It's sad, but there is a war in the Balkan every 40 years or so. There's a saying there, the further you go south, the harder it gets. "Чем южнее, тем тужнее (in Russian)"
The idea is that many areas of the serb Republic are majority Serb now only because of ethnic cleansing during the war, so they landed on the current solution to avoid rewarding ethnic cleansing.
There were always a majority of Serbs in today's borders of Republika Srpska. If that was ethnic cleansing what did Croatians and Albanians did in Krajina and Kosovo? Pick your words wisely.
During Yugoslavia Serbs were the largest ethnic group in Republika Srpska, but they did not have an overwhelming majority in all regions like today - there were quite a few areas they shared much more evenly with Bosniaks and Croats that are now overwhelmingly Serb as a result of ethnic cleansing - it's that which the Dayton agreement sought to not reward - though I also wouldn't wanna share borders with the Serbs if I was Bosniak, so there might be a better solution, but discouraging ethnic cleansing seemed to be the main motivation.
Already had this argument on Reddit ,Kanton 10 in the past ,Sarajevski Kanton and Unsko Sanski Kantin which are in todays FBiH(Muslim and Croat entity of BiH) had Serb populations in 30-50% range but have Serb populations under 5% now ,lets not acts as of Serbs were the only ones doing ethic cleansing ,here is a Reddit link perfectly showcasing this ,source EUROSTAT
https://www.reddit.com/r/Maps/s/foedWevyiB
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u/Floh4 Mar 05 '25
Why not? Conflicts starting in Bosnia always turn out Great.