(SARAJEVO) - Bosnia's long-awaited police reform will do little to improve the way the force operates yet the European Union considers it good enough to help seal a key pact on closer ties, EU and local officials say.

The reform laws, posted in Bosnia's official gazette Tuesday, barely touch the tip of a massive iceberg of changes needed to streamline the way the police service is run, and indeed add new layers of agencies to an already complex system.

Concluded after four years of heated debate and political obstruction, the reforms also help entrench the divide between communities that the EU has carefully tried to avoid since the war in the early 1990s.

The changes -- which come in the form of two laws that will take at best a year to enforce because of continued internal bickering -- satisfy only the Bosnian Serbs, officials and police experts say.

But despite the shortcomings, the decision could allow Bosnia to sign a coveted Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) late this month, bringing EU funds for its struggling economy and to its dilapidated infrastructure.

"We had to adopt the police reform, no matter what form it took," Bosnian Security Minister Tarik Sadovic told reporters in Sarajevo.

"This reform is not a sufficient step forward but it allows us to have something that we need: to sign the SAA," he said. "I am willing to build an ugly, dysfunctional house" to achieve this.

Yet Bosnia's police house was already ugly at best.

The 1992-1995 war that broke the troubled Balkans state apart left two main entities -- a Muslim-Croat federation and Republika Srpska, the Serb post-war statelet keen on holding onto some independence.

In policing terms, it is a veritable labyrinth, with separate headquarters in 10 federation cantons, two entity level police structures, one in the special Brcko district as well as a border and FBI-like agency, SIPA.

"This fragmentation was already an eldorado for criminals," said Valerie Wahl, coordinator at the EU's justice department in the capital, Sarajevo.

But rather than streamline processes and create a single Bosnian police force, as the EU had hoped when this all got under way in 2004, the new reform adds seven more agencies on top.

"Nobody is giving up anything, on the contrary they are adding structure to a system that is already heavy," said Simonetta Silvestri, the EU deputy head of police reform. "It will be more expensive to support the entire structure."

And while the structure itself is unwieldy, few of the agencies are keen on communicating anyway, which means little cooperation and virtually no coordination between them.

"It just amazes me," said David Powell, from the EU mission's unit dealing with organised crime. "Each have their own priorities and they don't want to talk to each other."

But despite the structural chaos, EU police experts say, Bosnia's small and underfunded force is actually no worse than many other in Europe.

"Bosnia Hercegovina is a country safer than many other countries in Europe, certainly than many other regions," said the European police mission head, Brigadier General Vincenzo Coppola.

EU officials were at pains to point out, for instance, that it is completely safe for a woman to walk through downtown Sarajevo in the middle of the night.

However organised crime remains a major problem, in a country on the notorious Balkans drug route through which Afghan opium flows into Europe, and only deep reforms will allow this to be tackled thoroughly.

For some, the final result -- these police reform laws -- are a source of deep frustration, despite the benefits that will come from the EU's SAA pact, a powerful tool it has used in the Balkans to try to ensure stability.

"We have been working for four years... but obviously there was no political will," Silvestri said.

Others, like mission leader Coppola, remain philosophical.

"Because we cannot change the structure, the only thing we can do is have good coordination" between the agencies, he said with a shrug.

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