More about History of Bosnia Herzegovina

More about History of Bosnia Herzegovina

• Ancient and medieval periods

When the Romans extended their conquests into the territory of modern Bosnia during the 2nd and 1st centuries bce, the people they encountered there belonged mainly to Illyrian tribes. Most of the area of modern Bosnia was incorporated into the Roman province of Dalmatia. During the 4th and 5th centuries ce, Roman armies suffered heavy defeats in this region at the hands of invading Goths. When the Goths were eventually driven out of the Balkans by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the early 6th century, the Bosnian territory became, notionally at least, part of the Byzantine Empire.

Slavs began to settle in this territory during the 6th century. A second wave of Slavs in the 7th century included two powerful tribes, the Croats and the Serbs: Croats probably covered most of central, western, and northern Bosnia, while Serbs extended into the Drina River valley and modern Herzegovina. The terms “Serb” and “Croat” were in this period tribal labels; they were subsequently used to refer to the inhabitants of Serbian or Croatian political entities and only later acquired the connotations of ethnic or national identity in the modern sense.

During the late 8th and early 9th centuries, part of northwestern Bosnia was conquered by Charlemagne’s Franks. This area later became part of Croatia under King Tomislav. After Tomislav’s death in 928, much of Bosnia was taken over by a Serb princedom that acknowledged the sovereignty of the Byzantine Empire. The first written mention of Bosnia was recorded during this period by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who described “Bosona” as a district in “baptized Serbia.” The district he referred to was an area much smaller than modern Bosnia and centred on the Bosna River. Soon after Constantine wrote those words, most of the modern territory of Bosnia reverted to Croatian rule.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, Bosnia experienced rule by Byzantium through Croatian or Serbian intermediaries, incorporation into a Serbian kingdom that had expanded northward from the territory of modern Montenegro and Herzegovina, rule by Hungary, and a brief period of renewed Byzantine rule. After the death of the emperor Manuel I Comnenus in 1180, Byzantine rule fell away, and government by Croatia or Hungary was not restored: a Bosnian territory (excluding much of modern Bosnia and all of Herzegovina) thus became, for the first time, an independent entity.

A Bosnian state of some kind existed during most of the period from 1180 to 1463, despite periodic intrusions from the neighbouring kingdom of Hungary, which maintained a theoretical claim to sovereignty over Bosnia. Bosnia enjoyed periods of power and independence, especially under three prominent rulers: Ban Kulin (ruled c. 1180–1204), Ban Stjepan (Stephen) Kotromanić (ruled 1322–53) of the Kotromanić dynasty, and Stjepan’s successor, King Tvrtko I (ruled 1353–91). Under Stjepan Kotromanić, Bosnia expanded southward, incorporating the principality of Hum (modern Herzegovina). During the reign of Tvrtko I, Bosnia reached farther south and acquired a portion of the Dalmatian coast. For a brief period in the late 14th century, Bosnia was the most powerful state in the western Balkans. This Greater Bosnia of Tvrtko’s final decades was an exception, however: for most of the medieval period, Bosnia was mainly a landlocked state, isolated and protected by its impenetrable terrain.

One consequence of this isolation was the development of a distinctive Bosnian church. After the schism of 1054 divided Western (Latin, or Roman Catholic) and Eastern (Eastern Orthodox) Christianity, most of the Bosnian territory (excluding modern Herzegovina) was Latin, but during the long period of isolation from Rome the Bosnian church fell into its own de facto schism, electing its own leaders from among the heads of the monastic houses. A combination of poor theological training, lax observances, and Eastern Orthodox practices led to frequent complaints from neighbouring areas, beginning in the 1190s, that the Bosnian church was infected with heresy. In 1203 a papal legate was sent to investigate these charges, and Ban Kulin gathered a special council at Bolino Polje (near modern Zenica), where the church leaders signed a declaration promising to undertake a series of reforms. Most involved correcting lax religious practices; in addition, however, they promised not to shelter heretics in their monasteries. The extent to which these reforms were observed is very uncertain, since over the following century the church in Bosnia became increasingly isolated. Occasional complaints from the 1280s onward still referred to “heretics” in Bosnia, and, by the time the Roman Catholic Franciscans began to operate there in 1340, the official view from Rome was that the entire Bosnian church had fallen into heresy, from which its members needed to be converted.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, many historians argued that the Bosnian church had adopted the extreme dualist heresy of the Bulgarian Bogomils. Evidence for this view came from the papal denunciations of the Bosnians, which sometimes accused them of Manichaeism, the dualist theology on which Bogomil beliefs were based. In addition, Italian and Dalmatian sources referred to the Bosnians as “Patarins,” a term used in Italy for a range of heretics including the Cathari, whose beliefs were linked to Bogomilism. However, later scholarship suggested that the authors of those denunciations had little or no knowledge of the situation inside Bosnia and that confusion may have been caused by the existence of genuine dualist heretics on the Dalmatian coast. Furthermore, the surviving evidence of the religious practices of the Bosnian church shows that its members accepted many things that Bogomils fiercely rejected, such as the sign of the cross, the Old Testament, the mass, the use of church buildings, and the drinking of wine. The Bosnian church should thus be considered an essentially nonheretical branch of the Roman Catholic Church, based in monastic houses in which some Eastern Orthodox practices also were observed.

During the 14th century the Franciscans established a network of friaries in Bosnia and spent more than a century trying to convert members of the Bosnian church to mainstream Catholicism. In 1459 this campaign received the full support of the Bosnian king, Stjepan Tomaš Ostojić, who summoned the clergy of the Bosnian church and ordered them to convert to Roman Catholicism or leave the kingdom. When most of the clergy converted, the back of the Bosnian church was broken.

The final decades of the medieval Bosnian state were troubled by civil war, Hungarian interference, and the threat of invasion by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Ottoman armies began raiding Serbia in the 1380s and crossed into Bosnian-ruled Hum (Herzegovina) in 1388. King Tvrtko I sent a large force to fight against them alongside the Serbian army at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in the following year. Tvrtko’s successor, Stjepan Ostoja, struggled for possession of the crown against his brother Tvrtko II, who was supported first by the Turks and then by the Hungarians after Ostoja’s death. The nobleman Stefan Vukčić also engaged in tactical alliances against the Bosnian rulers, establishing his own rule over the territory of Hum and giving himself the title herceg (duke), from which the name Herzegovina is derived. Ottoman forces captured an important part of central Bosnia in 1448, centred on the settlement of Vrhbosna, which they developed into the city of Sarajevo. In 1463 they conquered most of the rest of Bosnia proper, although parts of Herzegovina and some northern areas of Bosnia were taken over by Hungary and remained under Hungarian control until the 1520s. Vukčić and his son were gradually forced out of their domains, and the last fortress in Herzegovina fell to the Turks in 1482.

• Ottoman Bosnia

Bosnia was rapidly absorbed into the Ottoman Empire and was divided into military-administrative districts, or sanjaks (from the Turkish sancàk, meaning “banner”). In 1580 a broad area covering modern Bosnia and some surrounding areas of Croatia and Serbia was given the full status of an eyalet, or constituent province of the empire. Bosnia enjoyed this status as a distinct entity throughout the rest of the Ottoman period. The Bosnian eyalet was governed by a vizier and administered through a network of junior pashas and local judges. Land was distributed according to the Ottoman feudal system, in which the holder of a timar (estate) had to report for military duty, bringing and supporting other soldiers. A wide range of taxes was imposed, including the harač, a graduated poll tax on non-Muslims. Also introduced was the notorious system called devşirme, under which Christian boys aged 10 and above were taken off for training in the imperial administration and the Janissary corps, an elite army division. In all these respects, conditions in Bosnia were similar to those in the other conquered areas of Europe.

In one crucial way, however, Bosnia differed from the other Balkan lands (except, later, Albania): a large part of the native population converted to Islam. This was a gradual development; it took more than a hundred years for Muslims to become an absolute majority. There was no mass conversion at the outset, nor mass immigration of Muslims from Anatolia. The fundamental reason for the growth of such a large Muslim population in Bosnia may lie in the earlier religious history of the Bosnian state. Whereas neighbouring Serbia had benefited from a strong, territorially organized national church, Bosnia had seen competition in most areas between the Bosnian church and the Roman Catholic Church, both of which operated only out of monastic houses. In Herzegovina a third church, the Serbian Orthodox, had competed. Christianity was thus structurally weaker in Bosnia than in almost any other part of the Balkans. The motives that inclined Bosnians to adopt Islam were partly economic: the prosperous cities of Sarajevo and Mostar were also mainly Muslim, and it was not possible to lead a full civic life there without converting to Islam. Other motives included the privileged legal status enjoyed by Muslims and, possibly, a desire to avoid the poll tax on non-Muslims, though Muslims were subject, unlike Christians, both to the alms tax and to the duties of general military service. But the traditional belief that Bosnian noblemen converted en masse to Islam in order to keep their estates has been largely disproved by modern historians.

Another way in which Bosnia differed from other parts of the Ottoman Balkans is that, for most of the Ottoman period, Bosnia was a frontier province, facing some of the empire’s most important enemies— Austria, Hungary, and Venice. To fill up depopulated areas of northern and western Bosnia, the Ottomans encouraged the migration of large numbers of hardy settlers with military skills from Serbia and Herzegovina. Some of these settlers were Vlachs, members of a pre-Slav Balkan population that had acquired a Latinate language and specialized in stock breeding, horse raising, long-distance trade, and fighting. Most were members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Before the Ottoman conquest, that church had had very few members in the Bosnian lands outside Herzegovina and the eastern strip of the Drina valley. There is no definite evidence of any Orthodox church buildings in central, northern, or western Bosnia before 1463. During the 16th century, however, several Orthodox monasteries were built in those parts of Bosnia, apparently to serve the newly settled Orthodox population there.

Major wars affecting Bosnia took place almost every two generations throughout the Ottoman period. Bosnia was an important recruiting ground for Süleyman I’s campaign to conquer Hungary (1520–33). There was fighting on Bosnia’s borders during his final Hungarian campaign of 1566. And the large-scale Habsburg-Ottoman conflict of 1593–1606 was sparked by fighting in the Bihać region of northwestern Bosnia. This war left Bosnia financially drained and militarily exhausted. A Venetian-Ottoman war, beginning in the 1640s and lasting until 1669, involved heavy fighting and destruction in parts of western Bosnia. In the Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1683–99, Austria reconquered Ottoman Hungary and Slavonia, sending a flood of Muslim refugees (mainly converted Slavs) into Bosnia. In 1697 a small Austrian army under Prince Eugene of Savoy marched into the heart of Bosnia, put Sarajevo to the torch, and hurried back to Austrian territory, taking thousands of Roman Catholic Bosnians with it. In the next major war (1714–18) Austria joined forces with Venice; at the Treaty of Passarowitz (Požarevac, Serb.) in 1718, Venetian-ruled Dalmatia was allowed to extend its territory inland, reaching a line that since then has formed part of the southwestern border of Bosnia. Austria invaded Bosnia again in 1736 but was repelled by local forces; at the subsequent peace settlement (the Treaty of Belgrade, 1739), Austria gave up its claim to the territory south of the Sava River. This settlement formed the basis of the northern border of modern Bosnia. Austria seized more territory after invading Bosnia again in 1788, but it yielded up its gains at the peace settlement in 1791.

The chronic fighting weakened Bosnia. War necessitated increased taxation, causing tax revolts. Forced conscription and frequent plague epidemics led to a relative reduction in the Muslim population, which contributed its manpower to Ottoman campaigns throughout the empire and may have suffered disproportionately from the effects of plague in the cities. In the 18th century there was strong growth in the Christian population; by the end of the century the Muslims were probably no longer in the majority. The social consequences of war also included a change in the system of land tenure: increasingly, the old feudal timar estates were converted into a type of private estate known as a çiftlik, in response to the imperial treasury’s need for cash instead of old-style feudal service. The conditions of work demanded of the peasants on these estates were usually much more severe, and these peasants tended increasingly to be Christians, since Muslim peasants were able to acquire smallholdings in their own right.

Nevertheless, Ottoman Bosnia was not permanently sunk in misery. Descriptions of Sarajevo by visiting travelers portray it as one of the wonders of the Balkans, with fountains, bridges, schools, libraries, and mosques. Fine mosques were also built in towns such as Foča and Banja Luka. (Many of these buildings were systematically demolished by Serb forces in 1992–93.) Numerous works of poetry, philosophy, and theology were written. The cities of Sarajevo and Mostar, where such urban culture flourished, enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under elected officials. After war forced the Bosnian viziers to move out of Sarajevo in the 1690s, they found it almost impossible to return, residing instead in the town of Travnik and exercising only limited power. Real local power passed increasingly into the hands of a type of hereditary official (unique to the Bosnian eyalet) known as a kapetan.

The existence of these powerful local institutions meant that Bosnia was well equipped to resist the reforming measures that the Ottoman sultans began to issue in the early 19th century. When Sultan Mahmud II reformed the military in 1826 and abolished the Janissary corps (which had acquired the status of a privileged social institution), the reform was fiercely resisted by local Janissaries in Bosnia. The Ottoman authorities mounted punitive campaigns against the Janissaries’ stronghold, Sarajevo, in 1827 and 1828. In 1831 a charismatic young kapetan called Husein seized power in Bosnia, imprisoning the vizier in Travnik. With an army of 25,000 men, Husein then marched into Kosovo to negotiate with the Ottoman grand vizier, demanding local autonomy for Bosnia and an end to the reform process there. But the grand vizier stirred up a rivalry between Husein and the leading kapetan of Herzegovina, Ali-aga Rizvanbegović, and in the following year Husein’s support melted away when a large Ottoman army entered Bosnia. Rizvanbegović’s reward was that Herzegovina was separated from the Bosnian eyalet as a distinct territory under his rule. Further reforms announced by Sultan Abdülmecid I, involving new rights for Christian subjects, a new basis for army conscription, and an end to the much-hated system of tax-farming, were either resisted or ignored by the powerful Bosnian landowners.

During these final decades of Ottoman rule, the rise of Serbia as a quasi-autonomous Christian province, from which Muslims were violently expelled, made Bosnian Muslims feel more isolated and vulnerable. The increasing role of foreign powers (especially Austria and Russia) as “protectors” of the interests of Christians in the Balkans also raised Bosnian suspicions. Bosnian landowners, feeling that they could no longer trust the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople (now Istanbul) to maintain their power, frequently turned to more repressive measures against their Christian subjects.

However, two Bosnian governors succeeded in forcing through some of the sultan’s reforms and curbing local resistance. The first of these, Omer-paša Latas, crushed a major rebellion in 1850–51 and revoked the separate status of Herzegovina. The second, Topal Osman-paša, introduced a new method of military conscription in 1865 and a completely new administrative system in 1866, dividing Bosnia into seven sanjaks and establishing a consultative assembly. He also built schools, roads, and a public hospital and allowed the two Christian communities to build new schools and churches of their own. Yet the growing tax demands on Bosnian peasants revived local resistance.

In 1875 a revolt against the state tax collectors began among Christian peasants in the Nevesinje region of Herzegovina. Unrest soon spread to other areas of Bosnia, and repressive force was applied both by the new Bosnian governor and by local landowners using their own irregular troops. The revolt aroused enormous popular sympathy in Serbia, which, along with Montenegro, declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1876. Russia came into the war on their behalf in the following year. After the Serbo-Turkish War ended in 1878, the other great powers of Europe intervened at the Congress of Berlin to counterbalance Russia’s new influence in the Balkans. The congress decided that Bosnia and Herzegovina, while remaining notionally under Turkish sovereignty, would be occupied and governed by Austria-Hungary. In 1878 Austro-Hungarian troops took control of Bosnia, overcoming vigorous resistance from local Bosnian forces. They also occupied the neighbouring sanjak of Novi Pazar (now in Serbia), which had been one of the seven Bosnian sanjaks in the late Ottoman period.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule

Bosnia and Herzegovina was declared a “crown land” and was governed by a special joint commission under the Common Ministry of Finance. The Ottoman administrative division was preserved, and Ottoman laws were only gradually replaced or supplemented. This policy of gradualism was the most striking aspect of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Common Finance Minister Benjamin Kállay, a specialist in South Slav history who directed Bosnian policy from 1882 to 1903. Indeed, a common criticism of Austro-Hungarian rule was that little was done to resolve tensions between landlords and peasants. In other areas, however, Kállay’s rule was extremely active. A public works program was initiated, and by 1907 Bosnia and Herzegovina had a well-developed infrastructure, including an extensive railway and road network. Mines and factories were developed, and agriculture was promoted with model farms and training colleges. Three high schools and nearly 200 primary schools were built, although compulsory education was not introduced until 1909.

While he succeeded in many of these areas of practical improvement, Kállay failed in his central political project: developing a Bosnian national consciousness to insulate the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the growing movements of Croatian, Serbian, and Yugoslav (“South Slav”) nationalism. Roman Catholic and Orthodox people of Bosnia and Herzegovina had begun by the mid-19th century to identify themselves as “Croats” and “Serbs,” respectively. At the same time, Muslim intellectuals were campaigning for greater powers over the Islamic institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby becoming quasi-political representatives of a Muslim community with its own distinctive interests. During the first decade of the 20th century, new “national organizations” of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats functioned as embryonic political parties. In response, Kállay’s successor, István, Freiherr (baron) Burián, granted a degree of autonomy in religious affairs to both the Muslims and the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In October 1908 nationalist feeling was strongly aroused by the sudden announcement that Bosnia and Herzegovina would be fully annexed by Austria-Hungary. The decision, which caught other great powers by surprise and created a diplomatic crisis lasting many months, was prompted by the revolution of the Young Turks in Constantinople. The Young Turks appeared ready to establish a more democratic regime in the Ottoman Empire, which could then plausibly reclaim Turkish rights over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, one effect of this change was beneficial: Burián felt able to promote democratic institutions, and a parliament (with limited powers) was introduced there in 1910. But the bitter resentment that the annexation caused among Serb and South Slav nationalists led to the growth of revolutionary groups and secret societies dedicated to the overthrow of Habsburg rule. One of these, Mlada Bosna (“Young Bosnia”), was especially active in Bosnian schools and universities.

Tension was heightened by the First Balkan War of 1912–13, in which Serbia expanded southward, driving Turkish forces out of Kosovo, Novi Pazar, and Macedonia. In May 1913 the military governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gen. Oskar Potiorek, declared a state of emergency, dissolved the parliament, closed down Serb cultural associations, and suspended the civil courts. The following year the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to review a military exercise. He was killed in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by a young assassin from the Mlada Bosna organization, Gavrilo Princip, who had received some assistance from inside Serbia. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia one month later, precipitating World War I.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was under Austro-Hungarian military rule throughout World War I, and repressive measures were applied to those Bosnian Serbs whose loyalty was suspect. At the end of the war, Bosnian politicians from each of the three main communities followed the political leaders of Croatia and Slovenia in throwing off Habsburg rule and joining in the creation of a new South Slav state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Yugoslav kingdom

When the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was finally settled in June 1921, Bosnia and Herzegovina retained no formal status of its own. However, its outline was preserved on the map, in the form of six oblasti (provinces) corresponding to the sanjaks (excluding that of Novi Pazar) of the late Ottoman period. Serfdom was abolished, but Bosnia and Herzegovina remained relatively undeveloped socially and politically. In 1929 the kingdom was renamed Yugoslavia, and a territorial division—introduced under King Alexander I’s royal dictatorship—divided Bosnia and Herzegovina between four new administrative districts called banovine. Bosnia and Herzegovina thus was wiped off the map. Further adjustments were made in 1939, particularly the creation of an expanded Croatian banovina within Yugoslavia that included portions of Bosnian territory. In 1941, after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia during World War II, the entire Bosnian territory was absorbed into the puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia.

• Independence and war

Attempts by EC negotiators to promote a new division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into ethnic “cantons” during February and March 1992 failed: different versions of these plans were rejected by each of the three main ethnic parties. When Bosnia and Herzegovina’s independence was recognized by the United States and the EC on April 7, Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces immediately began firing on Sarajevo, and the artillery bombardment of the city by Bosnian Serb units of the Yugoslav army began soon thereafter. During April many of the towns in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina with large Bosniak populations, such as Zvornik, Foča, and Višegrad, were attacked by a combination of paramilitary forces and Yugoslav army units. Most of the local Bosniak population was expelled from these areas, the first victims in the country of a process described as ethnic cleansing. Although Bosniaks were the primary victims and Serbs the primary perpetrators, Croats were also among the victims and perpetrators. Within six weeks a coordinated offensive by the Yugoslav army, paramilitary groups from Serbia, and local Bosnian Serb forces brought roughly two-thirds of Bosnian territory under Serb control. In May the army units and equipment in Bosnia and Herzegovina were placed under the command of a Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladić.

From the summer of 1992, the military situation remained fairly static. A hastily assembled Bosnian government army, together with some better-prepared Bosnian Croat forces, held the front lines for the rest of that year, though its power was gradually eroded in parts of eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bosnian government was weakened militarily by an international arms embargo and by a conflict in 1993–94 with Bosnian Croat forces. But later in 1994 Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks agreed to form a joint federation.

The United Nations (UN) refused to intervene in the Bosnian conflict, but UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) troops did facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. The organization later extended its role to the protection of a number of UN-declared “safe areas.” However, the UN failed to protect the safe area of Srebrenica in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces perpetrated the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosniak men.

Several peace proposals during the war failed, largely because the Bosnian Serbs—who controlled about 70 percent of the land by 1994—refused to concede any territory. In February 1994, in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first-ever use of force, NATO fighters shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft that were violating the UN-imposed no-fly zone over the country. Later that year, at the UN’s request, NATO launched isolated and ineffective air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets. But following the Srebrenica massacre and another Bosnian Serb attack on a Sarajevo marketplace, NATO undertook more concentrated air strikes late in 1995. Combined with a large-scale Bosniak-Croat land offensive, this action led Bosnian Serb forces to agree to U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, U.S., in November. Serbian Pres. Slobodan Milošević represented the Bosnian Serbs. The resulting Dayton Accords called for a federalized Bosnia and Herzegovina in which 51 percent of the land would constitute a Croat-Bosniak federation and 49 percent a Serb republic. To enforce the agreement, formally signed in December 1995, a 60,000-member international force was deployed.

It was originally estimated that at least 200,000 people were killed and more than 2,000,000 displaced during the 1992–95 war. Subsequent studies, however, concluded that the death toll was actually about 100,000.

Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina An election in September 1996 produced a tripartite national presidency chaired by Izetbegović and an ethnically apportioned national legislature dominated by nationalist parties. Karadžić had been indicted for war crimes and was prohibited from being a candidate, though he retained some support among Bosnian Serbs into the 21st century. (He eluded capture until his arrest in Belgrade in July 2008.) The national government was largely responsible for foreign affairs, and the internationally appointed Office of the High Representative—established under the Dayton Accords and later granted overriding executive powers (the so-called Bonn Powers)—oversaw the implementation of the peace agreement and acted as the final authority. Meanwhile, the two parts of the republic, the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic), were largely autonomous, each having its own assembly.

Over the next several years the country experienced an uneasy peace. It received extensive international assistance, but the economy remained in shambles. Much of the workforce was unemployed—about 50 percent in the Federation and about 70 percent in the Republika Srpska. By the early 21st century, however, projects funded by the World Bank had succeeded in reconstructing much of the country’s infrastructure, and some political and economic reforms were implemented. In the course of the regional economic boom of 2006–08, unemployment in the country fell to less than 30 percent.As European bank credit and foreign direct investment took the place of declining international aid, rates of economic growth averaged 6 percent. Although the international financial crisis that began in 2008 did affect the economy, it had less of an impact in Bosnia and Herzegovina than elsewhere in the Balkans, as the country’s current account and state budget deficits were relatively small. Regional relations also improved in the early 21st century. In both the Croat and Serb communities, calls for breaking away from Bosnia and Herzegovina to unite with Croatia and Serbia declined in the face of faded interest from both of those states. Relations with Croatia in particular warmed in 2010, following Croatian Pres. Ivo Josipović’s apology for his country’s military actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the warfare of the early 1990s.

Nonetheless, other problems have continued to delay the internal integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leaving in doubt the possibility of accession into the European Union (EU). Although the danger of renewed violence has remained minimal, the stalemate between the Federation and the Republika Srpska has persisted. Struggles over a potential new constitution, including disputed provisions for a common police force, have steadfastly resisted resolution. The international Office of the High Representative has remained in place, despite repeated attempts to end its authority and transfer its advisory functions to an EU office. Underlying all these difficulties are the continuing troubled relations between Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs. Their leaders’ respective demands for a federation with some central powers in Sarajevo and a loose confederation offering the right of secession have been diametrically opposed. Their disagreement has frustrated repeated efforts to draft a new constitution to replace the Dayton agreement. Some promise for progress did emerge from the elections of October 2010. Although the hard-line president of the Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, was reelected, the Bosniak presidency passed to Bakir Izetbegović, the son of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, Alija Izetbegović. Attracting younger voters to his campaign for reconciliation, he joined Bosnian Croat Pres. Željko Komšić as a moderating figure.

In May 2011 Ratko Mladić, who had commanded the Bosnian Serb forces during the war and was widely held to be responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, was captured in Serbia to be extradited to The Hague for trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The political deadlock that had hobbled the Bosnian government since the October 2010 election was finally resolved on December 28, 2011. The absence of a central government had threatened to spark a financial crisis, as foreign investment contracted and hundreds of millions of dollars from the EU and the International Monetary Fund were withheld. The six major political parties agreed on Bosnian Croat Vjekoslav Bevanda as a compromise choice as prime minister, and they began work on a budget that would allow the new government to function.