This study focuses on the return of refugees and internally displaced persons after the end of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the point of view of the international community. In the first part of the paper the attitude of key players is characterised, i. e. of the western powers and their part in an exceptionally targeted project of the peace-building process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The second part is focused on analysisng the evolution of repatriation strategies of the international community, their modifications as a consequence of a low success rate of the return of refugees and search for new approaches and instruments to stimulate the feeble repatriation process.
The central problem of the study is the last phase of the forced ethnic homogenization of Bosna and Herzegovina, unintentionally cased by the peace accord, concluded on the American base in Dayton in the year 1995. On the basis of the border agreements the competing parties were forced to hand over some lands they were so far controlling to the hands of the enemy. This caused another wave of involuntary mass migrations. The most controversial transfer of territory has been the handing over of five settlements of Sarajevo with mostly Serbian inhabitants to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first three months of the year 1996. The circumstances of how exactly the majority of the Serbians were forced to leave their homes has so far not been fully clarified.
This contribution is dedicated to the insufficiently researched phenomenon of what are called “national keys”: principles the Yugoslav communists applied in their efforts at rigorously promoting a policy of brotherhood and unity. The goal of this text is to analyze the deepening contrast in the approaches to solving the league-wide crisis between the Bosnian communists. This group – even at in the twilight days of Tito’s Yugoslavia – were overseeing the policy of “brotherhood and unity” that had been in effect until that time, while representatives of the political parties that had newly formed in the 1990s were drawing on a nationalist principle based along ethnic-confessional lines. The essay analyzes both, across a backdrop of the culminating political and economic difficulties in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina in the 1980s. This work focuses on analysis of the modifying central premises for the peaceful existence of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina; i.e., on the transformation in understanding and utilization of the national key and on the essential consensus in constitutional questions between the three Bosnian-Herzegovinian ethnic groups in the era of socialism and in the period after the end of the Bosnian war (the second half of the 1990s).
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.