Country: Bosnia

Group: Bosnian

Date Finalized: 4/20/2021

Team:  Ethan Pelland (lead),Ann Thomas, Colleen Clauss, Therin Carr

There is strong evidence that Bosnian Muslims have been forced away from their county. Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, are a national ethnic group that comprises about half of Bosnia’s population, according to a 2013 estimate (CIA, 2021). The dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 preceded extreme regional conflict, which led to the Bosnian War (1992-1995) (Banka, 2020). Bosnian Muslim civilians were the targets of lethal violence and ethnocide by both Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb extremists in an attempt to forcibly displace them from territories bordering the new Serbian and Croation Republics (MRG, 2015).

 Many Bosnian Muslims that resided in these disputed territories were forced away to concentration camps where they were tortured, raped, and murdered (HMH, n.d.). The siege of Sarajevo lasted for three and a half years. Over the course of the siege Bosnian Muslims fled to areas held by the Bosnian Government forces (Christou, 2020). During the war multiple massacres took place, most notably the killing of 8000 men and boys in Srebrenica by Serbian Military forces.   The war drove more than two million people from their homes, and created over a million refugees and a million internally displaced persons (IDMC, 2014). Bosnia was split into two entities in the 1995 end-of-war peace agreement, the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (MRG, n.d.). In 1999, transfer of territories between the two entities internally displaced hundreds of thousands of people (IDPP, 2004). It is unclear what proportion of these displaced people were Bosniak alone. An estimated 580,000 internally displaced persons had returned to their homes in 2014, but many moved in the face of psychological trauma and continued discrimination (IDMC, 2014; MRG, 2015). More than 100,000 people remain internally displaced, according to a 2014 report by the IDMC, and increasing natural hazards of floods and droughts displace more people, some losing the homes they just returned to, every year (IDMC, 2014). There is extremely strong evidence that the displacement of Bosnian Muslims occurred, even if exact figures are difficult to come by. The data quality is rated at 3.

Sources