Hadzici and the Croat-Muslim Civil War

The siege of Sarajevo was an important factor in the Croat-Muslim war of 1993 to 1994.

Although it was a conflict between the mostly Muslim Bosnian Army (ARBiH) and the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA), the Sarajevo siege was close to areas of Herzegovina and central Bosnia with mixed Croat and Muslim populations.

As was discussed in a previous post, “Confusion over Konjic”, relations between the Bosnian Croat army, known as the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), and the ARBiH, in the northern Herzegovinian municipality of Konjic became strained in mid-1992 when the HVO refused to join ARBiH actions aimed at lifting the siege of Sarajevo.

As Croat-Muslim relations worsened, Hadzici, prior to the war one of the 10 Sarajevo municipalities, became drawn into the dispute between the two groups. In January 1993, ARBiH commander Sefer Halilovic warned the commander of the Herzegovina-based 4th Brigade of the ARBIH of “cadres” from the ARBiH and the MUP (interior ministry) in Konjic and neighbouring Hadzici who had put themselves in the service of “Greater Croatian” politics. Hadzici was significant in this regard because although the Croat population there was tiny, the main road from Mostar, seen by the Bosnian Croats as their capital, to Kiseljak, a Croat-majority municipality in central Bosnia, ran through it.

In March 1993, ARBiH forces from Hadzici, who were part of the Sarajevo-based 1^st Corp of the ARBiH, were involved in an attack on the HVO aimed at taking control of a military facility in Konjic, in northern Herzegovina.

ARBiH forces from Hadzici were also involved in the Croat-Muslim conflict in central Bosnia. Fighting between the Croats and Muslims in Kiseljak and Kresevo, municipalities that before the war had Croat majorities, started in January 1993 and was initially concentrated on their western fringes. Later in the year, the fighting shifted to the south and east of Kiseljak and Kresevo, which by that time formed a Croat-controlled enclave surrounded by ARBiH territory.

In late June, the ARBiH began targeting Kresevo, an attack that involved the ARBiH 3^rd Corps, which covered central Bosnia, and elements of the Sarajevo-based 1^st Corps. The ARBiH failed to take Kresevo and shifted their attack west to the town of Fojnica. These actions seemingly involved the 9^th Mountain Brigade from Hadzici and the 4^th Motorised Brigade from Ilidza, another Sarajevo municipality. Fojnica fell to the ARBiH in early July.

After Fojnica fell, the ARBiH’s actions against the Kiseljak enclave were largely linked to efforts to lift the siege of Sarajevo. The Croat enclave around Kiseljak, while mostly surrounded by ARBiH territory, also bordered territory controlled by the VRS forces that were besieging Sarajevo; the Croats in Kiseljak had a cordial relationship with the VRS and the frontline was peaceful.  The ARBiH wanted to break this connection and control all of the road, part of which was already controlled by the 9^th Mountain Brigade of the ARBiH 1^st Corps, between Han Ploca (in Kiseljak municipality) and Tarcin (in Hadzici) so they could attack the VRS and smash the siege of Sarajevo. The HVO wanted Kiseljak to stay out what they saw as a Serb-Muslim conflict. Fighting in this area continued periodically until the end of the Croat-Muslim war in March 1994. The Muslims never managed to break the connection between HVO- and VRS-held territory.

As in other parts of Bosnia, the ARBiH-HVO conflict in Kiseljak may not have been so much about one group’s desire to control the territory and expel all inhabitants belonging to the other group as about the two groups’ wholly different war aims in relation to the Serbs. The Croats had no dispute with the Serbs over territory in this region, unlike the Muslims, who were desperate to lift the siege of Sarajevo. As Charles Shrader writes in “The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia”: “Had the ABiH offensives in the Kiseljak area succeeded, which they did in part, the Muslims would have linked the II, III and VII Corps to the north with the I, IV and VI Corps to the south, saving about a hundred kilometres over the Zenica-Novi Travnik-Gornji Vakuf route.”

Despite the atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by both sides, the Croats and the Muslims each had understandable strategic aims in Kiseljak and it was the incompatibility of these, rather than any particular sinister objectives of one side, that was largely responsible for the conflict in this area.

A brief comment on the LM libel case

I was struck recently by a comment Oliver Kamm, a columnist for the London Times, made about the Srebrenica massacre on his blog. He said that there is “no legitimate debate about the nature of that abominable crime.”

Perhaps we should not read too much into this comment. But if taken literally it would seem to deem “illegitimate” the debate that must have taken place during former Yugoslav Army chief Momcilo Perisic’s appeal process against his conviction for war crimes, a process that led to him last week being acquitted of all charges, including that of aiding and abetting war crimes in Srebrenica. Surely the exact truth about the Srebrenica massacre can only be determined by debating aspects of that crime, such as the extent and nature of Belgrade's involvement in it.

Anyway, Mr Kamm’s blog post also referred to a piece he wrote last year for the Jewish Chronicle newspaper that discussed the Srebrenica massacre and a famous libel trial concerning the camps run by the Bosnian Serbs in 1992. An article in the magazine LM in 1997 accused two British reporters of misrepresenting conditions at the Trnopolje camp. The journalists successfully sued LM in 2000 for a large sum of money and the magazine soon went out of business.

As Mr Kamm relates: “while LM went out of business under the costs of its calumnious lies, several of its staff have since attained media prominence. Mick Hume, its editor, was for some years a Times columnist.”

It is not clear whether he thinks it is a bad thing that LM’s staff did not have their careers ended by the libel case, but the same cannot be said of the following comment by Nick Cohen, a journalist writing in Standpoint magazine about Ed Vulliamy’s book The War is Dead: Long Live the War:

“Claire Fox of the RCP [the Revolutionary Communist Party, the group behind LM] has gone on to become a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze. The BBC lets her get away with this: nobody questions the morality of whitewashing the worst crimes Europe has seen since Stalin.”

Celebrating LM’s loss of this libel case and subsequent demise is one thing, but to suggest that anyone who worked for the magazine should be shunned from any kind of media prominence is quite another. This does not seem to me the attitude of a person willing to give views different to his own a fair hearing.