SARAJEVO - The siege of Sarajevo ended twenty years ago, it was the longest in modern history and its tragic toll recorded almost 12 thousand dead, together with devastation and destruction on a scale people still find hard to forget.



Bosnia-Herzegovina is emerging from the nightmare of a bloody war in the heart of Europe that claimed 100 thousand lives and two million refugees.



Two weeks ago, the Balkanic country requested formal admission to the EU in the hope of leaving its tragic past behind and embarking on a road of modernisation and European integration.



One thousand four hundred and twenty five days long, the siege of Sarajevo was marked by continuous strikes and left the city without water, light and food.



It began in the spring of 1992 while Europe idly watched.



An average of 329 grenades rained on the city every day and the death toll, at the end, recorded 11,541 civilians killed, 1,601 of which children and over 50,000 injured.



Following on the footsteps of Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, between February 29 and March 1 1992, 64% of Bosnians, mainly Muslims and Croats voted in favour of independence from Slobodan Milosevic's Jugoslavia but the referendum was boycotted by Serbs who had already proclaimed a 'Serb Peoples Republic' on January 9.



The Bosnian capital was encircled by tanks and cannons: two thousand fire mouths led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both facing trials for genocide and war crimes at the Hague International Criminal Court.



After American intervention and Nato bombardments over Serbia, peace was finally sealed by the Dayton agreement in November 1995 and a multinational Nato-led force was deployed.



For the citizens of Sarajevo the nightmare of grenades and snipers, hunger and cold came to an end with the ''reintegration'' of the city: the siege was lifted and Serb-controlled suburbs were returned to the town after three and a half years of war.



Exactly twenty years ago, on February 29 1996, after Vogosca and Rajlovac, government police officers entered Ilijas, some 20 kilometers north-west of Sarajevo, de facto liberating the city and opening the town's road arteries connecting Sarajevo to central Bosnia through the cities of Zenica, Travnik and Tuzla. Reunification was completed on March 19 when the Sarajevo government was given back the city's Grbavica neighbourhood.



However, during three and a half years of conflict, warlords managed to destroy hundreds of years of peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews, while 'pax americana' putting an end to the war entrenched a rigorous ethnic and institutional division that is still slowing down and complicating every decision.



Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina is actually ethnically divided between three populations (Bosnian Muslims, Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholics) and two entities, Federation Bh (with a Croat-Muslim majority) and the Republika Srpska (Rs, with a Serb majority).



Efforts by the international community and by local forces towards integration have not yielded many results and this is a limit Bosnians hope to overcome by entering the wider European family.



Before submitting their request to the EU, local parties instituted a coordination mechanism to oversee relations between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the EU, in order to ensure, as Brussels demanded, that the Country may ''speak with one voice''.