Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovene: Jugoslavija, Југославија) was a country in Southeast Europe during most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (itself formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the formerly independent Kingdom of Serbia. The Serbian royal House of Karađorđević became the Yugoslav royal dynasty. Yugoslavia gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The country was named after the South Slavic peoples and constituted their first union, following centuries in which the territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929, it was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944, the king recognised it as the legitimate government, but in November 1945 the monarchy was abolished. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as president until his death in 1980. In 1963, the country was renamed again as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina (ⁱ/ˈbɒzniə ənd ˌhɛərtsəɡoʊˈviːnə, -ˌhɜːrt-, -ɡə-/ or /ˌhɜːrtsəˈɡɒvᵻnə/;Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Latin script: Bosna i Hercegovina, Bosnian and Serbian Cyrillic script: Боснa и Херцеговина; pronounced [bôsna i xěrt͡seɡoʋina]), sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or Bosnia & Herzegovina, abbreviated BiH or B&H, and in short often known informally as Bosnia, is a country in Southeastern Europe located on the Balkan Peninsula. Sarajevo is the capital and largest city. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west, and south; Serbia to the east; Montenegro to the southeast; and the Adriatic Sea to the south, with a coastline about 20 kilometres (12 miles) long surrounding the city of Neum. In the central and eastern interior of the country the geography is mountainous, in the northwest it is moderately hilly, and the northeast is predominantly flatland. The inland is a geographically larger region and has a moderate continental climate, bookended by hot summers and cold and snowy winters. The southern tip of the country has a Mediterranean climate and plain topography.

Republika Srpska

The Republika Srpska (Serbian Cyrillic: Република Српскa, pronounced [repǔblika sr̩̂pskaː]) is an administrative entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is one of two administrative entities, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The de jure capital of Republika Srpska is Sarajevo, the de facto capital is Banja Luka.

Name

In the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages, Republika Srpska means "Serb Republic". The second word is a nominalized adjective derived by adding the suffix -ska to srb-, the root of the noun Srbin, meaning Serb. The -ps- sequence rather than -bs- is a result of voicing assimilation. Although the name Republika Srpska is sometimes glossed as Serb Republic or Bosnian Serb Republic (Serbian: Republika Bosanskih Srba / Република Босанских Срба), and the government of Republika Srpska uses the semi-Anglicized term Republic of Srpska in English translations of official documents, western news sources such as the BBC,The New York Times, and The Guardian generally refer to the entity as the Republika Srpska.

Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian: Republika Bosna i Hercegovina, Република Босна и Херцеговина) was the direct legal predecessor to the modern-day state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina existed legally until co-signing the Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement, containing the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 14 December 1995, but official documents reveal that the state existed up until the end of 1997 when the implementation of the Dayton Agreement was finished and only then it fully came into effect. Most of this period is taken up by the Bosnian War, in which each of the two other main ethnicities of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats) established their own entities (Republika Srpska and Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia respectively), which left the republic representative primarily of its Bosniak population. By the Washington Agreement of 1994, however, Bosniaks were joined by ethnic Bosnian Croats in support for the Republic by the formation of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a sub-state joint entity. In 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords joined the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Serb entity, the Republika Srpska into the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Death of Yugoslavia

The Death of Yugoslavia is a BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995, and is also the name of a BBC book by Allan Little and Laura Silber that accompanies the series. It covers the collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars and final peace accords. It uses a combination of archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović, as well as members of the International political community, who were active in the various peace initiatives.

The series was awarded a BAFTA award in 1996 for Best Factual Series. It also won the 1995 Peabody Award. Interviews for the series have been used by ICTY in war crimes prosecutions.

All the papers relating to the documentary series, including full transcripts of the interviews, are lodged at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, University of London.

During the trial of Slobodan Milošević before the ICTY, Judge Bonomy referred to "the tendentious nature of much of the commentary".