Police from Bosnia's Muslim-Croat federation edged into a disputed, Serb-inhabited part of the Sarajevo suburb of Dobrinja yesterday, after an earlier delay due to fears of clashes with Serb protesters.
A few police officers moved on foot a few metres into the area and others drove through in an unmarked car, staking their claim to territory handed over to the federation on Tuesday by an international arbiter, the former Irish High Court judge Diarmuid Sheridan, assigned to resolve the dispute.
The Dayton peace treaty ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war by dividing it into a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic. Dobrinja, an area near Sarajevo's airport and the wartime frontline, was one of several disputed places left aside.
Sarajevo police said in a statement the protesters who prevented them from moving in the suburb after the midnight deadline for the handover had later dispersed and police had "started to patrol and control public order".
"Police are trying to do it in a very low-key way to prevent an escalation of tension," Mr Douglas Coffman, said the spokesman for the UN mission in Bosnia, which oversees the police.
Protesters who had marched up and down shouting at the police overnight had gone. A smouldering fire, bottles and cans and several chairs were the only signs of their demonstration.
Nearby, federation policemen chatted with Serb taxi drivers and a man selling eggs. On the other side of the street several people in front of a cafe and a grocery shouted angrily as French peacekeepers drove by.
A local Serb community leader said citizens would set up checkpoints if local and international police and peacekeepers began patrols before their accommodation problems were solved. "Unrest may occur because people's patience is running out," Mr Dragan Savic, a leader of the association of displaced Serbs from Dobrinja, told a local Serb assembly.
Under the ruling by the international arbiter, some Serb families will eventually have to leave their apartments in the area, near Sarajevo's airport and the wartime frontline. They will be among the thousands of displaced Muslims, Serbs and Croats across Bosnia who are being evicted from places they now occupy in order to return them to their pre-war owners.
Mr Sheridan, appointed by Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, Bosnia's senior international peace official, said he had ruled to restore people from the federation who were mainly dispossessed of their homes.
Mr Coffman and a spokesman for the federation police said Serb police had moved out of the area overnight. But a local journalist driven through by federation police in an unmarked car yesterday morning said they had found a Serb police patrol car still in the area. The Serb police had advised their federation colleagues to be careful. "Watch out, people are annoyed," the journalist quoted the Serb police as saying.
The Bosnian Serb government said it was appalled by the ruling and pledged to appeal against it. It called on all people currently living in the suburb to stay calm and not to leave the flats until their housing problems had been solved.
The republic's President, Mr Mirko Sarovic, was quoted by the Bosnian Serb news agency Srna as saying the decision could produce a "series of unwanted consequences and a new crisis in the Serb republic".