About Bosnia History

History 

The Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina was in many ways the heart of the former Yugoslavia, both geographically and culturally. It was home to 4.36 million people (1991 census figure), 44% of whom declared themselves Bosniak ('Muslim'), 31% Serb and 17% Croat, while there were also significant numbers of Jews, Roma, Albanians, undetermined 'Yugoslavs' and others. The country's ethnic diversity, however, did not entail territorial division, since the different national groups were inextricably intermingled in their geographical distribution (the famous 'leopard skin'), and especially in the urban centres there was a high proportion of mixed marriages. Nor did it entail social separateness, since the component parts developed within a common historical, linguistic and cultural space, giving rise to a specifically Bosnian paradigm of unity within diversity.

The Bosnian state was first mentioned in Byzantine sources in the early tenth century as one of the polities that had emerged from Slav settlements on the territory of the Roman Empire. The mediaeval Bosnian state reached its high point in the fourteenth century, but in the following century it was incorporated into the expanding Ottoman Empire, within which it survived as a distinct administrative unit. Bosnia-Herzegovina remained a separate province also after being first occupied (1878), then annexed (1908), by Austro-Hungary. After World War I it was included within the newly created kingdom of Yugoslavia; after World War II, as the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it became one of the eight constituent federal units within the second (Communist) Yugoslavia. With the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, confirmed by the EU's Badinter Commission, Bosnia-Herzegovina sought international recognition, which it achieved on 6 April 1992 following an internationally supervised referendum in which the great majority of its population voted in favour of independence.

The newly independent...