Anniversaries have the effect of forcing people to take stock of neglected problems. Ten years ago, an agreement cobbled together at an Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, put an end to a brutal civil war in Bosnia. The war among Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs left 200,000 dead and millions homeless, so the agreement was hailed as a triumph. But the price of peace was to leave Bosnia a broken country of two entities and 10 cantons, with three presidents. One reason it has muddled along since then is that a lot of power is still vested in a foreign overseer backed by foreign troops.

Fortunately, the 10th anniversary of Dayton has prompted American and European officials to start thinking about what to do next. Last month an agreement was reached to begin building a national police force. Over the weekend, Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, brought Bosnian politicians together in Washington and got them to agree to work on constitutional changes. They also agreed to press for the capture of the two most-wanted war criminals from the Bosnian conflict, Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic. Bringing them to trial would be an important sign that the Bosnians are really moving on.

The task of building a real country out of a battlefield in which former combatants still live largely apart and identify more with their separate tribes than with a country called Bosnia and Herzegovina is daunting. The absence of an effective central government for the past decade has prevented the development of the economy, with the result that unemployment is at about 40 percent and the majority of people subsist on a gray or black market.

Ten years ago, the foreign mediators, led by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, managed quite a feat in wrenching the Bosnians from one another's throats. But the Dayton accords have outlived their usefulness and have become an obstacle to Bosnia's development.

So long as the Bosnians remain wards of the international community, they will only slide away from their place among the new nations of Europe. The Bosnians themselves have to take it from here, and the first step is to accept that their only future lies in coming together in a more effective central government.