The earliest known inhabitants of what is now Bosnia, traceable
to the Neolithic period, were the Illyrians, a people of Indo-European stock who are considered
ancestors of the modern Albanians. By AD 9, when Rome crushed the last Illyrian resistance in
present-day Bosnia, all of Illyria had become part of the Roman Empire. Rome's most enduring
legacy in Bosnia was the division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian faiths
along the border between the western and eastern Roman empires. That border, first drawn around 285,
passed through Bosnia.
As Roman power declined, successive waves of nomadic Goths, Alans, Huns, and Avars devastated the
land before moving on. In the 6th century Slavic tribes, probably swept along with the Avars, settled
in the area and soon absorbed the peoples, languages, and cultures that were already there. A second
wave of Slavic tribes, called Serbs and Croats, arrived in the 7th century. The names Croat and Serb
probably both derive from the name of an Iranian or Sarmatian tribe that ruled and was absorbed by them
on the way.
Bosnia was first mentioned by that name in a surviving document from 958. The area became a remote
mountainous borderland between successive competing empires and kingdoms that subjugated or claimed all
or parts of it during the early medieval period. Bosnia's were generally members of the heretical
("Bogomil") Bosnian church. In 1180 Ban ("governor" or "viceroy" in Croatian and Hungarian) Kulin created
the nucleus of an independent Bosnian state, which was revived, consolidated, and expanded by Ban Stephen Kotromanić
(reigned 1322-1353). Kotromanić's conquest of Hum (later Herzegovina) in 1326 united Bosnia and Herzegovina
for the first time. Medieval Bosnia reached its height under Stephen Tvrtko (reigned 1353-1391), who was crowned Tvrtko I,
king of Serbia and Bosnia, in 1377. Under his rule, Bosnia briefly became the most powerful and prosperous Balkan state.
Ottoman Rule
Tvrtko's kingdom gradually disintegrated after his death. In 1448 Stephen Vukčić, lord of Hum, asserted his independence
by giving himself the title herceg (duke; from the German Herzog) of Hum, and his land soon came to be called Hercegovina
(Herzegovina; the Duchy). The Ottomans quickly conquered most of Bosnia in 1463 and Herzegovina in 1483. Ottoman rule, lasting
more than 400 years, introduced two more sizeable religious communities: Jews and Muslims. The Jews had been expelled from Spain
in 1492, and they became an important part of the cultural and economic life in Sarajevo and other Balkan cities. Immigrants from
the Ottoman Empire were among the first Muslims to settle in Bosnia. Later, growing numbers of local converts added to their number.
Bosnia, along with Albania, was the only part of Ottoman Europe where large numbers converted to Islam. The most persuasive explanation
for this, advanced in recent scholarly studies, is that all Christian faiths in this religious borderland were weak, with few churches and
clergy. All or most of the Bosnian Christians who embraced Islam had been members of an allegedly heretical ("Bogomil") Bosnian church.
The Bosnian church was nearly extinct by the 15th century. In an empire in which Muslims were privileged and a ruling caste, converting to
Islam offered advantages. The result, unique in Ottoman Europe, was a landholding and military nobility of native Muslim ruling over a mostly
Christian peasantry.
By the 19th century the Bosniaks (Muslim) nobility, like the local ruling elite in several other Ottoman possessions, was virtually independent of crumbling
Ottoman central authority. The Bosnian nobility was determined to prevent the Ottomans from reasserting authority and implementing modernizing reforms,
collectively known as the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat threatened the Bosnian nobility's power and exploitation of an increasingly impoverished and rebellious
peasantry. The last decades of Ottoman Bosnia were marked by repeated rebellions of two kinds: by the Muslim elite against the Ottoman authorities, and by
the mostly Christian peasants against that elite.
Austro-Hungarian Rule
In 1875 a peasant uprising took root in Bosnia and spread to Bulgaria in 1876, prompting a major international crisis. In 1877 Russia declared war on the
Ottoman Empire. Russian armies advanced to the gates of Ýstanbul, the Ottoman capital, in 1878. The Congress of Berlin, meeting that year to resolve the
crisis and prevent a wider war, decided that Austria-Hungary should occupy and administer Bosnia. Austro-Hungarian occupation met with serious armed resistance,
primarily Bosniaks (Muslim) but also Orthodox Christian; it took 82,000 troops and four months to subdue that resistance. But Bosniak (Muslim) fears for their religion and privileges,
which led many to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire, proved unwarranted. The Austro-Hungarian regime did not interfere with existing social and landholding relations,
focusing instead, and with some success, on economic development.
In 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia, partly to end Serb nationalist dreams of eventually incorporating it into the Kingdom of Serbia. The province had
become a prime target of Croat as well as Serb nationalist propaganda and schemes, with Croat nationalists agitating for its union with Croatia, then a part of Hungary.
Serbs claimed that the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims} were Islamicized Serbs; Croats claimed that they were Muslim Croats. The idea of a single nation whose people would be defined by
their common ethnicity, not their religion, was promoted by Benjamin Kállay, the Austro-Hungarian official in charge of Bosnia from 1882 to 1903. He wanted to counter both
Serb and Croat ambitions, but his idea emerged too late to win any except a few Bosniaks (Muslim) adherents. However, a group of Croats who in the 1830s began advocating the union of
all South Slavs, which included Serbs and Croats, was more successful. According to the Yugoslav idea, the South Slavs were one nation or kindred nations who should be unified
within a single state of their own (Yugoslavia means "Land of the South Slavs"). The Yugoslav idea appealed to a number of primarily younger Bosnians from the ethnic Bosniaks (Muslim),
Croat, and Serb communities.
On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb who professed to be a "Yugoslav," shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary,
and his wife. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later, igniting World War I. During the war, most Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims remained loyal to Austria-Hungary.
Integration into Yugoslaviae
At the end of the war in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. Bosnia became part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929). Serbia's
Karađorđević dynasty and a Serb-dominated government and administration ruled the new state. The kingdom's political parties, suppressed under a royal dictatorship from 1929
to 1934, were all ethnic nationalist parties except for a pan-Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned and went underground in 1921. The main Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) party, supported by nearly all
Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), was the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (YMO), founded in February 1919 and led by Mehmet Spaho until his death in 1939. Spaho skillfully maneuvered himself and the YMO into a balancing
position among other parties that ensured that the YMO and Muslim interests would be represented in most Yugoslav governments and policies. Spaho died two months before the Yugoslav government
made a major concession to Croat national aspirations and created an autonomous Banovina (Province) of Croatia that included parts of Bosnia with large Croat populations.
When Nazi Germany and its Axis allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941, during World War II, Bosnia was divided into German and Italian occupation zones. It was made part of the so-called
Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, or NDH in Serbo-Croatian). The NDH was an Axis puppet state run by the Ustaše, a Croat fascist and terrorist organization whose wartime attempt to exterminate
the NDH's nearly 2 million Serbs was modeled on Hitler's genocide of Europe's Jews. Bosnian Serbs fled to the forests to join two violently competing resistance movements. These were the Serb royalist Četniks a
Serb fascists (colaborated with Nazi Germany ocupators and its Axis allies), under Draža Mihailović, and the Partisans, a Communist-led multiethnic "Army of National Liberation" organized and headed by Josip
Broz Tito, the Croat head of the Yugoslav Communist Party.
Bosnia became the Partisans' principal zone of operations in two overlapping wars. In one war the Partisans battled the Axis armies of occupation. In the other they fought a parallel civil war against both the Četniks
and the Ustaše. The fighting was particularly fierce between the Partisans and the Četniks. The Četniks' anti-Communism and determination to restore a Serb-dominated monarchy led them to join first Italian and then
German operations against the Partisans. In November 1943 Tito convened a Partisan congress in Jajce, a medieval Bosnian capital. The congress proclaimed a new federal Yugoslavia of equal South Slav peoples, naming Tito marshal
and prime minister. The congress included the Bosniaks (Muslims) as one of the partially South Slav peoples. Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats joined the Partisans in growing numbers.
Tito's Yugoslavia
By the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, the Partisans had won both of their wars and recreated Yugoslavia, under firm Communist control, as a federal state of six republics. Five were to be semi-autonomous "homelands"
for Yugoslavia's Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. The sixth, Bosnia, was to be the joint homeland of its intermingled Bosniaks (Muslims), Serbs, and Croats. When a new, totally Communist government was installed in
November 1945 after strictly controlled elections, Tito headed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (known after 1952 as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, or LCY), the government, and the armed forces.
For the next 45 years, Bosnia was part of Tito's Yugoslavia. That state was at first a faithful copy of the authoritarian, rigidly Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Joseph Stalin. After Tito's break with Stalin in 1948,
Yugoslavia underwent a gradual process of relaxation and decentralization, in which greater power was given to the republics, including Bosnia, and their own Communist leaderships. Economic experiments with "market socialism" and "socialist self-management"
were introduced. The political changes included a strict apportioning of party and state positions among Bosnia's three constituent peoples. Bosnia's branch of the LCY continued to be more repressive and opposed to reforms of the Communist system than party
branches in most of the other republics. In 1968 the Muslims were fully recognized as Yugoslavia's sixth official national group.
Tito's death in 1980 coincided with the onset of an enduring economic crisis in Yugoslavia, during which production levels and living standards declined significantly. Tito's successors, the leaders of republics with conflicting economic
interests and national aspirations, could not agree on effective remedies. Acceptance of the institutions and eventually even the structure of Tito's Yugoslavia declined everywhere, especially in Slovenia and Croatia. This trend accelerated among
non-Serbs in reaction to Serbian president Slobodan Milošević's militant assertion of Serb nationalism and his aggressive campaign to restore central party and state control under Serb domination. Tensions and disputes among the republics and among the
ethnic groups in the republics multiplied.
The disintegration of the LCY in January 1990 paved the way for multiparty parliamentary elections in all six republics by the end of the year. The elections in all the republics produced absolute or relative majorities for nationalist parties. In Bosnia's
elections, the three winning nationalist parties, one for each of the major ethnic groups, garnered 76 percent of the popular vote and 202 of the parliament's 240 seats. The Bosniaks'(Muslims') Party of Democratic Action (PDA), led by Alija Izetbegović
, won 87 seats, or 34 percent. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDP), led by Radovan Karadžić, took 72 seats, or 30 percent. Forty-four seats, or 18 percent, went to the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CDU-BH), the Bosnian branch
of the party that had won Croatia's elections in spring 1990. That party was led by Croatian president Franjo Tudđman. Izetbegović became president of Bosnia's seven-member trinational presidency. By pre-electoral agreement, the three parties formed
a fragile coalition government. It fell apart as Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991.
Independence
Negotiations among the post-Communist republic leaders from January to early June 1991 failed to find a formula to preserve some kind of Yugoslavia. (Izetbegoviæ and President Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia kept trying to the very end.) Slovenia and Croatia declared
independence in June 1991. The Yugoslav army lost a token ten-day war in Slovenia against Slovenia's own police and military. In Croatia, a six-month Serb-Croat civil war ensued that left 30 percent of Croatia under Serb control until 1995. Bosnia and Macedonia,
with large majorities unwilling to stay in a shrunken Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, also began leaning toward independence.
Bosnia's Serbs were determined not to become a minority in an independent state, and its Croats would not stay in a Bosniak (Muslim)- majority state if the Serbs seceded. Milošević in Serbia and Tuđman in Croatia had already discussed partitioning Bosnia between their
two countries. The Bosnian Serbs and Croats began creating "statelets" of their own in 1991. Karadzić's SDP established armed "Serb Autonomous Regions" and a self-proclaimed Serb legislature. In November 1991 the Bosnian Serb legislature held its own referendum
in which Bosnian Serbs voted almost unanimously to "remain in a common Yugoslav state" with the rest of the "Serb nation." Later that month Macedonia declared its independence from Yugoslavia (it was admitted to the United Nations under the name the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia). In January 1992 the Bosnian Serb legislature proclaimed independence as the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In western Bosnia, the Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosna also was proclaimed in November 1991. It was run by the Croat Defense
Council (Hrvatsko Viječe Odbrane, or HVO), which had the backing of the Croatian government and army.
Slovenia and Croatia gained international recognition in January 1992. In March, the Bosnian government held a referendum on independence demanded by the European Community (EC; now the European Union, or EU) as a condition for recognition. Most Serbs boycotted the referendum,
but 97 percent of the Bosniaks (Muslims) and Croats who participated voted to secede. Bosnia proclaimed its independence that month, and the SDP formally proclaimed its separate Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). The United States and the EC recognized Bosnia's independence on April 6, 1992.
Bosnian War
Full-scale war, with Serbs and Croats armed and backed by Serbia and Croatia respectively, erupted the same week in April 1992 that Bosnia was recognized by the United States and the EC. Bosniaks (Muslims) fought alongside Croats against the Serbs. In May, Serbia and Montenegro declared themselves
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). By summer, Serb forces, which included troops from the Serb-dominated army of the former Yugoslavia, controlled about 70 percent of Bosnia. They laid siege to Sarajevo and carried out brutal massacres and expulsions of non-Serbs in territories they controlled,
a process chillingly called "ethnic cleansing." These atrocities produced worldwide condemnation, but no effective international intervention other than humanitarian aid under the protection of an otherwise ineffective United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR).
International efforts to achieve a cease-fire and resolution of the conflict included conferences, sanctions, peace proposals, and charges against suspected war criminals. Conferences attended by all the parties were held in Lisbon, London, and Geneva in 1992 and 1993. The UN began imposing economic
sanctions on the FRY in 1993 and co-sponsored a series of peace plans with the EC that one or more Bosnian factions in each case ultimately rejected. The UN also established so-called "safe areas" for Bosniaks (Muslims), although they were frequently violated, most notoriously in Srebrenica in July 1995.
In May 1993 a UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in The Hague, Netherlands. By early 1999 the ICTY had publicly indicted more than 50 men, including Bosnian Serb leader Karadzić, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Postwar Bosnia
The war in Bosnia was finally ended in late 1995 by a combination of efforts. These efforts entailed vigorous diplomacy led by U.S. assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke, a successful joint Muslim-Croat offensive in western Bosnia (the first serious Serb defeat in the war), and a major air attack on
Bosnian Serb positions by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In November 1995 the warring parties initialed a peace accord at a U.S. Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, after three weeks of intensive negotiations and pressure by the United States. Tudjman, Izetbegoviæ, and Miloševiæ (who represented
the Bosnian Serbs with their reluctant agreement) signed the Dayton peace accord in Paris in December.
In addition to dictating a new constitution for Bosnia and providing for internationally organized elections, the accord established a formally united Bosnia made up of two entities, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic. It included provisions for the unhindered return of refugees (estimated at 2.
million of the prewar population of 4,364,574) to their places of origin. The UNPROFOR was to be replaced with a multinational but primarily NATO Implementation Force (I-FOR) of 60,000 troops, initially for one year but soon extended indefinitely, to keep the peace and oversee the agreement's military and civilian
security provisions. In 1997 the I-FOR became the Stabilization Force (S-FOR) and was reduced to 31,000 troops.
The implementation of the Dayton provisions on the return of refugees has proved difficult. Hindered from returning to areas now dominated by another group, or forced to leave again upon their return, an estimated 820,000 refugees inside Bosnia remained displaced from their previous homes in mid-1998. The
leaders of each ethnic group still oppose one another, and there is little free movement and provision of services across the borders of what are in actuality three entities. The international community's High Representative for Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, had to dictate such things as a common flag, vehicle
license plates, and the form of currency. Westendorp also dismissed some nationalistic mayors and police chiefs and many observers asserted that he was turning Bosnia into a NATO-EU protectorate.
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