"The challenge in Srebrenica goes far beyond the elections," said Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat who has pressed local officials to take more responsibility since becoming high representative in 2009. "People want a better life, and the key to that is constructive politics and economic development."

Under the exemption, Muslims have controlled the municipal government, interned the bodies of 5,137 of the victims in a sprawling memorial here and tried to reverse some of the impact of the killings by slowly moving back. Today Srebrenica's population, which was 75 percent Muslim before the war, is evenly split between Serbs and Muslims.

And that is where the good news ends. Already a glaring symbol of international fecklessness, the town's sorry state today sets a new standard for Western half-measures gone astonishingly wrong.

The 17-year effort to move Muslims back to this town began with a whimper. Clinton administration officials, eager to avoid American casualties, made little effort in the late 1990s to arrest the Serb nationalists who carried out the executions. Fears of violent clashes blocked large-scale efforts to return Muslims to Srebrenica.

Frustrated, the roughly 30,000 Muslims who had survived the town's fall scattered across Bosnia and the world. Roughly 20,000 resettled in Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia. An additional 15,000 fled abroad; an estimated 7,000 arrived in the United States.

Many of them eventually settled in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with a Bosnian community already 80,000 strong, the largest in the United States. Today, roughly 5,000 refugees from Srebrenica live in St. Louis. The Midwestern American city is home to more Bosnian Muslim survivors of the massacre than Srebrenica itself.

One of the Srebrenica refugees who arrived in the U. S. was Camil Durakovic, the town's current Muslim mayor. After he survived the fall of Srebrenica at the age of 16, his family resettled in Manchester, New Hampshire. After attending a local high school, he graduated from Notre Dame in 2003 and planned to attend graduate school in the U.S.

A 2005 summer trip to Srebrenica convinced him that his home was here. He started working for the town's mayor. When the mayor passed away earlier this year, Durakovic, a burly man with a boyish face who wore a pin-striped suit and pink shirt in the town hall today, took over.

In an interview in his office on Thursday, he said returns of Muslim families rose from 2002 to 2005, largely as a result of heavy American and European support. In recent years, though, they have slowed. The economy has not helped. Unemployment is 50 percent in Srebrenica, making it a difficult place to settle for Muslims and Serbs alike. Today, 3,500 Bosnian Muslims live in Srebrenica. Because Serb officials decline to pay their pensions and other government benefits, many Bosnian Muslims maintain their official addresses in Muslim-controlled parts of Bosnia.