More than half the Bosnian soccer team debuting in the World Cup fled the country long ago, either during the war or in its aftermath.
Many horrible things happened during those conflicts, and Praljak was one of a half-dozen Bosnian Croat leaders whose convictions for war crimes were upheld by the Hague this November.
The signal from Kozara covers most of the western and more populous half of the Bosnian Serb domain.
Half of the Bosnian team were part of the wartime diaspora, including Stoke City's goalkeeper Asmir Begovic, who lived in Hrasnica, a suburb of Sarajevo, until he was four.
It is hard to imagine a stranger twist of timing: a week today, the Bosnian team, half of whom grew up as refugees far-flung by war, play their opening game in the high temple of football – the Maracanã stadium, Rio de Janeiro – against mighty Argentina, the former world champions.
Under the accord reached in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, which ended the war, roughly half the country belongs to Bosnian Serbs, while Muslims and Bosnian Croats share the other half.
Diplomats accorded about half the territory to the Bosnian Serbs, and the other half to the Bosniaks (Muslims) and the Bosnian Croats.
The charges also deal with the three-and-a-half year siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which left more than 10,000 dead during heavy and indiscriminate shelling of the city.
During the bloodiest of the Balkan wars in Bosnia, Sarajevo endured three-and-a-half years of shelling by Bosnian Serbs from nearby hills, which left 10,000 people dead, more than under the German occupation during the Second World War.
Assad has been pounding his people mercilessly for more than two years, with a death toll that is nearing 100,000, the total for the entire Bosnian war in about half the time.
