Bosnia

Bosnia (formally Bosnia and Herzegovina, conventionally abbreviated to BiH - i is Serbo-Croat for 'and' -or B&H) is a Balkan state, part of the former Yugoslavia, whose independence was internationally recognized in 1992. It is sometimes spelled Bosnia and Hercegovina. AWE uses the usual informal Bosnia to refer to the whole country, which has two principal regions, Bosnia to the north and Herzegovina to the south).

• Bosnia is first recorded (in post-classical Latin and Byzantine Greek by the 10th century CE) as a successor state to the Illyrians, who ruled over several kingdoms known to the ancient Greeks. In the sixth and seventh centuries CE, the Illyrian peoples were over-run by the Southern Slavs, although apparently experiencing assimilation rather than genocide. These included the Banate of Bosnia, the Kingdom of Croatia, and the Grand Principality of Serbia, none of which made a huge impression against the Hungarian Kingdom, the Byzantine Empire and, from 1463, the Ottoman Empire. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, sovreignty passed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, after its defeat in the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was instituted. This was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. When the Axis forces conquered Yugoslavia in 1941 and the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), under the fascist Ustaše regime, governed with the intention of exterminating the Serbs, and 'purifying' the Roman Catholic Croatian state.

• This history, particularly the Ottoman and Ustaše periods, lies behind the considerable troubles that Bosnia (and other Balkan states) experienced since the end of Yugoslavia. The three-way split in the population of Bosnia reinforced the bitternesses of the past. The population is divided into Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), who make up about 50% of the total population; Serbs |(about 30% of the total), who are largely Orthodox Christian; and Croats (about 15%), largely Roman Catholic; and about 3% others (2013 estimate, from the CIA World Factbook).

• In October 1991, Serbs formed a Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina later renamed Republika Srpska

"After the Wars of Yugoslav Succession (1991–5), Bosniak became the usual appellation of Bosnian Muslims, and is now largely restricted to this meaning; inhabitants of Bosnia considered without regard to religious and ethnic identification are usually referred to as Bosnians"(OED, 2020).