Les musulmans de Bosnie-Herzégovine, mise en place d'une guerre civile

Abstract

The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina - the making of a civil war. From the spring of 1992 to the fall of 1995, a heinous civil war ravaged Bosnia-Herzegovina. Three autochthonous populations (approximately 44 % Muslim, 33 % orthodox Serbe and 18 % Catholic Croat at the start of the war), divided by their ethnie and/or religious origins, massacred each other under the guidance of their respective «extremists », who managed to drag into this unspeakable slaughter (against a backdrop of 47 years of Communist Party dictatorship, an economically bankrupt State and a devastated civil society) not only yesterday's and the day before's apparently peaceful citizens of each of the three groups, but sometimes those born of mixed marriages, not to mention atheists, laymen and a-religious people of every stripe. How did it corne to this? What destructuring elements produced this catastrophe? What were the warning signs, the remote and proximate causes ? As it is beyond the capacity of this article to detail the history of the entire population of this region, it will merely present an overview of the history of the Muslim community of Bosnia-Herzegovina (and of the ideas used by a portion of the local Muslims to manufacture, as do all human groups, its own mythology), as an aid to the reader who does not know Serbo-Croatian and therefore is unfamiliar with the basic sources and texts.