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| Country | Croatia | | | Flag |  | | | Capital | name: Zagreb geographic coordinates: 45 48 N, 15 58 E time difference: UTC+1 (6 hours ahead of Washington, DC during Standard Time) daylight saving time: +1hr, begins last Sunday in March; ends last Sunday in October | | | Population | 4,493,312 (July 2007 est.) | | | GMT | +1 | | | Location | Southeastern Europe, bordering the Adriatic Sea, between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia
see map | | | Area | total: 56,542 sq km land: 56,414 sq km water: 128 sq km | | | Ethnic groups | Croat 89.6%, Serb 4.5%, other 5.9% (including Bosniak, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, and Roma) (2001 census) | | | Religions | Roman Catholic 87.8%, Orthodox 4.4%, other Christian 0.4%, Muslim 1.3%, other and unspecified 0.9%, none 5.2% (2001 census) | | | Languages | Croatian 96.1%, Serbian 1%, other and undesignated 2.9% (including Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and German) (2001 census) | | | Government type | presidential/parliamentary democracy | | | National holiday | Independence Day, 8 October (1991); note - 25 June 1991 was the day the Croatian Parliament voted for independence; following a three-month moratorium to allow the European Community to solve the Yugoslav crisis peacefully, Parliament adopted a decision on 8 October 1991 to sever constitutional relations with Yugoslavia | | | Constitution | adopted on 22 December 1990; revised 2000, 2001 | | | Legal system | based on civil law system | | | Background | The lands that today comprise Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the close of World War I. In 1918, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Following World War II, Yugoslavia became a federal independent Communist state under the strong hand of Marshal TITO. Although Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it took four years of sporadic, but often bitter, fighting before occupying Serb armies were mostly cleared from Croatian lands. Under UN supervision, the last Serb-held enclave in eastern Slavonia was returned to Croatia in 1998. | | Internet country code | .hr | |
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