To call Bosnia and Herzegovina a complicated country is an understatement. The country in the Balkan Peninsula divides its economic, administrative and political responsibilities between the multiethnic central government, the self-governing neutral Brcko district and two semi-autonomous entities that, for the most part, operate independently — the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb-run Republika Srpska. Both semi-autonomous entities are further split into several cantons and communities, home to mostly Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats in the central-western federation and Bosnian Serbs in Republika Srpska, to the north and east.
This principle of ethnic nationalism is key to the country's central constitutional and political organization. The Bosnian constitution recognizes Bosniaks, who are predominantly Muslim, the largely Orthodox Bosnian Serbs and primarily Catholic Bosnian Croats as "constituent peoples" with equal rights. Today, the country has a population of around 3.1 million people.
Around half are Bosniaks, while 31% are Serb and 15% are Croat. The rest of the inhabitants belong either to one of the 17 officially recognized minorities, like the Roma and Jews, or chose not to identify with any ethnicity at the last official census. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are all recognized as official languages.
The central government is led by rotating three-way presidency, made up of one representative from each of the three main constituent groups. The upper house of parliament and key government offices are also divided according to this principle. This strict balance between the three groups is always maintained, both politically and socially, often leading to ethnic interests and political gridlock dominating the decision-making process.
This complex, convoluted and oft dysfunctional structure was set up during the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, and then anchored in the constitution. It was intended to bring an end to the Bosnian war — sparked by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s — and legally secure the balance of power between the three feuding ethnic groups. During the war, from 1992 to 1995, the armed forces of the Bosniaks and the Bosnian Croats initially fought each other, before all three groups began to clash.
Later, the Bosniaks and the Bosnian Croats joined forces to take on Republika Srpska. Throughout the war, neighboring Serbia and Croatia were actively involved in the fighting. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The fighting devastated wide swaths of the country, and resulted in countless war crimes — among them the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide, in which thousands of Bosniaks were killed at the hands of Serb forces.
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