Francis said his visit to Bosnia will offer support to its post-war process of reconciliation, and also encourage the tiny Catholic Croat community, which represents only about 15% of the population.
The HVO wanted to reverse April 1992 loss of the town, home to a significant Croat community before the war, and to control the Tomislavgrad Bugojno Šipovo road.
In the absence of a shared history, Bosniak, Serb and Croat communities drift further apart.
The plan involved carving out an expansive Serb homeland from the ethnic patchwork of prewar Bosnia, and "ethnically cleansing" the Muslim and Croat communities, creating a corridor linking its eastern and western halves and gaining access to the sea.
The possibility of partitioning Bosnia and Herzegovina had been discussed during talks between the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, and the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, earlier in the year, and two Croat "communities" in northern and southwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, similar in some ways to the "Serb Autonomous Regions," were proclaimed in November 1991.
It was the worst violence in years in Bosnia, where three and a half years of war ended in 1995, and the biggest challenge yet to efforts to heal divisions among the Muslim, Croat and Serb communities.
Although the high politics of Bosnia remains a terrible mess, there are local signs that it may, after all, be possible to put multi-ethnic states, and communities, together again when they have been torn apart by force.In the hill country round Vitez in central Bosnia, for example, Croat and Muslim communities used to live in a series of concentric circles.
With one-third of the votes counted, the Serb Democratic Party, the Croatian Democratic Union and the Party of Democratic Action, all nationalist parties that have dominated politics in the Serbian, Croat and Muslim communities of this divided country in the five years since the war, made strong showings.
Before the Croatian War of Independence the Baroque town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups.
In rural areas the survey was undertaken in the mainly Serb populated community of Nevesinje (4.068), mainly Croat, Neum (1.651), Grude (3.598) and Stolac (5.530) and the mainly Moslem Tesanj (5.621) and Jablanica (4.457).
Tudjman's contribution to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and his support for the murderous Bosnian Croat militias, was glossed over by the international community as Croatia emerged as the most successful of Yugoslavia's three warring republics.
