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.