History

Throughout its history, Bosnia (and its companion, Herzegovina) has found itself on the frontier between empires. Bosnia was a part of the Roman province of Illyria, and even then was exploited for its mineral wealth and other natural resources—a practice which continued under subsequent political systems. Like the rest of the Balkan region, Bosnia was subsequently settled by Slavs during their great migration in the 6th and 7th centuries, leading to displacement or, in some cases, assimilation of the native Illyrians. Christianized in the 9th and 10th centuries in the wake of Cyril and Methodius' mission to the Slavs from Byzantium, Bosnia entered the medieval period as a classic, though isolated, feudal state, dependent on agriculture and mining. Post-Christianization isolation from Rome allowed the Bogomils to flourish there. This dualistic sect, heretical from Rome's viewpoint, remained the dominant religion until the advent of Islam.

The Medieval Kingdom of Bosnia did not last long after the defeat of the Serbian and Bosnian feudal nobility at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. Ottoman armies thus found their way open to further expansion into Europe. A long campaign against the Christian armies resulted in the conquest of Bosnia in 1463 and of Herzegovina in 1483. For the next 400 years, until the beginning of Austrian rule, Bosnia found itself relatively isolated from Europe, though the eventual capital, Sarajevo, became an administrative and trading nexus, oriented towards Istanbul. A series of caravanserai, known as hans, ultimately connected Bosnia to Persia and China along the Silk Route. A series of hans to the west connected Bosnia to Dubrovnik and Venice. During this period, many Bosnian Christians converted to Islam, in some cases to escape the taxes placed on Christians and in other cases to retain their social position as nobility.

As Ottoman power began to wane and Turkey began to be pushed out of Europe, Bosnia became an important frontier for the Turkish state, although an increasingly unstable one. By the 19th century, much of Bosnia had become turbulent and anarchic; peasant revolts, especially by the Christian peasantry, were a constant threat to stability. In the meantime, Serbia, to the east of Bosnia, won independence from Turkey and established a kingdom. Repeated attempts at reform in the Ottoman Empire were unsuccessful; revolts grew in Bosnia until Austria-Hungary felt compelled to step in. The treaties of San Stefano and of Berlin in 1878 proposed that Austria occupy Bosnia until such time that order and prosperity could be restored.

Europe arrived in Bosnia with the Austrian occupation. Having been left out of the great race for overseas colonies, Austria and its administration decided to treat Bosnia as a model, albeit self-supporting, colony. Much of the infrastructure of modern Bosnia, and especially Sarajevo, the capital, was developed during the Austrian occupation. The first railroads, museums, public transport, and waterways for commercial transport were built. Craft guilds were organized and new systems of agriculture developed. In little more than a generation, Bosnia moved from a backwater of the Ottoman Empire to the edge of an advancing Europe. By 1907, Austria ended what had always been at best a transparent fiction and formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bosnia ignited the spark that started World War I when a local Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. (Footprints embedded in the pavement at the corner by the presumed spot where Princip stood have remained a well known tourist attraction.) Tensions escalated sharply as the great powers quickly became involved in what had been a local movement for independence from Austria-Hungary. Russia was drawn in on the side of the Serbs against Turkey, although control of the Black Sea and the Balkans was also on the Russian agenda. Yugoslavia suffered greatly during World War I, since Austria-Hungary drafted its army from, among other places, the peasantry of Bosnia and Croatia—young men whose experiences were described in the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek's novel, The Good Soldier Schweik. In addition to losing huge numbers of young men, the Yugoslav peoples found themselves caught between the armies of Turkey and Austria-Hungary, on the one hand, and those of Russia and the Great Powers on the other. The entire Serbian government and much of its army undertook a long march from Belgrade across Bosnia to the Adriatic Coast, as it fled before advancing Austro-Hungarian troops. The folk song Tamo Daleko ("There, So Far Away") is said to commemorate this event. Although trench warfare, of the kind that left millions dead in France, Belgium, and Holland, didn't come to Bosnia's mountains and valleys, Bosnia suffered greatly from 1914 to 1918.

Shortly after the end of World War I, Bosnia was incorporated within the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, ruled by the royal family of Serbia. Unfortunately this "first Yugoslavia" quickly became a maelstrom of contending ethnicities. Attempts at accommodation failed, and this contributed directly to the intercommunal slaughter of World War II. By most accounts, about 1.7 million Yugoslavs lost their lives in World War II. Scholars generally agree that about half of the carnage was internecine, the broader context of the war providing a forum for the narrower agenda of revenge. Bosnia was particularly hard hit by this intercommunal violence because its population was so intermixed. As a quisling, fascist government took over in Belgrade (indeed, Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, was the first city in Europe to be declared "Judenrein" ["Free of Jews"] by its own government) and adopted and enforced their own racist policies, many Muslim families, especially in southwestern Serbia and Montenegro, fled to the perceived tenderer mercies of directly German-administered Sarajevo.

This first Yugoslavia died with the German invasion. After some formal resistance, the military high command fled to Pale (site of the current "Bosnian Serb Parliament"), from which they surrendered. Thereafter, a guerilla war—called the Struggle for National Liberation (or NOB)—against the invaders and their proxies began in the mountains of Bosnia. A multisided war ensued in which Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Muslims, divisions of the German and Italian armies, Cetniks (Serbian royalists), Ustaše (supporters of the Nazi-controlled Croatian puppet state), and Tito's anti-German Partizans in various combinations fought numerous bloody battles and campaigns of attrition. The second Yugoslavia—Tito's Yugoslavia—was declared in Bosnia (at a conference in Jajce) in 1943. Initially, the Soviet model for the country's administration and development raised hopes for dealing with the question of ethnicity. Later, following Tito's dramatic break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia's "self-management" model and the partial restoration of property rights led to rapid growth and relative prosperity from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. Until its breakup, Yugoslavia and its variety of "worker self-managed" Communism was relatively progressive. As the country began to unravel in the 1980s, the party, especially in Serbia, became much more repressive, justifying numerous oppressive practices, directed against non-Serbs, by manipulation of ethnicity issues.

Bosnia's role in the new Yugoslavia was always ambiguous. On the one hand, the census did not at first recognize "Muslim" as an ethnicity. Neither was Bosnia considered a "Muslim" republic. On the other hand, agreements of understanding reached with Muslim leaders allowed the Muslim religion generally to escape persecution under the new regime.

Tito's break with the Comintern in 1948 further enhanced Bosnia's position in the new Yugoslavia. Much heavy industry, many armament factories, and several military bases were relocated to central Bosnia where they would, at least theoretically, be safe from a Warsaw Pact armored thrust from Bulgaria or Romania.

Yugoslavia's postwar foreign policy of nonalignment with either East or West and a domestic policy fostering the equality of all of its nations and nationalities gave Yugoslavia prestige in the Third World and among fellow members of the nonaligned movement. These policies also helped the economy to grow strongly, fueled by "soft" loans from such organizations as the International Monetary Fund. It was only with the "oil shocks" of the 1970s that the central government's house of cards began to collapse.

Tito's death in 1980 spelled the beginning of the end for the Yugoslav experiment. Tito left as his political legacy a system for the rotation of government positions among the various republics, that is to say (except for Bosnia), ethnicities. Over the next decade, this system began to fall apart without Tito's personal authority to settle questions of the allocation of resources to republics.

At the end of the 1980s, Slovenia began its drive for secession, with Croatia not far behind. The governments of Serbia and of Yugoslavia led by Slobodan Miloševic;, nationalist author Dobrica Cosic, and other leading intellectuals, responded with open agitation for a Greater Serbia—the union of all Serbs in former Yugoslavia within one contiguous state—under slogans like "Wherever there is a Serb, there is Serbia." They found their intellectual justification in a 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences which sought to describe Serbia as an historic "victim" of Yugoslavia.

Slovenia and then Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. As the Yugoslav war spread from Slovenia to Croatia, it became apparent that Bosnia, the only ex-Yugoslav republic not based on ethnicity, would be the next bone of contention. Despite the Government of Bosnia's attempts to remain outside the conflict, events soon forced it into a referendum in 1992 on independence from what remained of Yugoslavia—a referendum which the Serbian minority boycotted. Approval of the referendum by a majority of voters resulted in international recognition for the new state and an undeclared war with heavily armed Serbia and its proxies. The current war began as Serbia, through its proxy army of local radical militias, Belgrade gangsters, and "demobilized" soldiers of the Yugoslav Peoples' Army, embarked on a campaign of what has become known as "ethnic cleansing," a form of genocide aimed at eradicating non-Serbs from large sections of Bosnia in order to achieve eventual political union with a Greater Serbia. Conflicts with newly independent Croatia also ensued as radicalized members of that state sought to create, from the multi-national Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Croatian state of Herzeg-Bosna, with its capital at Mostar. Among the many sad incidents of cultural destruction in this war has been the demolition of the historic "Stari Most" (The Old Bridge) in Mostar, by Croatian artillery fire.

www.culturalorientation.net
For more information contact sanja@cal.org.
Designed by SAGARTdesign
This site looks best when viewed using Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher. Last Updated:02/18/04