Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina
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Serbs are one of the three constitutive nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina, predominantly concentrated in the Republika Srpska, although many also live in the other entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are frequently referred to as Bosnian Serbs in English, regardless of whether they are from the Bosnia or Herzegovina region.
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[edit] Population
There are an estimated 1,479,930 Serbs in BiH, where they form about 37.1%[1] of the total population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The vast majority live on the territory of the Republika Srpska, and West Bosnia and Una-Sana cantons of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbs are the most territorialy widespread nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The majority of Bosnian Serbs are adherents of the Serbian Orthodox Church, while some are atheists.
[edit] Culture
[edit] Prominent individuals
A selection of prominent Serbs from Bosnia include Ottoman official Mehmed-pasha Sokolović or the writers Jovan Dučić, Petar Kočić, Branko Ćopić, Meša Selimović, Aleksa Šantić and Skender Kulenović, the painter Kosta Hakman, the historian Vladimir Ćorović, musicians Zdravko Čolić, Goran Bregović, Nenad Janković and Duško Trifunović and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. The guslar (gusle player) Filip Višnjić was born in Ugljevik. Luka Vukalović raised an uprising to free Bosnia of Ottoman rule. Democrat of the 1990s Yugoslavia, Zoran Đinđić was born in Bosnia, as was the current President of Serbia, Boris Tadić. Mladen Sekulović a. k a. Karl Malden an Oscar-winning American actor. Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in protest of the Austro-Hungarian annexasion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby initialing World War I. Miraš Dedeić is the current self-proclaimed Archbishop of Montenegro and the Littoral and Head of the uncannonical Montenegrin Orthodox Church.
The Montenegrin House of Njegoš former ruling dynasty are from Herzegovina and Bosnia by origin. The Bosniak national hero Husein Gradaščević was also considered a Serbian national hero.[1]
[edit] Name
The Serbs are one of the rare Slavic nations who kept their old names that they had in the old Slavonic motherland. Beside the Serbs, only the Croats kept their old name. The other Slavic nations got their names after the migration from the old Slavonic motherland.
According to some historians and slavists, like Serbian historian and linguist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Slovak historian and slavist Pavel Jozef Šafárik and Czech slavist Josef Dobrovský, all the Slavs in the beginning called themselves the Serbs.
[edit] History
[edit] Medieval
Serbs settled the region of Bosnia in the first half of the 7th century{fact}. They were led by the Unknown Archont who Byzantine Emperor Heraclius gave Bosnia as one of the lands to settle. Bosnia had two cities, Kotor and Desnik. Bosnia was ruled by Bans and in 753 formed a territorial union with the Principality of Rascia known as Surbia (nativly called Zagorje) ruled by Grand Princes. In 822, Prince Liudevit TransSavian of Pannonia fled to Srb in western Bosnia to the Serbian ruler from the Frankish forces and their allies. Prince Liudevit was accepted well by the Lord, but Liudevit eventually tricked him, killing him and talking his demesne for himself. The western regions were incorporated into the secular Croatian state.
Bosnia's Serbs were baptised into Christianity by Byzantine missionary of the actions of Cyril and Methodus in the 800s.
The Bosnian Chiefs abandoned the War-of-the-succession-torn Kingdom of Croatia and joined the Serbian Realm of Prince Časlav of Klonimir of the House of Vlastimir up to 931. By the end of the 948 Croatian struggles for the throne, he included all the territories to the river of Vrbas to the west and Sava to the north while western and northern Bosnia remained in the Kingdom of Croatia. The Drina area became the heart of his state. The Hungarian Kingdom had pretensions to conquer Bosnia, so Ceslav had to fend-off a Hungarian invasion in 955. Prince Ceslav saved Bosnia, but was drowned by the Hungarian forces in the river of Sava in norther Bosnia in 960.
The Serbian rule in in eastern and central Bosnia crumbled after Ceslav's fall. It would take King Constantine Bodin of Doclea and Dalmatia's conquest of Bosnia against the Byzantines in 1082-1085 to restore it. There he implaced a related courtier of his, Stefan as Ban, whose heirs continued to rule Bosnia. Bosnia became less independent of Duklja over the ages, only forming an alliance with King Kočapar against Rascia in an attempt to reunite all former Serbian lands.
[edit] Modern
- see also: History of Republika Srpska
Between 1945 and 1948, following World War II, around 70,000 Serbs migrated from the People's Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Vojvodina, prior to the expulsions of Germans. Serbs were the larger of the two constitutive nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina (later of three, since Muslims by nationality gained constitutive status in 1968). In the first population census conducted in the People's Republic of Bosnia in 1948, there were 1,136,116 Serbs or a total of 44.3% of BiH's population. In 1953, there were 1,264,372 Serbs in BiH, 44.4% of the total population. According to the 1961 population census, there where 1,406,057 Serbs, accounting for 42.9% of total population of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Serbs lost their plurlity as the largest single ethnic group of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1970s and switched places with Bosnian Muslims dropping to second place. According to the 1971 population census, there were 1,393,148 Serbs in BiH or 37.2% of the population. In 1981, there were 1,320,644 Serbs in BiH or 32% of the total population. In that year, Serbs formed a majority on 27,255.2 square kilometres or 53.3% of the total territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They lived in 34.4% of the total housing of BiH. There was a Serb majority in 2,439 settlements or 41.4% of the total settlements of BiH and Serbs owned a total of 51.4% of the land of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1991, there were 1,369,258 Serbs in BiH or 31.4% of the total populace. It is unknown how many of those who declared themselves as Yugoslavs were ethnic Serbs, but it is believed that altogether they made up 38% of BiH's population.
The Serb and Croat political leaderships accused the certrain elements within the government of BiH of being pro-Islamic and of attempting to create a Unitary Islamic Bosnia in the 1990s. The Serbs boycotted the 1992 referendum for independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Although it succeeded, in the opion of the Serb political leadership the result was unconstitutional since the electoral threshold had not been reached{fact}. The Government of BiH declared independence anyway - which was not accepted by the federal government of Yugoslavia, and what followed was the forming of the Serbian Autonomous Area of the Bosnian Frontier in the western Bosnian Frontier region of Bosnia and Herzegovina with its capital in Banja Luka, which was not recognised by the central government. SAO Bosnian Frontier made attempts to unite with the Autonomous Region of the Serbian Frontier in Croatia. The Serb political leadership martialled its own force assisted by the Yugoslav People's Army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and declared independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina in late 1992. BiH's Muslim and Croat dominated government did not recognize the new Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose president was Radovan Karadžić seated in Banja Luka.[citation needed] The Serb side accepted the proposed ethnic cantonization of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan), as did the Muslim and Croat sides in Lisbon in 1992, in the hope that war would not break out. The Muslim political leadership under President Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia and Herzegovina subsequently broke the agreement under pressure from the U.S. upon the delegations' returning to BiH and the Bosnian War began{fact}.
At the beginning of the war, Serbs comprised 31.4% of the total population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serb side primarily fought the Muslim side, but later also the Croatian side prior to the Muslims' union with the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. What followed was the removal of 70,000 non-Serbs (Croats and Bosnian Muslims) from the Bosnian Frontier region. The Serb Republic was formed on around 70% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's soil, allied with the pro-Yugoslav Muslims of the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia under Fikret Abdić. During the entire length of war, the Army of the Serb Republic maintained the Siege of Sarajevo, in order to tie down the Bosnian Muslim forces and resources. It maintained close ties with the Republic of the Serb Frontier and received volunteers and supplies from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the war. The Serb Republic received a large number of Serb refugees from other Yugoslav hotzones, particularly Sarajevo, Herzeg-Bosnia and Croatia. In 1993, the Owen-Stoltenberg peace treaty was suggested that would give 52% of BiH to the Serb side. It was refused by the Bosnian Muslim side. In 1994, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia imposed sanctions after the National Assembly of the Serb Republic refused the Vance-Owen peace plan. In 1995, Operation Storm, eliminated the Republic of the Serb Frontier. The Croatian Army continued the offensive into the Serb Republic under General Ante Gotovina (currently on trial for war crimes at the ICTY). 250,000 Serbs fled to the Serb Republic from Croatia, and the Serb side continued the full retreat of Serbs from the Una river to the Sana river. The Croatian Army, supported by the forces of the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina struck closer to the Bosnian Serb capital, Banja Luka.
The fiercest fighting of the war was in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Serb forces fought the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, seizing much territory, except for the enclave of Goražde and committing ethnic cleansing of the regions which left them almost entirely Serb-populated.[citation needed] The Army of the Serb Republic opened numerous internment camps for prisoners during the war. In 1995, the Serb troops occupied the UN safe area of Srebrenica and conducted the Srebrenica massacre, executing 5,000 - 8,000 male Bosnian Muslims. The war was halted with the Dayton Agreement which recognised the Republika Srpska comprising 49% of the soil of BiH as one of the two territorial entities of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serb side suffered a total 30,700 victims - 16,700 civilians and 14,000 military personnel, according to the Demographic Unit at the ICTY. The exact number is disputed, mostly by Bosniaks. It is generally agreed that th Bosnian War claimed the lives of about 100,000 people - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. See: Casulties of the Bosnian War
Many Serbs emigrated from BiH because of the war, although this was balanced to an extent by the influx of around 150,000 Serb refugees from Croatia who settled permanently in BiH. Numerous members of the Serb military and political leadership were accused by the ICTY and faced trials in The Hague. Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić continue to evade capture as of June 2006.
[edit] Subgroups
The subgroups of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina are commonly based on regional affiliation. Some of the major subgroups of them include: Frontiersmen (Krajišniks), Semberians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians
[edit] Herzegovinan clans
Some of Bosnia and Herzegovina's Serbs, mostly living in Herzegovina are organised in clans. The Herzegovinian clans are:
- Grahovo
- Rudine
- Bijele Nikšićke Rudine
- Oputne Rudine
- Bilećke Rudine
- Banjani
- Lukovo
- Nikšićka Župa
- Gornje Polje
- Drobnjak
- Uskoci
- Jezera
- Korito
- Šaranci
- Piva
- Planina
- Župa
- Golija
- Gacko
- Zupci
[edit] See also
- Serbs
- Serbophobia
- List of Serbs
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Republika Srpska
[edit] References
- ^ CIA World Factbook: Population [of Bosnia and Herzegovina]: 4,498,976 (July 2006 est.) ... Ethnic groups: Bosniak 48%, Serb 37.1%, Croat 14.3%, other 0.6% (2000)
Categories: Articles lacking sources from October 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with unsourced statements | Ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina | Ethnic groups in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina | Ethnic groups in Republika Srpska | Serbian people | History of the Serbs
