SARAJEVO — Once upon a time there was an American-forged Balkan nation comprised of two entities, 10 cantons, a district and an overarching state where several hundred ministers presided over close to four million people but did little for them because preserving their privileges was a full-time job.

These ministers at the cantonal, entity, district and state levels were known as “Daytonians,” after an agreement reached in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, that ended the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II. The accord stopped the killing but instituted an unworkable, many-layered political system whose chief beneficiaries were these fat-cat Daytonians and their hangers-on.

Every now and again somebody might ask if a small country needed 14 education ministers. The Daytonians responded in unison: “Of course it does!”Somebody else might ask why the national anti-corruption agency was a complete joke, and would be told: “The European Union insisted on one, but, hey, why would we police our own perks?”Daytonians came in various stripes: Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak), Serb and Croat. They disagreed about many things and nursed bitter memories of a war that killed at least 100,000 people. But they agreed on the necessity of their self-perpetuation. They agreed that investigating the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars would be silly. They agreed on the need for political parties drawn on ethnic lines. They agreed on the efficacy of pre-election nationalist outbursts.

And so a failed system endured.

In the capital of Daytonland, on an avenue known during the war as “Sniper Alley,” the United States built a vast embassy resembling a high-security prison whose message to passers-by seemed to be: “America is under siege.”One day in 2011 a radical Islamist opened fire on the embassy. He strolled around for 40 minutes shooting because nobody could decide if state or entity police or security forces should stop him.

Decision making in a land of entities — the very term was a reflection of disagreement on what to call the country’s component parts — is hard.

Inside the embassy, U.S. diplomats grew frustrated. Dayton was not supposed to be set in stone. It froze things at the worst moment of interethnic relations. It reflected the reality of 1995 but was no long-term basis to run a country. In fact it was designed to block a country. Still, it kept the peace.

Bosnians — facing high unemployment, rampant corruption, a venal judiciary and the need to join sectarian political parties to get a job in the state-run industries accounting for 60 percent of the economy — voted with their feet. They left for Düsseldorf. They headed for Detroit or St. Louis, where they could be plain “Bosnians,” not some ethnic subgroup.

Nobody was sure how many people remained in the country. A census was planned. It was unclear if it would happen. Numbers are political dynamite in a country where Daytonians depend on their ethnic majorities to dominate minorities.

The shadow of the war endured. Unidentified human remains were scattered through the valleys of the land. Serbs massacred many tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the first six months of 1992 and another 8,000 at Srebrenica in 1995. Every week trucks passed the presidency loaded with coffins headed for burial. Just this month, 409 newly identified victims were buried near Srebrenica, 18 years after the killing.

Terrible crimes had happened here, not confined to one side, but perpetrated overwhelmingly by one side, the Serbs.

Still in the Serb entity, crucible of imagined victimhood, denial persisted. They funded efforts to deny the Srebrenica slaughter. They made a dumb effort to institute new identification numbers that would distinguish Serb babies from others — and thousands of people took to the streets to protest.

They dreamed of statehood, or union with Serbia, not noticing that in Serbia, a leading politician had talked of going down on his knees in shame at Srebrenica; not noticing that Serbia had negotiated an agreement with Kosovo; not understanding Serbia’s turn toward the European Union and away from the folly of Bosnia.

Young people grew impatient. They wanted to be Bosnians — not Bosniaks, or Serbs or Croats. They wanted to be citizens of their nation rather than ethnic pawns in Dayton’s blocked labyrinth.

At Srebrenica, in the Serb entity, a campaign began to register Muslims driven away from their homes, so they could vote. They did — and Camil Durakovic is now the young mayor of Srebrenica, working with a Serb deputy. Why stop there? The best answer to the Daytonians is to undercut the sectarian divide on which they thrive. Now the campaign has extended to registering all Muslims who fled the Serb entity and so change its warped politics.

In Bosnia the time has come to move beyond Dayton — not its peace (the great achievement of Richard Holbrooke) but the division and denial it has perpetuated