Bosnia and Herzegovina

The republic with no majority people, and therefore the one the war was worst in. Bosnia had been a medieval kingdom with its own church before the Ottoman conquest of 1463, and four centuries of Ottoman rule produced a large Slavic Muslim population alongside Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats - the same language, three religions, intermixed village by village rather than divided by any line that could be drawn. Austria-Hungary occupied it in 1878 and annexed it in 1908; Sarajevo is where Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914. Tito's federation recognised Muslims as a constituent nation in 1968. When Yugoslavia broke up there was no arrangement that satisfied everyone, and the war from 1992 to 1995 was fought explicitly to create ethnically uniform territory: Sarajevo was besieged for nearly four years, longer than any capital in modern warfare, and Srebrenica, a declared UN safe area, saw around eight thousand men and boys murdered in July 1995, ruled a genocide by two international courts. The Dayton Agreement stopped the fighting by freezing the ethnic division into a constitution of two entities and three presidents. That structure has proved almost impossible to reform. Mostar's bridge, destroyed in 1993, was rebuilt in 2004. Sarajevo and Banja Luka are the two entity capitals. The country is almost landlocked, with about twenty kilometres of coast at Neum. Its three official languages are effectively the same language under three names. Stecci, medieval carved tombstones, are found across the country. The high representative appointed under Dayton still holds override powers.

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