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Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Bosnia and Herzegovina (locally: Bosna i Hercegovina/Босна и Херцеговина, most commonly abbreviated as BiH) is a country in south-east Europe with an estimated population of between three and four million people. The country is the homeland of its three ethnic constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Other communities that live there are not given the status of being "constituent"[1]. A citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of ethnicity, is usually identified as a Bosnian.

The country borders with Croatia in the west and Serbia and Montenegro in the east. It is virtually landlocked save for a small strip of land (about 20km) on the Adriatic sea, centered around the city of Neum. The interior of the country is heavily mountainous and divided by various rivers, most of which are nonnavigable. The nation's capital is Sarajevo, which is also its largest city.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was formerly one of the six federal units constituting Yugoslavia. The republic gained its independence in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and, due to the Dayton Accords, is currently administered in a supervisory role by a High Representative selected by the UN Security Council. It is also decentralized and administratively divided into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.

Bosnia itself is the chief geographic region of the modern state, and forms its historical backbone. Herzegovina is the most notable of the numerous other territories traditionally under the Bosnian political unit, and has been included in the country's name since 1853.

History[edit]

Pre 20th Century History[edit]

The original inhabitants of the region were Illyrians, followed by the Romans, who settled around mineral springs near Sarajevo. When the Roman Empire was divided in 395 AD, the Drina River (now the border between Bosnia and Hercegovina and Serbia) became the line between the Western Roman Empire and Byzantium. The Slavs arrived in the 7th century, and in 960 the area became independent of Serbia. The first Turkish raids started in 1383, and within a century Bosnia was a Turkish province with Sarajevo as its capital.

During the 400-year Turkish period, Bosnia was completely assimilated, and many of its people (Roman Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs) gave up their Christianity and converted to Islam. The country itself became the boundary between the Islamic and Christian worlds. As the Turkish Empire weakened in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Turks strengthened their hold on Bosnia and Hercegovina as an advance bulwark of their empire. National revival movements among the Southern Slavs in the mid-19th century led to an uprising against the Turks, who were finally forced to give up the territory by the Russians. The Russian-backed Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary then occupied Bosnia and Hercegovina by force.

Modern History[edit]

Resentment that one foreign occupying force had been replaced by another became more intense in 1908, when Austria annexed Bosnia and Hercegovina outright. The assassination of Hapsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb in 1914 led Austria to declare war on Serbia. When Russia supported Serbia, Germany jumped in behind Austria and the world was thrust into war.

Following WWI, Bosnia and Hercegovina was annexed to royalist Serbia, then in 1941 to fascist Croatia. The wartime Croatian puppet regime slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, in their own 40s-style 'ethnic cleansing'. With the help of the British and Soviet armies, Yugoslav nationalist forces under the command of Josip Broz Tito pushed Germany out of Yugoslavia in 1944. At the war's end, Bosnia and Hercegovina was granted republic status within Yugoslavia. Tito's regime emerged as Communist, but not as a Soviet satellite, and for the next 40 years, he and his successors worked to squelch ethnic disturbances and maintain the Communist Republic of Yugoslavia-Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro.

In the republic's first free elections in November 1990, the communists were easily defeated by nationalist Serbian and Croatian parties representing their respective communities, and a predominantly Muslim party favouring a multi-ethnic Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Croat and Muslim parties united against the Serb nationalists, and independence from Yugoslavia was declared on 15 October 1991. The Serb parliamentarians withdrew and set up a parliament of their own, and when Bosnia and Hercegovina was recognised internationally and hastily admitted to the UN, talks between the parties broke down.

Although Bosnia and Hercegovina's Muslim president guaranteed Serb rights, the Belgrade leadership incited Serbian extremists to defend Bosnian Serbs from 'genocide'. Civil war broke out in April 1992 after Serb snipers fired on unarmed demonstrators in Sarajevo.

The Serbs began a process of 'ethnic cleansing', brutally expelling the Muslim population from northern and eastern Bosnia to create a 300km (185mi) corridor between Serb ethnic areas in the west of Bosnia and Serbia proper. Villages were terrorised, looted and often razed to prevent their inhabitants from returning. Any who refused to leave were massacred. By the war's end, all sides had used the tactic to meet their ends.

In June 1992, the Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna was set up at Mostar, and in November heavy fighting erupted between the Croats and Muslims after the presidents of Yugoslavia and Croatia cut a deal to partition Bosnia between themselves. The Croats' mini-siege of the Muslim quarter of Mostar received far less publicity than the siege of Sarajevo.

In August 1992, the UN Security Council authorised the use of force to deliver humanitarian relief supplies, and in November 6000 UN troops were sent to Bosnia and Hercegovina to protect aid shipments. Their impotence was dramatically displayed in January 1993, when the vice-premier of Bosnia and Hercegovina was dragged from a UN armoured car at a Serb checkpoint and executed in front of French peacekeepers.

By mid-1993, with Serb 'ethnic cleansing' nearly complete, the UN began to discuss setting up 'safe areas' for Muslims. One of these was the town of Srebrenica, now infamous as the site of the 1995 Serbian massacre of some 6000 local Muslim men without so much as a peep out of the UN. It wasn't until a Serb mortar attack on a crowded market in Sarajevo killed 68 civilians that the UN finally stopped posturing and began enforcing its threats against the Serbs.

In August 1995 - when Bosnian Serbs were on the defensive but the Muslims and Croats were not in a position to gain more territory - US President Clinton floated a peace plan. An agreement was drafted stating that the country would retain its pre-war boundaries but would be composed of two separate entities, the joint Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine) and the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina (Republika Srpska). After the accord was signed in December, Bosnian, Serb and Croat forces withdrew to the agreed lines, and a NATO peacekeeping force took up positions between them.

Around 34,000 NATO troops remained stationed in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and a large international civilian presence began working to rebuild the country. In early June 1999, NATO troops captured Dragan Kulundzija, charged with persecuting Muslims and Croats in the Serb-run Keraterm prison camp.

Recent History[edit]

Progress since peace has been substantial, but inter-ethnic tensions can still run high. Bosnia and Hercegovina's current leadership structure, ratified by the Dayton Accord, leaves it among the world's most complicated democracies. Known as the Chairman of the Presidency, the country's chief of state shares the office with two co-presidents, each having been elected to office by their respective peoples. The heads of government are the co-chairmen of the Council of Ministers, who together nominate the council's members. There's also a president of the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and a president of the Republika Srpska.

In July 2004, the reconstruction of Mostar's historic and distinctively-shaped bridge - the destruction of which had come to symbolise the Bosnian tragedy - was completed. Bosnian Serbs had dropped their demands for secession, and the UN's trials of suspected war criminals in The Hague were chasing villains of all sides. Though there was cause for hope, the war remained close to the surface of the national psyche, and international peacekeeping troops - in January 2003 the EU took over policing duties - seems set to stay for the foreseeable future.


Anarchist History[edit]

BiH's most known connection to anarchism comes from the revolutionary youth group, the Young Bosnians whose member Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Hungary in Sarajevo. The assassination in Sarajevo triggered World War I. The group did espouse anarchism

Anarchist thought and activity grew in the region from the DIY punk scene, but the socially-conscious subculture took a hard blow when the war began. Many activists fled the country, leaving the younger generation to start essentially from scratch. Additionally, this younger generation was raised in a war-torn environment where racism, nationalism and xenephobia ran rampant.

Since the war anarchism has slowly grown, mainly alongside the punk culture once again. Groups have formed in places such as Banja Luka and Mostar. These anarchist have been involved mostly in writing fanzines, distributing political music and literature and holding protests.

The group in Banja Luka's first action was a May Day demonstration in 1997. They distributed flyers on the history of May Day which also connected the conditions of workers at that period to current issues faced by workers due to the policies of institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

Activity has continued to grow in the region, an organic farm based on permaculture and sustainable living is now established outside of Mostar. The farm provides free food to people, including a refugee camp of mixed-marriage families who are essentially shunned. A Food Not Bombs chapter also formed and helped organize protests to the Iraq War outside the US Consulate. They also coordinated with conscientious objector groups and provided free food to people on several occasions.


Active Groups[edit]

External Links[edit]

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