This lasted until they were offered alternative accommodation." But there were no forgiving handshakes at the threshold."The Serb asked if I was willing to pay for the improvements he had made to my house I said I wasn't. However outrageous the ethnic cleansing of Brcko - 20,000 Serbs were brought in during the war - a Serb family had been in Mr Sulejman's house for a decade. And the reason they left was not a sudden attack of pity and remorse, but the hard-headed realisation on the part of the Brcko authorities that you do not solve one refugee problem by creating another one elsewhere. Denic Sulejman, 63, a retired butcher, is rebuilding his home and will live in it with his wife and daughters because the Serbs who occupied it in 1992 have gone away.

Instead, successive US Supervisors plucked well-intentioned moderates from the non-fanatical political parties to create an assembly, and presented them with the basic building blocks of brotherhood and unity, the rules of the game which a just, multi-ethnic state ought to play And it worked. When finally the Americans grasped the nettle and called elections, the winners were the moderates.The bitterness of the war has not evaporated here, but it has been dealt with. Notionally, this Brcko Shogunate was subservient to the European Raj in Sarajevo, the "Office of the High Representative", and remains so today. But, in fact, it went its own sweet way from day one.While the rest of Bosnia was thrust into elections right after the war, with memories of the fury and agony of the fighting still fresh, no elections were held in Brcko until last year.

Until then, it would be ruled by a "Supervisor" appointed by the US State Department.Brcko illustrates - much like Japan in the early years of the post-war Allied occupation - the creative charms of a benign, alien dictatorship. Thousands of troops, committed by President Bill Clinton with great misgivings, were stationed here, in Fort McGovern, so they could flee across the river and into Hungary if things turned nasty. An American legal expert, Roberts Owen, was given the job of ruling on the town's final status. Dayton succeeded because Brcko, and only Brcko, was set aside to be decided later.As a result, the town became America's little corner of Bosnia, Bosnia's little corner of America.

Up to the penultimate day of the talks, Slobodan Milosevic, for the Serbs, was demanding that the "Posavina Corridor", in which Brcko sits, be expanded from three miles to 10.Then, on the final morning, with all sides resigned to failure, Mr Milosevic suddenly told Mr Holbrooke he would "walk the final mile for peace" and submit Brcko to arbitration "one year from now". Hollande can hope to draft a vague declaration to give the impression of restored party unity.. Remembering the day when the district council gave him the materials to rebuild his house, Denic Sulejman's eyes fill with tears. "I was born here, this is where I spent my childhood, I am a citizen of Brcko And now I'm home again Yes, I'm happy. Hollande was meeting his rivals yesterday and today to try to win agreement on a composite motion. Positions are so opposed that party officials admit that this is unlikely.At best, M.

All favour a modern, social-democratic approach which is now rejected by over 40 per cent of Socialist party militants and by the majority of the wider French left.M. His motion scored only 22 per cent of the vote.However, the outcome was scarcely more encouraging for the other leading figures of the party, such as M. Hollande, his wife, S?l? Royal, the former finance minister, Dominique Strauss Kahn, or the former education minister, Jack Lang.Each has ambitions to be the main presidential candidate of the left in 2007. Hollande's job - suggest the Parti Socialiste is carved down the middle.The result of the party vote was a disaster for M. Fabius, who abandoned his moderate, pro-European views to campaign against the EU treaty in the hopes of seizing the leadership. The failed motions called on the party to move closer to the position of France's Trotskyist, Communist and anti-globalist hard left and adopt policies which are more clearly protectionist, anti-capitalist and anti-European.The results have been challenged by the losers, who accuse the party leadership of, in effect, stuffing ballot boxes Even the official results - though good enough to save M.