Principal religions: Slavic Muslim 40%, Eastern Orthodox 31%, Catholic 15%, Protestant 4%
Rank of affluence among U.N. members: 60/183
History has been exceptionally unkind to this mountainous and heavily forested piece of central Europe. Occupied by successive waves of Hungarians, Turks, and Austrians, forced into an uneasy union with the five other republics comprising communist Yugoslavia, populated by Roman Catholic Serbs, Eastern Orthodox Croats, and the continent's biggest native Islamic population, Bosnia-Herzegovina has long exemplified the unhappy inability of Europe to cohere. Its many peoples have long kept themselves apart, like quarrelsome neighbors whose mutual jealousies are barely balanced by ordinary social courtesies.
After an economic slump and the collapse of Yugoslavia's communist government, these tensions exploded in the 1990s into open warfare. Bosnia, as the new nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is generally known, became the most wretched point in a band of ethnic conflict that stretches from the Adriatic Sea all the way into the former Soviet Union. Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, has become a Muslim enclave. Serbian militia in the surrounding hills have kept it in a state of siege since Bosnia's independence was declared in the spring of 1992. A flurry of threats from Europe and the United States forced an armistice onto Sarajevo in the spring of 1994, but the area seems mired in a conflict with no real end in sight. A majority of Sarajevo's beleaguered residents have indicated they will leave the city as soon as it is physically possible. The future of this shell-shocked capital looks bleak.
