The creativity team, Bosnia y Herzegovina	back
Essay "Respecting diversity" Time-edition: 2002

A Short History of Bosnia-Herzegovina According to some archaeological researches, the first inhabitants settled the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina a few hundred thousand years ago, during the Palaeolithic period. Later on, trading with the Greeks, the different tribes came in touch with the advanced antique culture. The Illyrians, our ancestors, lead many wars with the Romans who appeared in the Balkans at the end of the III century of the old era. The numerous roads, bridges and towns were built; mines were opened for this region was rich with gold, silver, copper, iron etc. The Romans were tolerant towards the various religious believes and traditions of the Illyrians. In the VII century the Slavs appeared, mixed themselves with the former population and slowly spread their influence. However, for the first time Bosnia-Herzegovina was mentioned as a state by Constantine Porfirogenet in the X century. In his written documents, it was said that Bosnia-Herzegovina involved the region of upper and middle flow of the river Bosnia after which this country was named. At the head of the middle age country, the ruler could be a ban , a duke or a king, but feudalists on their lands were not less important. One of the greatest masters in the XI century was Kulin ban. He attained a political stability and economical prosperity mostly based on trading with Dalmatian towns. His charter with Dubrovnik s merchants, by which the free trade was allowed in Bosnia, was the birth document and the first written document in the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Historical facts show that in the next century on the territory of Bosnia existed a specific religious direction which refused the religion of the Roman church and that s why it was called pestilenza bosignana . Its members were persecuted, violently treated and killed with methods of the inquisition. This religion was at some points similar to Islam, which came soon into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Ottoman Empire became very powerful in Europe and represented a great rival to the Christianity. The Roman church was afraid of Islam and its fast broadening so they decided to inspire people to fight against the Ottomans. At the time, Bosnia came under the protection of Pope but was also obligated to pay tribute to the sultan Mehmed II. Even before the occupation, Turkish soldiers moved freely on the grounds of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so they had enough time to get familiar with the people and make them believe that better times are to come. Although Bosnia was left without any help, it was heroically defended during many fights. It must be said that the unhappy circumstances around the Bosnian King s arresting, who became fatal because the Sultan succeeded to make the arrested King to order his army to stop the resistance and to surrender. Again, being under the rule of foreigners Bosnia-Herzegovina had to bear great changes in the tradition, culture, religion and in all other aspects of life. Neither the Turks nor the West sources show any data that the Turk s powers used any kind of violence to persuade the Bosnians to accept the new-coming religion, which is shown in the mass transfer to Islam of the Bosnian population. The Bosnians, especially Moslems, being famous for their fortitude, have fought for Ottomans, which have stayed here for more than 400 years. In 1878 the Bosnians formed an institution called The National Government, which helped them to part from the Ottoman Empire. Every empire comes to its end sooner or later, so Austria-Hungary used the great East crises and got from the European powers, during the Berlin s Congress in 1878, the mandate to occupy and temporarily administrate Bosnia-Herzegovina. This event caused the resignation of the Christians and discontent amongst the Bosniaks, which said that the Sultan is free to give away Istanbul but not Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the time of nearly three months, engaging 300.000 soldiers Austrian-Hungarian army had occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina and defeated this country s 100.000 brave soldiers. The religious communities: the Orthodox, the Catholicism and Islam were put under the control of the Austro-Hungarian law. However, their rule did little to quell the ethnic tensions in the region, and instead it became a centre of nationalists agitation for political independence and cultural autonomy. One of the good things they did is that the percentage of literacy increased to 15%. In June 1914 the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb. That was an act that precipitated World War I. During the war, some Croats and Serbs fought together, hoping to create a kingdom that would unite all the South Slavic peoples. In 1918, following the overthrow of the monarchy of Austria-Hungary at the close of the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina merged and became part of the independent Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under the Serbian monarchy of Alexander I who renamed the kingdom Yugoslavia in 1929. During World War II, the Axis Powers invaded and divided Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs fought against each other during the remainder of the war, but at the end of the war, Josip Broz Tito created a Yugoslav federation with Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of the constituent republics. During the 1960s Tito granted Moslems a distinct ethnic status, in an effort to put them on equal footing with Serbs and Croats. Ethnic tensions worsened following Tito s death in 1980. Eleven years later, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, and many Serbs throughout the remaining republics proclaimed their allegiance to Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. In Bosnia-Herzegovina they formed Serbian Autonomous Regions and held a referendum for Serbs on whether they should remain part of Yugoslavia. While nearly all participants in the referendum voted to remain with Yugoslavia, voters in a similar referendum in March 1992, open to all ethnic groups (but boycotted by most Serbs), voted to secede. That same month, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence and had to pay for it. Although the United Nations recognized us as an independent country, Slobodan Milosevic decided to keep us as a part of Yugoslavia and used force and violence as his main instrument to achieve his plans which contained the idea of making all Moslems from this territory disappear. In early April began the aggression. The world put an embargo on importing of all kinds of weapons, so we were not able to defend ourselves properly. The National Army of Yugoslavia with the collaboration of Bosnian Serbs and later with the help of the Croatian troops are responsible for mass banishing of Bosniaks and many other war crimes. In May 1993 a conflict between Croats and Muslims in central Bosnia ended in March 1994, when the two groups agreed to create a joint federation to battle the Serbs. A cease-fire between Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-Croat federation was declared from January to April of 1995, but sporadic fighting continued to break out. For four years the world has ignored the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, although pictures and records of daily terror were well known to them. They found it much easier just to watch the genocide in which 200.000 people (17.000 of them were children) were killed and do nothing. Between 50.000 - 60.000 people were captured and tortured in death-camps every day, thousands of women were raped and many thousands of people are left as invalids, not to mention a million and a half of refugees which were forced to leave their homes. UN-troops were sent to observe the situation, to set up the peace but unfortunately they found themselves powerless and that they couldn t help us. In places, which were proclaimed as a safe area by the UN Security Council and in the presence of the UN-soldiers were publicly committed the most brutal and perfidious genocides. Srebrenica, one of these safe areas , became a suffering paradigm of Bosnia and the Bosniaks. In the first half of July 1995, the aggressor committed a horrible genocide massacre against all Srebrenica s population as well as thousands of Bosniak refugees from other parts of lands under Drina River. They were expelled, arrested or killed by the Serb fascist and among other things, the mass graves bare witness of that. Helpless cries of survived Srebrenica s citizens looking for more than 10.000 missing persons: children, parents, brothers, husbands and other close relatives, go in vain. Today, the Serbs try to make the number of victims less and don t find themselves guilty. They want to make the world believe that the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not an aggression, but a civil war what is absurd. The number of the victims in Srebrenica was minimized to 2.000, and who knows - maybe there will be just a few hundred till next year?! Among numerous massacres in Sarajevo, the one that happened on the Markale market was the worst. About 200 innocent people who wanted to buy some food were killed or injured by chetniks grenades. And again, the world did not react. During the war, cultural, religious, industrial and many other institutions were totally destroyed. Churches, cathedrals, synagogues and more than 1.200 objects of the Islamic architecture, mostly mosques were demolished. Finally, following lengthy negotiations, a comprehensive agreement was initiated on November 21, 1995 near Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton accord was intended to reconstruct the country as a single state consisting of two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (also known as the Muslim-Croat federation), which would receive 51 percent of the territory, and the Serb Republic, which would receive 49 percent. Sarajevo was to be established as a unified city under the control of the central government. According to the terms of the Dayton peace accord, the separate Croatian state of Herzeg-Bosnia was supposed to disappear; however, in the months following the signing, it was still effectively in existence. Serbian and Croatian nationalists resisted the integration of ethnically divided communities. In 1996 the United Nations (UN) international war crimes tribunal, established in 1993 in Hague, Netherlands, to indict, try and sentence suspects accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against the humanity in the former Yugoslavia, stepped up its activities. Now living in peace we have to face the consequences of the war. In the last six years steps to the prosperity were taken, but that is not enough because there are still too many refugees who can not return to their destroyed homes and who can not find work, in fact 40% of the population is unemployed. Basic human rights are not respected, and one of these is that in some areas the minor ethnic groups are violently detained from getting back home. There is a great danger of mines. Millions of them are unexploded, lying hidden in and on the ground. One more problem is the missing people. Thousands of mothers and wives are looking for their children, husbands, fathers or other relatives. The process of the identification is additionally slowed down, because it takes much time to find the mass graves, to ensure the money, to find the equipment and experts who can work it out properly. Poverty and diseases caused by chemical substances that were used in he war are just a few more of the endless problems this country has to cope with. The world did not stop the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina on time, but the powerful countries could at least do something to prevent the wars in other parts of the world now. Not an hour of wayfaring from here, there is a vijalet lagging behind, which you could hardly even imagine. There, next to you, not far away from this Byzantine splendour and richness that is being compiled from the whole empire, your own brothers are living like beggars. And we are nobody s, always on some boundary, always someone s dowry. Then, is it any wonder that we are poor? We have been recognizing and looking for each other for centuries, soon we will not even know who we are, we are already forgetting that we do want something, others are doing us a favour by letting us go under their flags because we don t have our own one, they are decoying us if we are needed and dashing us away after we have served them off; the saddest vilajet on the world, the most unhappy people on the world, we are losing our face but can t assimilate with others, cut off and unaccepted, strange to everyone, to those whose stock we are and to those who don t accept us into their stock. We are living at the boundary of worlds, at the boundary of folks, exposed to everyone s impact, always guilty to someone. The waves of history are shattered on us like on a cliff. The power has bored us, and we have turned the misery into a virtue: we have become noble out of spite. You are regardless out of the fury. Who is then lagging behind? Dervish and the Death, Mehmed Mesa Selimovic (This is our translation of the Mesa Selimovic s quote about Bosniaks.) The Creativity Team B&H Bibliography - Bosnia-Herzegovina from the oldest times till the end of the Second World War, Bosanski kulturni centar, 1998 - Documents of Crimes Committed in Srebrenica, Institute for the research of crimes against humanity and international law, Sarajevo, Council of Bosniak intellectuals Sarajevo, Museum of genocide Sarajevo, 1997 - Encarta. 98 Desk Encyclopedia ) & 1996-97 Microsoft Corporation