Start...of Srpska

Republic of Srpska is proclaimed on 9th of January 1992, and as a State Entity verified by Dayton Peace Agreement and signing of peace accord in Paris, on 14th of December 1995, with which was ended the 3,5-years war.

Main capital is Banja Luka, with more than 200.000 citizens.

The frontiers of the Republic of Srpska have been defined by the internationally recognized border with Yugoslavia and the Republic of Croatia and the inter-entity boundary with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both these lines were established with no regard to basic principles of delineation between peoples (ethnic, historical, natural-geographic, functional-economic, military-strategic.

Considering its size the Republic of Srpska has unproportionally long and irregular borders. They are very elongated and broken, building narrow belts of land in some places (the so called "pockets") which link the Serbian areas. The narrowest and the most sensitive belt is the one round the town of Brcko, the width of which is only 5 km. The total length of the borders of the Republic of Srpska is 2,170 km, the inter-entity border accounting for 1,080 km. If the territory of the Republic of Srpska were in the shape of a circle, the total length of its borders would be only 561 km. This means that the coefficient of the border indentation is 3.6, which is rare in the world and could only be compared to Chile. The territory of the Republic of Srpska is atypical in form. Its northern part is elongated in the west-east direction and its eastern part in the north-south direction. Such an unusual shape is an aggravating circumstance for internal communication and economic integration of distant western and southern parts of the Republic, which gives rise to a problem of its wholeness.