It's been 20 years since the Dayton peace agreement ended the war in Bosnia.
It was a brutal ethnic conflict that raged for three years, killing 100,000 people and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Two decades later, many are drawing comparisions between the Bosnian war and today's war in Syria.
The sounds of Sarajevo's Markale marketplace today: stallholders shout and hustle for customers just as they were doing 20 years ago when shells fired from Serbian army positions above turned their market into a bloodbath.
Those killings and the ensuing much wider, much greater massacre at Srebrenica finally forced the warring parties to talk peace.
The Dayton agreement that ended the Bosnian war was far from perfect, as recent demonstrations in central Sarajevo testify.
Bosnians are now governed by a tripartite presidency representing the three main ethnic groups -- Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats.
To protesters Lehla and Mehmed, their government is a failure.
Lehla: "Too many issues: no job, no health-care ... I don't know ...
Mehmed: "No future."
Lehla: "No future!"
Question: "What do you want the government to do about it?"
Mehmed: "To reduce its size. That's the big issue here."
Kurt Bassuener, of the Sarajevo-based research centre the Democratisation Policy Council, says the Dayton Accords are not serving Bosnia well.
He says Bosnia's rulers are not doing what the accords were intended to do.
"And the ruling elite are supposed to be the partners of the West -- right? -- in moving the country forward toward EU and NATO membership. But they have no interest in doing so really, because they already have everything. And there's nothing in particular that the EU can offer them that's better than what they already have."
But the Dayton Accords did stop the killing and created conditions for many refugees to return home.
Syria is not Bosnia, but many who were part of the Dayton peace process see similarities.
Wolfgang Petritsch is a former International High Representative to Bosnia Herzegovina whose job was to implement the Dayton peace agreement.
He says the Syrian peace process now underway is drawing on hard-learnt lessons in Bosnia.
"One of the lessons from Bosnia is you have to be inclusive. Only when you include -- like now what is happening, Iran ... You have to include and take as a very important partner Russia. And, of course, also, the regional powers."
The seasoned diplomat also wants the European Union to apply another Bosnian lesson to Syria.
He says it is time to start talking about the future of Syria and the possibility for refugees to return home when the fighting stops.
"At the time, two million Bosnians were refugees and IDPs.* You need to offer them a future perspective, and this is, clearly, the return, and this is reconstruction. And these two elements are going to be extremely important for Syria as well."
But Kurt Bassuener says the talks on Syria should avoid the elements of the Dayton peace agreement that have kept Bosnia poor and still divided along ethnic lines 20 years later.
"I fear the Syrians are going to get stuck with something that makes Dayton look good. Because, effectively, what you have in Bosnia is perpetual warlord politics with a veneer of democracy on top. And I fear that Syria will end up with something like that, where you end up with a peace agreement that locks combatants into secure positions ad infinitum with no real accountability mechanisms."
At a political meeting inside Skandija, a Sarajevo meeting hall, Bosnians are trying to work out a better form of government.
But numerous protests and meetings like this have failed so far to change the status quo agreed upon at Dayton, Ohio, in the United States, in 1995.
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