He helped forge an uneasy federation between Bosnian Muslims and Croats, to offset the Serb onslaught.

ECONOMIST: Peter Galbraith��s smaller stage

Under the agreement Bosnia would be preserved as a single state but still divided into two separate republics -- the Bosnia-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic.

CNN: Balkan leaders initial peace agreement

The Dayton accords, which ended the Bosnian war, formalised the division of the country into two parts: a Serb entity and a federation of Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).

ECONOMIST: Worries over Bosnia

It has 14 often competing and overlapping administrations, including a weak central government and a complete administration apiece for the Serb republic and the Croat-Bosniak (as Bosnian Muslims are now known) federation.

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Yet the Dayton agreement's plan for rebuilding a single Bosnian state, involving autonomy for both a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic, has come to little.

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For his part, the Yugoslav leader - a long-standing Serb nationalist - is pressing for the establishment of closer links between his country and the Bosnian Serb republic, the entity that the Dayton accords created within Bosnia along with the Muslim-Croat federation.

BBC: Analysis: An uneasy relationship