Bosnia is home to three main ethnic
groups. The Bosniaks, who are mostly
Muslim, the Serbs who are mostly orthodox
Christian and the Croats—they're mostly
Catholic. And don't get confused with
Serbians or Croatians, which is what
people from Serbia and Croatia are
called, although they share history,
tradition and religion with the Serbs
and Croats. Now, Bosnia's ethnic divisions
were a big part of the war that happened
in the 1990s. After Yugoslavia broke up,
there was a power vacuum and all those
ethnic groups started fighting each
other for territory.
In 1992, the UN recognised Bosnia and
Herzegovina's independence, and that
didn't go down well with Serbs.
Various Serb forces attacked, and that
was the start of the Bosnian war.
Fighting went on for three-and-a-half
years.
Atrocities were committed by all sides.
Roughly 100,000 people were
killed, about 80% were
Bosniaks. In the town of Srebrenica,
Serb forces killed more than 8,000
Bosnian Muslims—men and boys. A UN
tribunal later called it a genocide.
The war ended in 1995, with the Dayton
Peace Agreement, a deal brokered by the
US. Europe and Russia were also involved.
It included a new constitution for
Bosnia that tried to balance political
power between the Bosniaks, Serbs and
Croats. But in many ways, that
constitution only reinforced those
ethnic divisions.
So keep that
in mind while we tell you what the
system looks like. There's the state
level that deals with the whole country,
but instead of one president at the top,
they have what's called a tripartite
presidency. It means three people share
the presidency, and it's always one
Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb. There's
also a prime minister and a parliament
at the state level. And this is where
things like foreign policy and the army
are dealt with. At the next level down,
you've got two self-governing entities.
There's Republika Srpska and the
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And
don't confuse the federation with the
name of the country.
And there are more layers of government
below those, but there's another layer we
need to talk about. And that's back at
the top—the high representative.
The high
representative is never a Bosnian.
They're usually from the EU. The current
one's German. So, in some ways, you can
think of Bosnia as a kind of
protectorate. It really depends on the
international community, especially the
US and EU, to keep the peace. The whole
system is completely rooted in the
Dayton agreement. But right now, that
system is looking a bit shaky.
A lot of that has to do with this man,
Milorad Dodik. He's the Serb member of
the tripartite presidency.
And that rhetoric has
risen in the last few months.
Dodik threatened to pull out Republika
Srpska from the main state-level
institutions—the judiciary, the tax
authority and the army—and set up
separate Serb ones.
Serb politicians have also
been refusing to participate in many
state-level institutions. It's paralysing
the system and nothing's really getting
done.
And then in Republika Srpska they went
ahead with celebrations to mark what
they call their National Day, which
Bosnia's top court has ruled illegal.
Now, there are a couple reasons why
things have heated up so much lately.
Last July, the high representative at the
time—remember that's the top foreign
official we talked about earlier—he
brought in a new law to make genocide
denial a crime.
It's something that Bosniaks, in
particular, have been calling for for a
while.
The law doesn't single out any ethnic
group, but many Serbs feel the law
unfairly targets them, and Dodik and his
allies have pushed this idea, too.
There's another big
thing going on that Dodik is unhappy
about. It's a long-running dispute over
public agricultural land within
Republika Srpska. Dodik insists it
belongs to Republika Srpska, but Bosnia's
Constitutional Court declared it belongs
to the state. So Dodik wants that
decision overturned, and he's using it as
a bargaining chip.
Now there's
another dimension to all of this:
elections, which are in October. It means
a lot of politicians are riled up,
including Dodik.
So that paints the
picture of what's going on inside Bosnia.
But what about the role of the US, the EU
and NATO in all of this?
They're the guarantors of the Dayton
agreement.
The US imposed new sanctions on Dodik
for what they called "significant
corruption and destabilising activities".
And the EU has a small peacekeeping
force in Bosnia, currently around 600
soldiers.
But some people think that's just not
nearly enough, and is one of the reasons
things have gone this far.
The big shadow over this whole
crisis is the fear that it could
escalate into another conflict. And
Bosnians are all too familiar with the
worst-case scenario. So even though some
people say Dodik isn't serious about
following through with secession,
just by raising it he also raises the
stakes.
If you found that useful, check out our
recent explainer on what's happening in
Ukraine. And if you have other ideas for
news stories you want explained, let us
know in the comments. See you next week.