Bosnia remained a part of the Ottoman Empire until it was granted its independence as part of the settlement at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. As a result of religious conversions while under Turkish rule, Bosnia had become unique in modern Europe as the only country with a large, indigenous Muslim population. During the period of Turkish rule (from the 1450s to 1878) roughly one third of the population of Bosnia became Muslim, about one-third were Roman Catholics and one-third Serbian Orthodox Catholics. Lying between Serbia and Croatia, many Bosnians had rejected both forms of Christianity even before the Muslims arrived and were apt to subscribe to the so-called Bogomil heresy. It was the Bogomils who were most likely to have converted to Islam. Under Ottoman rule, the Bosnian Muslims formed the upper class and ruled over the Christian majority.
Bosnia (or Bosnia/Herzegovina, to be exact) is located between in an area that has long been subject to conflicts among its Slavic population. Both Serbs and Croats speak Serbo-Croatian (although the Serbs use a Cyrillic alphabet and the Croats a Latin one) they are divided by religious differences, with a predominantly Roman Catholic population in Croatia and Orthodox Catholics in Serbia. During World War II, Croats cooperated with the Nazis and fought bloody conflicts with the Yugoslav resistance fighters under the leadership of Tito (who was himself Croatian). The fifty years of communist rule in the Balkans following the war suppressed many of these divisions, but with the collapse of the Yugoslav communist regime nationalistic and religious hatreds reemerged with a vengeance.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the bloodiest fighting among the various ethnic groups occurred in Bosnia, where the Bosniaks – the Slavic Muslims – and the Serbian residents – Serbian Orthodox Catholics – engaged in a brutal civil war. Croats and Bosniaks and Croats and Serbs also were fighting each other during this period.
Today, Bosnia is about 48 per cent Muslim, but many of the former Bosnian Serbs left Bosnia to form the Republika Srpska. During the civil war in Bosnia, the Muslims were the main victims of “ethnic cleansing” and it is estimated that some 66 per cent of all deaths (military and civilian) in the Bosnian conflict were Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and that Bosniak civilians constituted over 80 per cent of the killed. Both Croats and Serbs fought the Bosniaks, with most of the casualties resulting from Serbian action, including the genocidal killing of some 8,000 Bosniak men at Srebrenica in July 1995.
Since the Dayton Accords of 1995, Bosnia/Herzogovina has been divided into two federated regions: one made up of Bosniaks and Croats and the other made up mostly of Serbs. There is a weak federated government. There has been relative peace in the country since the Dayton Accords, but a European peacekeeping force remains in Bosnia to monitor the situation there.
De Facto Partition
Although the Dayton Accords of December 1995 had as their ultimate aim to create a viable Bosnian state, the short-term goal was simply to end the civil war and the wanton killing and ethnic cleansing that had been going on for almost four years. In order to gain an agreement, the settlement created two separate “entities” divided by an Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL). One entity is called the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the other simply Republika Srpska. The two entities have almost complete autonomy from the weak confederation government that sits in Sarajevo. Although refugees who fled areas dominated by their ethnic foes enjoy the nominal “right of return” to their homes, there has been little resettlement of Bosniaks in Serbian entity, and even less movement of uprooted Serbs back to their homes in the current Bosniak-Croat entity.
The Bosnian central government in Sarajevo is responsible for foreign affairs and defense matters, but has been stymied for much of its existence by the unwillingness of the Serbian representatives to cooperate with the Bosniak and Croat representatives, who do not often cooperate even between themselves.
Overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement on the ground is a High Representative of the International Community. When the two (or three) sides fail to live up to the Accords or are unable to reach agreement on some matter, the High Representative steps in to try to find a solution.
What one sees in this situation is that very few citizens of Bosnia view themselves as truly “Bosnian”. They continue to identify above all with their ethnic (or religious) group and only very weakly with the state of Bosnia. This situation is further aggravated by the existence of Serbia on one side, pulling the Bosnian Serbs into its orbit, and Croatia on the other side, pulling the Bosnian Croats in that direction. It is clear that Bosnian Serbs would happily dissolve the Bosnian state and join their “entity” to Serbia/Montenegro and there are many Croat nationalists in the Bosniak-Croat Federation who seek to undermine the Bosnian state and bring their entity under Croatian rule. Only the Bosniaks have a long-term interest in preserving the state.
There is some hope that eventual integration into the European Union will provide the kind of economic lift that will overcome these intense ethnic hatreds. In a sense, Bosnia needs to return to being part of a larger political unit, with the EU filling the role once played by the Yugoslav Federation.