Bihac, 1995

Many people believe that Croatia’s defeat in August 1995 of the Croatian Serb para-state, ‘Republika Srpska Krajina’ (RSK), prevented a repeat of the Srebrenica massacre in Bihac, a besieged town in northwest Bosnia.

This may not be the case. The besieged area around Bihac town was much larger than the Srebrenica enclave had been and was mostly territory that had always been nearly 100% Bosniak (Muslim). The pre-war Serb population in Bihac municipality was significant, but in Cazin, the municipality north of Bihac, it was less than 1%. Further north, the Serbs were propping up Fikret Abdic, a local Bosniak politician who had broken away from the Sarajevo leadership to establish an “autonomous province” around Velika Kladusa, another overwhelmingly Bosniak municipality. These municipalities were of little interest to the Serbs.

Referring to the Serb attack on Bihac of late 1994, the VRS general in charge of the operation, Manojlo Milovanovic, claimed in an interview that he was ordered not to take Bihac town. This is in keeping with the previously stated Serb objective to establish the border of the Serb state on the Una, a river that runs through Bihac. One of the Serbs' main objectives was to control the strategically important railway line that ran from the main Bosnian Serb controlled city Banja Luka to the RSK ‘capital’ Knin via the outskirts of Bihac, and also linked the two limbs of the RSK.

The situation was similar in August 1995 when the Serbs, who had captured Srebrenica the previous month, turned their attention to Bihac. They were again supporting Fikret Abdic, who had been reinstalled in Velika Kladasa in late 1994 having been ejected from the region by the Bihac-based 5^th Corps of the ARBiH (Bosnian Army) earlier in the year. Given that his forces joined the Serbs in their attack on the 5^th Corps, it seems possible that had they succeeded in defeating the 5^th Corps they would have left Abdic in control of Velika Kladusa, Cazin and part of Bihac, including the town. It is possible that the Abdic forces would have massacred soldiers and civilians if they had taken control of Bihac. It is also possible that the Serbs would have preferred to enter Bihac town themselves and committed atrocities worse than the Srebrenica massacre the previous month. Perhaps they also would not have tolerated the presence of a densely populated island of Bosniak territory wedged between the RSK and the Republika Srpska and cast Abdic aside once he was no longer useful to them, emptying Cazin and Velika Kladusa of its Bosniak population. 

But the other possibility, that they may have left Abdic in long-term control of Cazin, Velika Kladusa and part of Bihac municipality, including the town, seems to have been given very little consideration.

Some thoughts on the local elections in Bosnia

A pattern seems to be emerging in the Central Bosnia canton, one of the two “mixed” cantons in the Bosniak-Croat Federation that was established in 1994.


In the 2004 mayoral elections, Jajce, previously a Croat-controlled municipality having been captured from the Serbs by the HVO (Bosnian Croat Army) in the dying days of the Bosnian war, elected an SDA (Bosniak nationalist) mayor. In the 2008 mayoral elections, the SDA took Busovaca and Novi Travnik, previously part of a crescent-shaped sliver of Croat-dominated municipalities surrounded by Bosniak-majority territory.

Yesterday it was the turn of Vitez, which became the fourth previously Croat-controlled municipality in the canton to come under the control of the SDA, although an examination of the voting figures suggests one should not read too much into this particular result. The percentage of the electorate voting for Croat mayoral candidates in Vitez actually rose from 60% in 2008 to 62% in 2012, with the SDA profiting from a split in the Croat vote. The Croat vote also held up at 46% in Busovaca, which was a straight contest between the Croat nationalist HDZ and the victorious SDA, and in Jajce, the Croat vote rose to 46% from 44% in 2008.

But in Novi Travnik, which the SDA held, the Croat vote fell from 56% in 2008 (when the SDA benefited from a split in the Croat vote) to 38% in 2012, while in Kiseljak, which the HDZ won, it declined to 64% from 70%.  In Zepce, a Croat enclave in the Bosniak-dominated Zenica-Doboj canton, 55% of votes went to explicitly Croat parties, compared with 60% last time, although the left-wing SDP, which is seen by many Croats as a party representing Bosniak interests, fielded a Croat candidate rather than a Bosniak one, which may have swung some Croat voters.

The picture is complex, but the dramatic falls in the Croat nationalist vote as a percentage of the total in Novi Travnik, Kiseljak and Zepce point to a weakening of the Croat position in the Central Bosnia and Zenica-Doboj cantons, a trend that is symbolised by the SDA’s victory in Vitez yesterday.