Where peace feels like a truce

What factors hold back the new and smaller Yugoslavia, aka Bosnia, experiment involving three different ethnic groups which must try to live in the same space.

Bosnia-Herzegovina has always been considered a miniature Yugoslavia; the centre (by no means only geographically) of a socialist federation that in Josip Broz Tito’s day, as the old saying goes, encompassed six states, five nations, four languages, three religions and two alphabets. It is still inhabited by three peoples: Bosniak Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.These communities have been at war with each other on and off throughout the 20th century. But they have also been living together for over half a millennium, at times side by side. Consider the capital, Sarajevo, nicknamed the “European Jerusalem” because it hosts a large mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral and a synagogue located within a few hundred metres of each other.

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