 |
| 30 municipalities of Herceg-Bosna (shaded) according to a decision of 18 November 1991. |
Last year, the prosecution in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) trial of Jadranko Prlic and other former Bosnian Croat leaders accused of war crimes against Bosnian Muslims made an interesting claim.
In its final brief, the prosecution stated that the Croats “brazenly” included the central Bosnian municipality of Kakanj as part of their "Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna" in 1991 “transparently for the purpose of providing a land bridge to Vares”, a municipality to Kakanj’s east, where Croats were according to the 1991 census the largest ethnic group.
This is one of many questionable assertions about Herceg-Bosna that have contributed to a simplistic caricature of events in central Bosnia between 1992 and 1994.
The use of the word “transparently” suggests that you only need to glance at the map to see that Kakanj’s inclusion in Herceg-Bosna arose from its geographical position between Vares and other Croat territories.
But Kakanj, which according to the 1991 census was 30% Croat and 55% Muslim, was demographically similar to other municipalities that were also included in Herceg-Bosna or the Croatian Community of Bosanska Posavina in northern Bosnia, none of which was needed as a “land bridge” between Croat territories. Kotor Varos, for example, which was 29% Croat, was on the outer fringes of the group of municipalities that comprised Herceg-Bosna.
The claim that Kakanj was included in Herceg-Bosna to provide a land bridge seems to be based on the assumption that the Bosnian Croat leaders needed Herceg-Bosna to be territorially contiguous so that it could secede from Bosnia. There is, however, no real evidence that the Bosnian Croats actually took any meaningful steps to attach the 30 municipalities that had in 1991 been claimed as part of Herceg-Bosna to Croatia.
More convincingly, the prosecution has argued that the Bosnian Croat leadership abandoned Vares to the Muslims once they realised that it could not be defended, preferring its Croat population to resettle in Croat-controlled parts of Bosnia rather than remaining in Muslim-ruled territory.
The Bosnian Croats clearly prioritised certain Croat-populated areas over others, with western Herzegovina (including Mostar, which Bosnian Croats considered to be their capital) favoured over areas in central Bosnia such as Vares, Zepce and Usora.
In a copies of war diaries seized from former Bosnian Serb Army leader Ratko Mladic’s wife’s flat in Belgrade in 2010, the Bosnian Croat leaders are shown to be dismissive of Croats occupying enclaves outside the core of Herceg-Bosna, for instance, deriding the “idiots in Usora”, a Croat enclave surrounded by Serb and Muslim territory, where the Croats maintained their alliance with the mostly Muslim Bosnian Army (ARBiH). They also discuss the possibility of withdrawing the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO) 108th Brigade from the Tuzla region.
According to the prosecution in the Prlic trial, former Herceg-Bosna president Mate Boban requested the assistance of international peacekeepers in moving Croats out of Sarajevo, Tuzla, Vares, Bugojno, Zepce and Zenica.
And as the former commander of the HVO, Milivoj Petkovic, who is on trial alongside Prlic, pointed out in the court, in Kiseljak and Kresevo there was resentment at the Bosnian Croat leadership because they were not included in the Croat majority provinces established by the Vance Owen Peace Plan of 1993. In ‘The Muslim Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History, 1992-1994’ Charles Shrader writes that HVO leaders in Zepce, Kiseljak and Vitez, were at the end of 1993 “somewhat disappointed in the support they were receiving from their compatriots in Herzegovina, who appeared to be more concerned with establishing the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna than the with the very real threat to the continued existence of the Bosnian Croat enclaves in central Bosnia.”
The Bosnian Croat leadership, who were nationalists, clearly valued some territories more than others, depending on how many Croats lived there and how they were positioned in relation to the Croat heartland in Herzegovina.
But before blaming this for the war between Croats and Muslims, it is worth considering whether the Bosnian Muslim leadership’s stance wasn’t simliar. Was its commitment to Bosnian unity really more important than its desire to defend and liberate areas that had large Muslim populations prior to the Serb offensive in 1992? Did it value Kupres for example, which had a large Croat population, as much as neighbouring Muslim-majority Donji Vakuf, which had also been occupied by the Serbs in 1992? The answer in both cases is no. Both Croat and Bosnian Muslim leaderships failed to act in the spirit of brotherhood and unity and one-sided attempts to demonstrate how one side’s intransigence was provoked by the other are futile. This reality is not compatible with the “Greater Croatia” thesis that has already been advanced by the ICTY.
The Greater Croatia thesis also rests on the assumption that the Bosnian Croat leaders wildly exaggerated the threat to Croats in Bosnian government-controlled areas such as Travnik and Bugojno. No doubt this is true, but when the prosecution in its final brief cites a report by international observers detailing “Croat propaganda” about “mudjahidins slaughtering women and children” which was “totally without justification”, there is a real danger of downplaying the horrendous crimes that were also committed by Bosnian Army (ARBiH) troops. The version of the Greater Croatia thesis that has already been advanced by the ICTY in previous trial judgements depends on a completely sanitised view of the Bosnian government side that depicts every ARBiH crime as an isolated reaction to HVO aggression. It will be interesting to see how the thesis is developed when the ICTY reaches its judgement in the Prlic trial.
