Independence, Siege and the Road to Dayton

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Bosnian War began after Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1992 declaration of independence from the disintegrating Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was fought chiefly among the Bosnian government's forces, formally multi-ethnic but chiefly Bosniak led, the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska, backed by Serbia-dominated rump Yugoslavia, and Bosnian Croat forces backed by Croatia; the Bosnian Croat Croatian Defence Council fought a separate war against the Bosnian government from 1993 to 1994, before the United States brokered Washington Agreement realigned it against the Bosnian Serbs. The war included the more than three year siege of Sarajevo.

It ended with the November 1995 Dayton Agreement, initialed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and signed in Paris that December, which partitioned Bosnia and Herzegovina into two largely ethnically defined entities, the Bosniak-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska, joined under a weak central government. The agreement ended the fighting, but the wartime front lines it fixed as an internal political boundary still structure the country's politics today.