RELIGION: Muslims 50.7%, Serbian Orthodox 30.7%, Catholics 15.2%, Others/Uninformed 3.4%
COIN: marka
CURRENCY CODE: BAM
ENGLISH NAME: Bosnia and Herzegovina
INDEPENDENCE: 03/01/1992
POPULATION COMPOSITION: Bosnians 50.1%, Serbs 30.8%, Croats 15.4%, others/not 3.7%
GDP PER residents: 4808 USD (2015)
LIFE EXPECTANCY: men 75 years, women 79.7 years (2015)
INDEX OF LIVING CONDITIONS, HDI: 0.733
INDEX OF LIVING CONDITIONS, POSITION: 85
INTERNET DOMAIN NAME: .ba
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of the Balkans. The formal demarcation of the republic follows the old boundaries of the time as a state of Yugoslavia. The country is divided into two ethnically based parts: the Bosnian-Croatian Federation (51% of the country) and the Serbian Republika Srpska (49% of the country). As a result of the 1992-95 civil war, the country received extensive foreign aid to rebuild its economy, politics and administration.
AbbreviationFinder.org: Find two-letter abbreviation for each independent country and territory, such as BA which stands for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – Constitution
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is from 1995. Formally, the central government in Sarajevo is in power, but in reality the three states with their own parliaments and political leaders have great opportunities to conduct foreign and economic policy.
Federally, the executive power lies with a presidential council with three members representing resp. the Bosniaks, the Croats and the Serbs. The members are elected by direct election every four years, and the one who gets the most votes becomes chairman in the first instance. After eight months, the chairman is replaced by a rotation system.
The Federal Parliament consists of two chambers: Predstavnićki Dom (“House of Representatives”) and Dom Naroda (“House of the People”). The first consists of 42 members elected for four years in direct elections divided by 14 to each of the three ethnic units. This chamber must approve the Council of Ministers, which is appointed by the Presidential Council. The President of the Council of Ministers appoints ministers to be approved by Predstavnićki Dom. The second chamber consists of 15 members with five from each of the three ethnic groups. They are elected by the parliaments of the Bosnian Croat Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. Check youremailverifier for Bosnia and Herzegovina social condition facts.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – military
The armed forces are (2006) divided into two parts, which after 2003, however, are subject to a common Ministry of Defense and a small common defense staff. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which includes the Muslim and Croatian populations, has a regular force of 8,000, trains 8,400 conscripts and has a reserve of 40,000. The regular strength of the Republic of Srpska is 4,000, it trains 4,200 conscripts and has a reserve of 20,000. Ie. that each ethnic group has a third of the strength. The equipment is primarily older ex-Yugoslav. The federation has a mixed force of transport helicopters, while Republik Srpska also has a dozen light fighter jets.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – literature
Although the residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina have spoken and written the same language, the ethnic composition makes it difficult to speak of a Bosnian literature as an organic whole with a continuous development. Before independence in 1991, people were not talking about Bosnian literature either, but about literature in Bosnia.
The Turkish conquest of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1463 led to a sharp Islamization of the area; the population was divided into two groups, a Muslim, privileged upper class and a Christian lower class (rayah) without rights.
The first developed its special oriental-inspired culture; the authors wrote for a time in Turkish, Arabic and Persian and later switched to writing their religious or secular poems in the vernacular (Serbo-Croatian), but with Arabic characters. This literature, which in both expression and content was distinctly oriental, is called alhamijado.
The Christian Serbs and Croats had no real opportunity to develop a continuous literature. When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of them found refuge in Bosnia, where with their special culture they contributed to the complicated “cultural mosaic” of this extreme Turkish province.
With the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, conditions changed completely. Sarajevo did not seem attractive to the Serbian and Croatian students and intellectuals. Instead, they oriented themselves either towards Serbia or towards the Habsburg monarchy, and stayed, for example, in connection with education, shorter or longer in Budapest, Vienna, Belgrade or Zagreb. For a long time, therefore, there was no cultural center in Bosnia-Herzegovina itself.
The literary journals were for the first many years the most important mouthpieces of Bosnian poets and writers, and at the same time became an opening to European currents. The most important periodicals, Bosanska vila (The Bosnian Fairy, 1885-1914), Zora (Dawn, 1896-1901), Nada (Hope, 1895-1903) and Behar (The Flower, 1900-10), mixed national agitation with delayed European romanticism and memories of folk poetry.
The magazine Zora brought together a number of Serbian, Croatian and Muslim poets from Bosnia-Herzegovina: Aleksa Šantić (1868-1924), Svetozar Ćorović (1875-1919), Jovan Dučić, Osman Djikić (1879-1912), Avdo Karabegović 1900). At the same time, Serbian and Croatian writers from Serbia and Croatia, such as Jovan Zmaj Jovanović (1833-1904), Laza Kostić (1841-1910), Janko Veselinović (1862-1905), Stevan Sremac (1855-1906), Sima Matavulj, (1852 -1908) Radoje Domanović (1873-1908) and Ivo Ćipiko (1869-1923), diligent contributors, thus acting as a kind of teacher for the younger Bosnian writers.
The period up to and after World War I was a fruitful time for literature in Bosnia, with authors such as Edhem Mulabdić (1862-1954), Petar Kočić (1877-1916), Abdurezak Hifzi (1886-1972), Isak Samokovlija (1889- 1955), Hamza Humo (1895-1970) and Borivoje Jeftić (1894-1959), although significant authors such as Ivo Andrić, Antun Branko Šimić (1898-1925), Mesa Selimović, Skender Kulenović (1910-78), Branko Copić (1915-1984) et al. had left Bosnia and had settled in Belgrade or Zagreb as Serbian and Croatian writers, respectively.
With the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) after World War I, Bosnia-Herzegovina became part of this new state, recognizing only the three state-bearing nations and their literatures.
The Muslim writers in many cases chose to join the Serbian or Croatian literature. With a number of collections of poems, primarily The Sleeping Stone (1966), Mak Dizdar (1917-71) positioned himself as the most important Bosnian poet of the post-war period.
After 1991
Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 and the formation of the independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the literature has been defined as consisting of three literatures: Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian; all writers born in Bosnia and Herzegovina are considered Bosnian writers, even if they choose to join the Croatian literature as Hasan Kikić (1905-1942) or the Serbian as Meša Selimović or as Ivo Andrić, first the Croatian and then the Serbian.
The civil war and the bombing of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs have, of course, left strong traces in the literature. The war became the first major theme of Bosnian literature, and in besieged Sarajevo, literature became a rallying point and a symbol of the will to survive.
One of the first witness of the war was the 13-year-old Zlata Filipovic (b. 1980) diary Zlatas diary (1993, da. 1994) who quietly described the fear in the besieged Sarajevo. The lyricist Ferida Duraković’s (b. 1957) collection of poems The Heart of Darkness (1994) is also about the war that destroyed her Sarajevo, while Nenad Veličković (b. 1962) ironically describes daily life during the bombings. Ozren Kebo (b. 1959) has written a Sarajevo chronicle in her Welcome to Hell: Sarajevo, User Manual.
As a result of the war, several writers left Bosnia-Herzegovina and settled abroad. Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964) has from his new home in Chicago written the short story collection A Question of Bruno (1995, da. A Question of Bruno, 2002) and later the novel Nowhere Man (2002, da. 2004), both in English.
The playwright and author Dževad Karahasan (b. 1953) lives in Germany today and describes in the novel Diary of a Relocation (1994) the destruction of Sarajevo and the human solidarity that arises under inhuman conditions.
Dario Džamonja (1955-2001) returned to Sarajevo after five years in the United States and wrote a series of short stories about Sarajevo’s turbulent history.
