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History and Government
History: In the time of the Roman empire, modern-day Bosnia was part of the Roman province of Dalmatia. Then, after brief occupation by the Goths, the territory was ruled for the next six centuries as a semi-autonomous outpost of the Byzantine Empire. From 1180, when Byzantine rule came to an end, and 1463, when the Ottoman Turks took control, Bosnia was more or less an independent state under a succession of strong rulers who expanded the territory southwards to take in the province of Hum (now Herzegovina). As a province of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia and Herzegovina had two distinguishing characteristics: firstly, much of the population converted to Islam; secondly, as a frontier province, it was the first line of defence against incursions into the Ottoman sphere of influence. Consequently, the country suffered from repeated invasions, resulting in destruction and dislocation. Bosnia and Herzegovina also became susceptible to Turkish efforts to expand northwards (for example, the 16th-century Hungarian campaigns of Suleyman the Magnificent).
Under pressure from Austria, Ottoman rule began to weaken during the 18th and 19th centuries until the Turks were finally expelled following the Russo/Serbian-Turkish war of 1876, and Bosnia was assigned to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Congress of Berlin. An influx of non-Muslims from the north around this time brought Bosnia to something close to its present-day ethnic mix. The decision by Vienna to annex Bosnia fully in 1908 produced a destabilising chain of events contributing to the First Balkan war of 1912-13, and then to the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in June 1914 by a Serb revolutionary, Gavrilo Princip. This single event led directly to the outbreak of World War I. At the end of the war, with the approval of the victorious Great Powers, Serbia annexed Bosnia as part of the new ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, which was renamed ‘Yugoslavia’ in 1929.
After Yugoslavia’s dismemberment by the Axis powers during World War II, the area was incorporated into a so-called ‘Independent State of Croatia’, ruled by the fascist Ustasa movement, under the joint sponsorship of both Nazi Germany and its ally Italy, with the Vatican also giving its support. Among other things, this resulted in an Ustasa policy of genocide against the local Serbs (henceforth a numerical minority as a result), often supported and aided by the Slavic Muslims who had strongly resented Serb rule before the war. Concomitantly, the area was also the major battleground of the Yugoslav civil war proper between royalist Chetnik forces loyal to the exiled King Peter II and his Government in London, and Partisans under the control of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia led by Josip Broz Tito. Following the communist takeover in 1945, Bosnia and Herzegovina became a constituent republic of the new Yugoslav federation (see Yugoslavia section).
The ethnic rivalries characteristic of the region’s politics were largely suppressed during communist rule. However, they resurfaced once the Yugoslav federation began to unravel from 1990 onwards. At the November 1990 elections, extreme nationalists were voted into power by each of the republic’s three constituencies and the following year Bosnia and Herzegovina effectively fell apart as a functioning and recognisable polity. At the time, this was one aspect of the wider disintegration of the Yugoslav federation as civil war took hold, first in Slovenia, then Croatia and finally in Bosnia.
With a population split almost equally three ways between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, Bosnia was always likely to be the centrepiece of the struggle for influence in former Yugoslavia between the two most powerful republics: Serbia and Croatia. In the initial stages, the Serbs were dominant, with their military forces taking control of two-thirds of the territory as part of a wider plan to establish a ‘Greater Serbia’. This racial project started to go wrong when the United Nations imposed sanctions on Serbia as evidence mounted of atrocities inflicted upon the civilian population. In the summer of 1995, NATO forces intervened. The Croat and Muslim armies, discreetly armed and trained by Germany and the USA, rapidly retook much of the Serb-occupied territory in Bosnia. Robust American diplomacy then produced a deal under which Bosnia was split almost equally between Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation. The war ended at an estimated cost of 200,000 lives. The long-besieged capital of Sarajevo became the seat of a new central government protected by a multinational military force, the Stabilisation Force (S-FOR). An international mediator, with wide-ranging powers, was installed to oversee the political process. The Dayton Accord – named after the American city where the bulk of the pre-settlement negotiations took place – has been reasonably successful in returning Bosnia to normality; a number of war criminals on the Serb and Croat sides have been captured prior to trial before an international court in The Hague.
The elections that eventually took place in October 1996 asked voters to elect a three-person Presidency (Presidium) for the nation as a whole, as well as individual Presidents and parliaments for the two component entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska (see the Government section). The poll produced comprehensive victories for the main nationalist parties representing the three communities: the Party of Democratic Action (KCD) for the Muslims, the Croat Democratic Party (HDZ) and the Serb Democratic Party (SDS).
Subsequent polls in the Republika Srpska (1998) and the Muslim-Croat Federation (2000) saw the emergence of effective opposition parties: Sloga on the Serb side (which is now in power) and the Social Democratic Party on the Croat side which has mounted a serious challenge to the HDZ. The KCD remains the dominant party representing the Muslims. During 2000, the Croat-Muslim alliance, which had vanquished the Serbs five years earlier, started to disintegrate as hardliners in the Croat HDZ started to push for an independent Croat territory within Bosnia. The hostility between the two brought a dangerous new element into the already fragile Bosnian political situation, although international diplomatic pressure seems to have defused the conflict for the time being. In April 2002, the international mediator further undermined militant nationalists by enforcing a court ruling giving equal civil and political rights to all Bosnian citizens in all parts of the country.
Government: Under the terms of the Dayton deal (see above), Bosnia is divided into two distinct entities: Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. A central government, based in Sarajevo, is responsible for national functions including foreign, external trade and finance policies. It consists of a three-person executive Presidency and a National Assembly in which two-thirds of the seats are reserved for Federation candidates and one-third for Serbs. In addition, Republika Srpska elects its own President and National Assembly while the Federation elects a National Assembly.
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