SARAJEVO: Bosnia’s failure to establish a coherent system of government more than a decade after its ethnic war has had some strange consequences among them a dire lack of prison space for Sarajevo’s small-time criminals.

The Bosnian capital, located in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia, has space for just 100 low-risk prisoners, while twice that number wait some for up to six years to serve their sentences.

A few kilometres away stands a prison that could accommodate some of them. But it lies just inside Bosnia’s Serb Republic, the other entity that emerged from the end of the war and there is no agreement between the two halves on taking each other’s prisoners.

The shortage of space means that Amer Hamidovic, 22, waited two and a half years to start serving a seven-month sentence for dealing drugs.

“It was strange. I couldn’t plan anything in my life, I just had to wait,” he said, sitting in a common room where prisoners were watching the Olympics on television.

The long delays are among the many consequences that accompanied the division of Bosnia into a mostly Serbian half and a mostly Muslim and Croat half under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement. Each side runs separate institutions, including prisons.

“We can’t take any more people than is our capacity,” Alija Berberkic, the warden who oversees Sarajevo’s prisons, said in an interview.

“The only answer is to come up with a common solution to Bosnia’s problems. Why should we spend the money to build a new expensive system when we already have a working one just across the dividing line?”

The prison in question is on Sarajevo’s outskirts, and Berberkic said it had space. But it lies just inside the Serb part of Bosnia, Republika Srpska.

The Bosnian Serb prison officials declined to comment and region’s justice ministry officials were not available.

The most dangerous criminals in the Muslim-Croat region, such as murderers and rapists, are sent to a much larger prison outside Sarajevo.

But Berberkic said that about 200 people convicted in the city of lesser crimes are still living at home in the Sarajevo area, awaiting space in the city’s prisons. Only about 100 are actually jailed.

“It is dangerous, but we can’t do anything about it,” said Ferid Niksic, the assistant to the warden. “But it’s not as though, if you just put away the 200 people, the situation on the streets would be ideal, without crime.”

Waiter Sasa Martinovic, 23, waited the longest time to serve his time: six years from the day he got into a fight until he began a 20-day sentence.

“They ordered me to pay 1,000 Bosnian marka (500 euros) but I couldn’t afford to pay.” He chose to go to prison instead.

Niksic said that no convict waiting to serve sentence has run away in recent years.

—Reuters