Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Information.
BOSNIA and HERZEGOVINA (Serbo-Croatian Bosna i Hercegovina), officially the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, country in southeastern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. A total area - 51,129 sq km (19,741 sq mi). Population - 3 531 159. The capital city - Sarajevo. Bosnia is bordered by the Croatia to the west, south and nord, and Serbia and Montenegro (formerly the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or FRY) to the east and northeast. Beech forests constitute the primary natural vegetation. Among the wildlife found in the country are hares, lynxes, weasels, otters, foxes, wildcats, wolves, gray bears, chamois, deer, eagles, vultures, mouflon (wild sheep), and hawks. Lynxes, weasels, and otters have the status of endangered species. The earliest known inhabitants of what is now Bosnia, traceable to the Neolithic period, were the Illyrians, a people of Indo-European stock who are considered ancestors of the modern Albanians. By ad 9, when Rome crushed the last Illyrian resistance in present-day Bosnia, all of Illyria had become part of the Roman Empire. Rome's most enduring legacy in Bosnia was the division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian faiths along the border between the western and eastern Roman empires. That border, first drawn around 285, passed through Bosnia. As Roman power declined, successive waves of nomadic Goths, Alans, Huns, and Avars devastated the land before moving on. In the 6th century Slavic tribes, probably swept along with the Avars, settled in the area and soon absorbed the peoples, languages, and cultures that were already there. A second wave of Slavic tribes, called Serbs and Croats, arrived in the 7th century. The names Croat and Serb probably both derive from the name of an Iranian or Sarmatian tribe that ruled and was absorbed by them on the way. Bosnia was first mentioned by that name in a surviving document from 958. The area became a remote mountainous borderland between successive competing empires and kingdoms that subjugated or claimed all or parts of it during the early medieval period. Bosnia's Slavs were generally Christian, either Roman Catholic or Orthodox. In 1180 Ban Kulin created the nucleus of an independent Bosnian state, which was revived, consolidated, and expanded by Ban Stephen KotromaniÄ (reigned 1322-1353). KotromaniÄ's conquest of Hum (later Herzegovina) in 1326 united Bosnia and Herzegovina for the first time. Medieval Bosnia reached its height under Stephen Tvrtko (reigned 1353-1391), who was crowned Tvrtko I, king of Serbia and Bosnia, in 1377. Under his rule, Bosnia briefly became the most powerful and prosperous Slavic Balkan state. In 1448 Stephen, lord of Hum, asserted his independence by giving himself the title herceg (duke; from the German Herzog) of Hum, and his land soon came to be called Hercegovina (Herzegovina; the Duchy). The Ottomans quickly conquered most of Bosnia in 1463 and Herzegovina in 1483. Ottoman rule, lasting more than 400 years, introduced two more sizeable religious communities: Jews and Muslims. The Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492, and they became an important part of the cultural and economic life in Sarajevo and other Balkan cities. Immigrants from the Ottoman Empire were among the first Muslims to settle in Bosnia. Later, growing numbers of local converts added to their number. Bosnia, along with Albania, was the only part of Ottoman Europe where large numbers of Christians converted to Islam. The most persuasive explanation for this, advanced in recent scholarly studies, is that all Christian faiths in this religious borderland were weak, with few churches and clergy. Current scholars reject the theory that all or most of the Bosnian Christians who embraced Islam had been members of an allegedly heretical(Bogomil) Bosnian church. The Bosnian church, essentially Catholic in doctrine, was nearly extinct by the 15th century. In an empire in which Muslims were privileged and a ruling caste, converting to Islam offered advantages. The result, unique in Ottoman Europe, was a landholding and military nobility of native Muslim Slavs ruling over a mostly Christian peasantry. By the 19th century the Muslim Slav nobility, like the local ruling elite in several other Ottoman possessions, was virtually independent of crumbling Ottoman central authority. The Bosnian nobility was determined to prevent the Ottomans from reasserting authority and implementing modernizing reforms, collectively known as the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat threatened the Bosnian nobility's power and exploitation of an increasingly impoverished and rebellious peasantry. The last decades of Ottoman Bosnia were marked by repeated rebellions of two kinds: by the Muslim elite against the Ottoman authorities, and by the mostly Christian peasants against that elite. In 1875 a peasant uprising took root in Bosnia and spread to Bulgaria in 1876, prompting a major international crisis. In 1877 Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Russian armies advanced to the gates of Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, in 1878. The Congress of Berlin, meeting that year to resolve the crisis and prevent a wider war, decided that Austria-Hungary should occupy and administer Bosnia. Austro-Hungarian occupation met with serious armed resistance, primarily Muslim but also Orthodox Christian; it took 82,000 troops and four months to subdue that resistance. But Muslim fears for their religion and privileges, which led many to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire, proved unwarranted. The Austro-Hungarian regime did not interfere with existing social and landholding relations, focusing instead, and with some success, on economic development. In 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia, partly to end Serb nationalist dreams of eventually incorporating it into the Kingdom of Serbia. The province had become a prime target of Croat as well as Serb nationalist propaganda and schemes, with Croat nationalists agitating for its union with Croatia, then a part of Hungary. Serbs claimed that the Bosnian Muslims were Islamicized Serbs; Croats claimed that they were Muslim Croats. On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb who professed to be a Yugoslav, shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later, igniting World War I. During the war, most Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims remained loyal to Austria-Hungary. At the end of the war in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. Bosnia became part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929). Serbia's Karadjordjevich dynasty and a Serb-dominated government and administration ruled the new state. The kingdom's political parties, suppressed under a royal dictatorship from 1929 to 1934, were all ethnic nationalist parties except for a pan-Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned and went underground in 1921. The main Bosnian Muslim party, supported by nearly all Muslims, was the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (YMO), founded in February 1919 and led by Mehmet Spaho until his death in 1939. Spaho skillfully maneuvered himself and the YMO into a balancing position among other parties that ensured that the YMO and Muslim interests would be represented in most Yugoslav governments and policies. Spaho died two months before the Yugoslav government made a major concession to Croat national aspirations and created an autonomous Banovina (Province) of Croatia that included parts of Bosnia with large Croat populations. When Nazi Germany and its Axis allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941, during World War II, Bosnia was divided into German and Italian occupation zones. It was made part of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH in Serbo-Croatian). The NDH was an Axis puppet state run by the Ustashe, a Croat fascist and terrorist organization whose wartime attempt to exterminate the NDH's nearly 2 million Serbs was modeled on Hitler's genocide of Europe's Jews. Bosnian Serbs fled to the forests to join two violently competing resistance movements. These were the Serb royalist Chetniks, under Draža Mihailovich, and the Partisans, a Communist-led multiethnic Army of National Liberation organized and headed by Josip Broz Tito, the Croat head of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Bosnia became the Partisans principal zone of operations in two overlapping wars. In one war the Partisans battled the Axis armies of occupation. In the other they fought a parallel civil war against both the Chetniks and the Ustashe. The fighting was particularly fierce between the Partisans and the Chetniks. By the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, the Partisans had won both of their wars and recreated Yugoslavia, under firm Communist control, as a federal state of six republics. Five were to be semi-autonomous "homelands" for Yugoslavia's Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. The sixth, Bosnia, was to be the joint homeland of its intermingled Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. When a new, totally Communist government was installed in November 1945 after strictly controlled elections, Tito headed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (known after 1952 as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, or LCY), the government, and the armed forces. For the next 45 years, Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia. T The disintegration of the LCY in January 1990 paved the way for multiparty parliamentary elections in all six republics by the end of the year. The elections in all the republics produced absolute or relative majorities for nationalist parties. In Bosnia's elections, the three winning nationalist parties, one for each of the major ethnic groups, garnered 76 percent of the popular vote and 202 of the parliament's 240 seats. The Muslim Party of Democratic Action (PDA), led by Alija Izetbegovich, won 87 seats, or 34 percent. The Serbian Democratic Party(SDS), led by Radovan Karadgich, took 72 seats, or 30 percent. Forty-four seats, or 18 percent, went to the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CDU-BH), the Bosnian branch of the party that had won Croatia's elections in spring 1990. That party was led by Croatian president Franjo Tudjman. On April 1992, Bosnia declared independence. On the same day, the civil war broke up between Muslims, Bosnian Croats and native Serb nationalist militants backed by Yugoslav army. By April 7, 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina's independence had been officially recognized by the United States and by most European countries. On May 22, 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina was admitted as a full member of the United Nations. Croats living in Bosnia declared independent Republic Herceg-Bosna with capital Mostar in July 1992. This state had close ties with Croatia and was backed by Croatian army. After declaration of independence it started issuing own stamps (printed, of course, in Croatia). In December 1995 the war in Bosnia was over and Herceg-Bosna incorporated into Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina according to peace agreement signed in Dayton. But it has continued issuing stamps. Republic os Srbska was formed in March 1992 by Serbs living in Bosnia as an answer to proclamation of Bosnian independence. Local Serbian leadership did not approve that act. They tended towards uniting all Serbs in one country and started a rebellion. In 1995 a peace agreement divided the country between the Croat-Muslims and the Serbs and created a collective government. A shaky peace has been maintained by an international peace-keeping force (SFOR). Republic of Srbska, although formally a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has its own assembly and laws and is still issuing own stamps.
Full infor mation about stamps of
Bosnia
is available on site:
www.posta.ba
See also:
Yugoslavia.
