Bosnia and Herzegovina

The now-independent nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was once part of the Yugoslav Republic. With the disintegration of that country in the early 1990s, Bosnia declared its own independence in 1992. That declaration was followed by a three-year conflict among Bosnia's ethnic Bosniacs, Croats, and Serbs. Along with every other aspect of life, leisure and play in all its forms were severely disrupted. In the years since the Dayton Accords were signed in 1995 ending the conflict, play in all its forms has made a tentative return and in some cases has helped to rebuild the country.

In the years before the conflict, perhaps the most popular form of group play had been soccer. Throughout Bosnia, soccer has always been very popular, whether it was children playing informal pickup games in the streets or amateur or semiprofessional leagues of varying degrees of skill. Nearly every village had a soccer field. Soccer, like every other aspect of life in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, was affected, however, by the fighting. First, many of the leagues and even teams broke up. Where different ethnic groups had been able to play together in the years of the Yugoslav Republic, the new situation prohibited that kind of play. Further, although this did not happen everywhere, soccer fields were sometimes the places where executions took place, and practice areas around several soccer fields became cemeteries. By 2000, however, there was some movement toward ethnic groups playing together, with Bos-niac and Croat league play beginning in that year. Two years later, Serbian leagues began to play as well.

As was the case in much of the old Yugoslav Republic, basketball was very popular in Bosnia. As was the case with soccer, play flourished on many levels, but, as was also the case with soccer, playing in integrated groups stopped during the conflict. In 2001, the U.S. State Department sponsored a series of basketball clinics held in different locations—some of which, like Sarajevo and Tuzla, had been battlegrounds—throughout the country. Led by Don Casey, who had coached the New Jersey Nets and Los Angeles Clippers in the National Basketball Association, the program reached an estimated 500 young players of all Bosnian ethnic backgrounds. In various other areas, rebuilding parks and playgrounds has become part of an extensive effort to bring life back to normal. Other team sports at various levels of play and organization included hockey and volleyball, and these are still popular.

In Yugoslavia's history, there was a great deal of emphasis on group activities, although individual activities flourished as they always had. Many of these pursuits are being revived, and not only by the Bosnian population. The Bosnian government is hoping to use these pastimes as a means of encouraging sport tourism. These include swimming and scuba diving, mountain climbing, hiking, [Page 90]skiing, biking on roads as well as mountain biking, fishing, hunting, sailing, and canoeing.

A very old form of individual play in the city of Mostar had been for young men to jump off the city's famous bridge into the water below. That bridge was destroyed in 1993 during the conflict, not to be rebuilt for another 10 years. Once it was rebuilt, it once again became the scene of the very individual game of bridge jumping.

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