethnic- cleansing towns have become homogenous, it still gives the country a sort of settled feel.
"They are not interested in hostilities, there is no indication in our assessment, 10 years after the war, that any of the ethnic identities in this country have any desire to go back to hostilities," Carty says. "They are interested in moving forward and into Europe."
Sarajevo always had a multi-ethnic charm and it still does. Mosque and Orthodox churches still jostle for public space. But according to Carty's analysis, while an end to war has brought a peace dividend, elections and freedom of expression, it also brings organised crime and hard drugs.
"Drug abuse is actually becoming a problem here, you didn't have this problem in the past because of the systems that operated. The country has become more democratic and people have more opportunity to travel now. We are seeing an influx of heroin in particular into the state."
But most people understandably would rather see the bottle as half-full rather than as half-empty. People expelled during the war are returning. Property and food are relatively cheap and, while nobody wants to encourage a dependency culture, EU funds appear to be having an impact.
Carty, who is shortly finishing his term in Bosnia, says it is time for locals to get some credit, not just the international organisations and the various NGOs who are still active here.
"We are 10 years out of a war. That's not very long by any standards.Ten years ago, about one-sixteenth of the population of this country, 250,000 people, were killed, 10,000 here in Sarajevo alone; 2,500 kids were shot, killed, going to and from school. Horrible statistics.
"But to think 10 years on we have come this far, I think it's amazing. It speaks volumes for the resolve of the people of this country."