This is Popular Front, a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to journalist Mitchell Protharo

about the prospect of conflict reigniting in the Balkan region of Bosnia Herzegovna.

There was extreme violence there in the 90s during the Balkan Wars and now it's looking

like things are getting very tense again. Mitchell is going to explain it to us.

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Co. slash support. There's been what some people are saying the most heightened tensions in Bosnia since the 90s

one of the kind of Serbian representatives wants to break away

You've been there you've been reporting Tell us what's going on. Is this as tense as everybody is saying?

Like, what's happening?

Yeah, it's a situation right now in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and it gets complicated describing all of its different parts which is the problem but the overall problem in post-Dadeen-Pazmia the peace treaty that they came up with in the 90s that ended the Civil War, there's really great

concern that it's falling apart. It was one of those I think you know and

there's probably better diplomatic people to explain it but what happened during the Civil War was essentially as Yugoslavia was breaking up the most

multi-ethnic of the former Ugo states was Bosnia which you know mix of Muslim Catholic and Orthodox

Serbs you know everybody kind of went at it for territory and you know people know that

history but there was like genocide it was really brutal so I think in 95 they just wanted to sort of stop it and give everybody a government of their own in an incredibly small place and that worked for a while but you know what we're looking at now is it's a

country of four million people it's got one federal government on top of it that's

also got three parts the Muslims the

kurats and the Serbs have their sections and then when you get inside it

everything's also got three sections so the the whole place basically sort of rotted in a little bit of a level of sectarian

corruption where the only real benefits anybody had were to play off the different sectarian sides against each other and that stopped the war initially but it didn't really fix the overall problems.

And that's really coming to a head. We're seeing a lot of very cynical politicians

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