Bosnia and Herzegovina 2018

Yearbook 2018

Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the October presidential election, three presidents were elected, according to the constitution. For the Bosnian Serbs (Republika Srpska), Milorad Dodik, who is for a split between Bosnia and Herzegovina, won for the Serbs SDA’s Šefik Džaferović and for the Croatians Social Democrat Željko Komšić from the party HDZ. The election was preceded by a campaign full of ethnic tensions. The question was very much about whether the country should be united or divided and whether to approach the EU or not.

• According to Abbreviationfinder: BIH is an three letter acronym for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to Countryaah.com, Sarajevo is the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country located in Southern Europe. The country’s complex political system with three presidents is a product of the Balkan war in the early 1990s. After the war, the country was divided into two halves, one side dominated by Serbs and the other by Croats and Muslims. The term of office of the three presidents rotates and you are governed eight months each.

At the beginning of the year, an investigation was started about a paramilitary organization called “Serbian honor”. It is suspected that it was created as a means of pressure against people who oppose Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik. Reports have come that the organization’s members have been trained by Russians. The aim of the Russians would be to create instability in the region and opposition to NATO and the EU, etc.

The results of the first census since 2013 were published in June 2016. Republica Srpska asked questions both for the method of the census and for the results. In October, local elections were carried out in a climate of increasing nationalist rhetoric. The biggest winner of the election was the Serbian Social Democracy SNSD, which got the mayor post in 32 municipalities out of 143. An increase of 9. The Croatian nationalist conservative HDZ got the mayor post in 19 municipalities; a rise of 7. The Serbian nationalist SDS party got the mayor post in 16; a decline of 16. The Bosnian SDA got the mayor post in 30; a decline of 7.

The federation’s parliament passed amendments to the Criminal Code that made hate crimes punishable. The law works with a broad definition of hate crimes that covers both written and oral communication as well as violence directed at specific national, ethical or religious groups. Sexual orientation fell outside the definition, and therefore the persecution of LGBT people could continue unpunished.

At the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY), former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was convicted in March 2016 of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war. The sentence was 40 years in prison. Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladics was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war in November 2017. The highest responsibility for the massacre in Srebrenica 20 years earlier was thus placed. The message to the hangmen of the world was clear: you will be caught for your crimes in the end. Unless you had NATO officers on their heads when the crime was committed. The Nuremberg Process also dealt only with the losing party’s war crimes. The winning party’s crimes were never punished.

History

In the context of the Yugoslav disintegration, the Bosnia and Herzegovina was the scene from April 1992 of a violent conflict which, which lasted until November 1995, saw the political-institutional projects elaborated by three nationalist parties (one Serbian, one Croatian, one Muslim) in order to make the territories they dominate ethnically homogeneous. The separation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia (6 April 1992, the day of the declaration of independence of the country) was opposed by the Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska Demokratska Stranka, SDS), which intended to safeguard its relations with Belgrade and with other Serbian areas already part of the Yugoslav federation. It also rejected the prospect of Bosnian Serbs becoming a minority in an independent state whose majority ethnic component was Muslim. In the Muslim field, where the desire to preserve the unity of the country had initially appeared dominant, the idea of ​​creating one’s own state, the ‘Muslimanija’, also gradually spread as a necessary step to safeguard and increase religious and cultural peculiarities. of Muslims in Bosnia and Sangiaccato. The latter had been, since 1990, one of the priority objectives of the major political formation of Muslims, the Democratic Action Party (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA), led by the President of the Republic, A. Izetbegović. Finally, as far as Bosnian Croats are concerned, their strongest party – the Croatian Democratic Community (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, HDZ) – was initially an ally of the Muslims in an anti-weed function, but soon entered into open conflict with them, with the aim of consolidating its control over Herzegovina and central Bosnia and achieving unification with the Republic of Croatia. It was therefore not just a war between regular armies or between non-regular troops for the conquest of territories: among the nationalists the desire to make the conquered areas ethnically homogeneous prevailed with the consequence that the violence was directed in an extremely bloody way against the civilian population, non-nationalists, mixed marriages, and any form of dialogue and respect for the country’s multicultural reality. However, a part of the Bosnian population remained faithful, despite the dramatic conditions of the war period, to the prospect of a civil inter-ethnic coexistence. After four years of fighting that involved the devastation of Bosnian cities, infrastructures, the economic and social fabric, about two hundred thousand dead, an incalculable number of injured and disabled and2. 700. 000 between refugees and displaced persons, the peace agreements imposed by the USA, signed at the end of 1995 by S. Milošević, F. Tudjman and Izetbegović (respectively leaders of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), confirmed at least in part, of fact, the situation created by the war, freezing the results of ethnic cleansing carried out on the ground by regular troops and militias.