Brief history of Bosnia. . . .

First i will start with yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was under communist rule under Tito. Bosnia was one of the "states" of Yugoslavia. Under Tito´s leadership Yugoslavia was at peace because he did not give power to the individual states, each region was equal.

However, when Tito died, peace ended. Each region tried to give themselves more power, especially Serbia. At one point, Serbia was overshadowing the rest of Yugoslavia. The leader of Serbia made political decisions that angered Croatia. This fight and pull for power was the basis of the war that occured in the early 90s.
Both Serbia and Croatia has thier own ethnic identity that is seperate from one another.
The basis of the war was the struggle over Bosnia. Bosnia is uniquely occuppied by Serbs, Croats and Muslims. Serbia wanted to take the part of Bosnia that was occupied by Serbs and Croatia wanted to do the same for the area occupied by Croats. However, the leader of Bosnia at the time was a Muslm and did not want to creat seperation within his country even more.
This caused chaos within the country. Although there are parts of Bosnia that is mostly occupied by one ethnic group, there are still minorities. The Muslim minorities was the ethnic cleansing and genociod by the Serbs.

Even today, each of the ethnic groups face prejudice from one another. Many of the students that I talk to try to tolerate each ethinic group, not by trying to reslove it, but just being able to stand each other. Many of the pains and scars are caused by feelings the people had for each other 15 years ago.

This is what I understand of the history and the people as an outsider. Hopefully its accurate. Its very difficult to simplify the complex history of Bosnia, but I hope that I gave it justice.