The Joint Criminal Entity

Jadranko Prlic: Courtesy of the ICTY

Lingering doubts about the nature of “Herceg-Bosna”, the entity established by Bosnia’s Croats in November 1991, will have been laid to rest by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s recent judgement in the war crimes trial of six Bosnian Croat leaders.

The ICTY found Jadranko Prlic, former prime minister of Herceg-Bosna, and his co-accused guilty of crimes against Bosnian Muslims during the Muslim-Croat war. According to the judgement, the crimes they committed against Bosnian Muslims between January 1993 and April 1994 “were the result of a plan drawn up by members of the JCE (Joint Criminal Enterprise) whose goal was to permanently remove the Muslim population from Herceg-Bosna.”

This assertion follows findings in previous judgements that Herceg-Bosna was established with the intention that it would “in due course, become part of the Republic of Croatia” and that this was in line with Croatian president Franjo Tudjman’s “dream of a Greater Croatia.”

So Herceg-Bosna was to be separated from Bosnia, cleansed of its non-Croat population and attached to Croatia. It seems there is little left to say.

Yet a closer examination of the voluminous Prlic judgement suggests that things might not be so simple. Referring to the territories that were to come under Croat control in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) the judgement states that from mid-January 1993 the Croat aim was to enact an ethnic cleansing campaign that would make the three provinces designated to the Croats “majority or almost exclusively Croat.”

The difference between the two possibilities arising from this statement is huge. If the Croat goal was to make areas they controlled “almost exclusively Croat”, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing was necessary, due to the large non-Croat pre-war population in the municipalities claimed by Herceg-Bosna. But if the goal was for the Croat provinces created by the VOPP to be Croat-majority, this left open the possibility that a large part, or possibly all, of the pre-war Muslim population could stay in these territories.

The judgement’s detailed account of events between 1992 and 1994 seems to back up the former interpretation, that Herceg-Bosna was to be “almost exclusively Croat.” From at least October 1992, the Bosnian Croats realised that it was necessary to modify the ethnic composition of territories. From May 1993, the HVO (Bosnian Croat Army) began demanding the assistance of international organisations in resettling Croats from Muslim-controlled territory such as Sarajevo and Tuzla into Croat-controlled areas. Parallel with these movements of Croats into Croat-controlled territory Muslims were expelled from Croat areas of municipalities such as Mostar, Stolac, Capljina, Ljubuski and Prozor into ARBiH- (Bosnian Army) controlled territory or to other countries via Croatia. In three neighbouring municipalities in Herzegovina, Ljubuski’s Muslim population fell to 826 from 2,381 between September and October 1993, Capljina’s fell to 3,852 from 14,085 and Stolac’s to zero from 8,093. Ljubuski is of particular interest because its pre-war population was already 94% Croat – suggesting that ethnic purity was the motive for the expulsions. As in other municipalities Muslim men of fighting age were imprisoned then released on condition they and their families left Herceg Bosna. Between June and the end of 1993 and in line with the campaign to replace Herceg-Bosna's Muslim population with Croats, 22,000 to 24,000 Croats from places such as Travnik, Novi Travnik, Vares, Kiseljak and Bugojno arrived in Herceg Bosna, notably in Prozor, Stolac, Capljina and Ljubuski. The crimes that were committed by the HVO between January 1993 and April 1994 were in the vast majority of cases the result of a plan drawn up by the leaders of Herceg Bosna to modify the ethnic makeup of Croat-controlled territory.

Yet despite the judgement’s exhaustive account of the ethnic cleansing campaign visited on Muslims in Croat territory, many questions remain about the nature of the JCE of which Prlic and his co-defendants have been convicted. Did the resettlement of Croats from Bosnian government-controlled areas into Herceg-Bosna necessarily mean that the Muslim population would also be expelled from areas of resettlement? If the Bosnian Croat policy of ethnic modification did tilt more towards majority-Croat territories than “nearly exclusively Croat” ones, did this mean that only Herceg-Bosna taken as a whole had to be majority Croat or did each municipality have to be majority Croat? In the latter case, Muslims would have to be expelled from municipalities such as Jablanica and Konjic, which had pre-war Muslim majorities but were claimed as part of Herceg-Bosna. If the JCE did aim at ethnic purity, as is suggested by expulsion of Muslims from places that were already overwhelmingly Croat, such as Ljubuski, why were Muslims not expelled on the same scale from municipalities such as Tomislavgrad and Orasje, a municipality where Muslims continued to fight in the HVO until the end of the war? (Orasje was originally in the Croatian Community of Bosanska Posavina, which like the Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna was established in November 1991. Though it is in northern Bosnia, it became part of Herceg-Bosna, which originally only comprised municipalities in Herzegovina and central and western Bosnia, in September 1992. Orasje was according to the VOPP to be in Province 3, which the Prlic judgement explicitly states was, like the other Croat provinces, 8 and 10, to be ethnically cleansed of Muslims. This never happened.) The judgement says that the Bosnian Croat leaders sought to resettle Croats from Bosnian government-controlled Sarajevo and Tuzla to Herceg-Bosna. To what lengths did they go in pursuit of this aim and if this was their aim why did the HVO continue to operate in Sarajevo and Tuzla until the end of 1993, before being disbanded by the Bosnian government? Such questions need to be properly addressed to determine whether the Croats’ aim was to make Herceg-Bosna “majority” or “almost exclusively” Croat. But the claim about Sarajevo and Tuzla is taken from comments made by an anonymous witness in closed session, so we can’t properly assess it.

Some of the answers to these questions may be contained in the exhibits that are mentioned in the judgement. But reading the dissenting opinion of the presiding judge reinforces the impression that the judgement does not back up its bald assertion that the JCE’s “goal was to permanently remove the Muslim population from Herceg-Bosna.”

Judge Antonetti, did not share his colleagues’ view that the accused were part of a JCE also involving the Croatian leaders to ethnically cleanse Herceg Bosna. In his dissenting opinion, he says it is “it is very difficult to discern exactly the real goal of the JCE” and notes that just as ethnic cleansing may have motives other than the creation of “Greater Croatia”,  the creation of “Greater Croatia” did not necessarily entail ethnic cleansing.

Much of Judge Antonetti’s criticism of the JCE concept relates to the involvement of President Tudjman and other Croatian leaders in the plan and his doubts about whether Tudjman really was playing a “double game” that involved publicly supporting Bosnia’s borders while actually seeking to annex part of it. He is less sparing in his criticism of the Bosnian Croat leaders, for instance acknowledging that Prlic played a personal role in the expulsion of Muslims from Herceg-Bosna.  The Prlic judgement and Judge Antonetti’s dissenting opinion leave one in little doubt that a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing was carried out against the Bosnian Muslims in the municipalities that were covered by the trial. Whether this campaign was actually the result of a plan to create an ethnically pure Herceg Bosna is much less clear.