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© Unknown. "People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."
Protesters set fire to a government building and clashed with riot police in Bosnia on Friday in a third day of unrest over high unemployment and two decades of political inertia since the country's 1992-95 war.

Demonstrators smashed windows and set fire to the offices of the local government in the northern town of Tuzla, while in the capital, Sarajevo, police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse a crowd of several thousand.

Protests were called for Friday in towns and cities across Bosnia, in a sign of growing anger over the lack of economic and political progress since the country broke from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and descended into war. More than one in four of the country's workforce were out of a job in 2013.

A Reuters photographer in Tuzla, once the industrial heart of north Bosnia, said up to 6,000 people had turned out to protest the closure of factories sold off by the state.

Some broke away from the main group and attacked a government building and set it alight. Trapped by the flames, some people leapt from the windows, the photographer said. Police said two officers were injured, one seriously.

Bosnia's recovery from the war, in which an estimated 100,000 people died, has been held hostage to a dysfunctional power-sharing system of ethnic quotas that has stymied governance and left the country trailing its ex-Yugoslav peers on the road to membership of the European Union.

Civil unrest is not common, however, with many among Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks scared that violence could tip the country back into conflict.