Bosnia-Hercegovina

Bosnia-Hercegovina A heterogeneous country consisting of Bosnia in the north and Hercegovina in the south, whose population is divided into Muslims (around 40 per cent), Orthodox Serbs (32 per cent), Roman Catholic Croats (18 per cent), as well as a host of ethnic minorities, mainly of Montenegrines, Albanians, and Slovenes. Bosnia and Hercegovina was united in 1580 as part of the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottoman hold over the Balkans progressively weakened, the territory came under the administration of Austria-Hungary in 1875–8, and was annexed by Austria in 1908. The annexation by Roman Catholic Austria was largely resented. One of the new organizations opposed to Austrian rule, ‘Young Bosnia’, participated in the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914. It was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after 1918, which in 1929 became Yugoslavia. During the years of German and Italian occupation in World War II it was home to the Chetnik resistance movement. After the war it became part of Yugoslavia again. As Yugoslavia's most heterogeneous state it had much less influence in Tito's state than Serbia or Croatia, while its economic development lagged behind that of its neighbours.

Inspired by the domestic developments in Slovenia and Croatia, democratic elections were held in 1990, whereupon a coalition government between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats was formed under the nationalist Muslim President Izetbegovic. It proclaimed its independence from Yugoslavia on 3 March 1992, against fierce opposition from the Serb minority which, under the leadership of Karadzic, proclaimed the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The country was torn apart in the Bosnian Civil War (1992–5), at the end of which the Dayton Agreement created a fragile state consisting of two halves, a Bosnian Serb half, and a loosely organized Muslim-Croat Federation. Peace was restored, though another wave of migration ensued, as neither ethnicity dared live under the control of another. Meanwhile, the stability of the new state was overwhelmingly dependent on the deployment of 60,000 NATO troops under US leadership.

Bosnia-Hercegovina was henceforward governed by a parliament and a three-member Presidium consisting of a Bosnian, a Serb and a Croat. It was subdivided into two relatively autonomous republics of roughly equal size, the Bosnian-Croat Federation with its seat in Sarajevo, and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) with its seat in Banja Luka. The complex governmental structure was made all the more inoperable by the relative success of the nationalist parties especially, but not exclusively, in the Serb Republic. As a result, many of the major decisions that institutionalized the sovereignty of the unloved state were forced through by the UN High Reprentative, over the heads of the various intransigent popular representatives. Although foreign military presence was reduced to 20,000 troops by 2002, the integrity of the state was far from established. Radicalized by the growing moderation of the Croatian political establishment since 2001, demands by Croatian leaders within Bosnia for their own republic became more vociferous. At the same time, the complex state structure and the international community supporting it became discredited by a bankrupt economy with up to three quarters of the population unemployed, and the establishment in many areas of organized crime.