The Riddle of the Sandzak

The Sandzak, a Muslim-majority region that straddles the border between Serbia and Montenegro, is something of a backwater.

Despite the violence that consumed neighbouring Bosnia and Kosovo as Yugoslavia dissolved in the 1990s and Sandzak’s seemlingly similarly combustible ethnic mixture, it has remained relatively quiet. It is now the only region in the former Yugoslavia where significant numbers of Serbs and Muslims live side-by-side peacefully, if not harmoniously.

But the lack of drama in post-Yugoslav Sandzak is what makes its story so fascinating, because, but for key decisions taken by ruling powers over the course of its history, Sandzak might also have suffered a similar fate to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

The main reason for the Sandzak’s relatively peaceful post-Yugoslav history is demographic. Its population is tiny. Although the region is majority Bosniak (Slavic Muslims who identify with the Muslims of Bosnia), there were just 152,000 Slavic Muslims in central Serbia (not including the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina) in 1991 and 78,000 in Montenegro. These populations, which are concentrated in the Sandzak, are dwarfed by the Orthodox Christian populations of Serbia and even tiny Montenegro. While Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians on the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse were in a weak position compared to the Serbs demographically and otherwise, they at least inhabited territories in which they were the largest ethnic group and through which they could pursue their aim of self determination, an option was never really open to the Sandzak Muslims.

The first key decision in that shaped Sandzak’s present day circumstances was in 1877, when it had for centuries been part of the Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Bosnia. As the recently-published and much-needed “Sandzak: A History” by Elizabeth Roberts and Kenneth Morrison relates: “Measures designed to protect Ottoman territory from Austria’s designs were ... enacted, among them the redrawing of the administrative boundary which had hitherto seen Novi Pazar and most of the present-day Sandzak incorporated in the Vilayet of Bosnia.”

The Ottomans transferred Sandzak from the Bosnian to the Kosovo Vilayet, but this might have been quickly reversed if hawks in the Austrian administration had held sway when Austria occupied Bosnia in 1878. They demanded that the sanjak of Novi Pazar should also be occupied. Instead, Austria opted for a kind of compromise; the Sandzak remained under Ottoman administration but fell under joint Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian military occupation. This ambiguity over Sandzak was still apparent in 1908 when the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, but withdrew from Sandzak, paving the way for Serbia and Montenegro to achieve their aim of linking up by occupying Sandzak in the Balkan War of 1912-13. This may not have happened had the Austrians taken the advice of the German Kaiser, who thought it was “folly” not to help the Ottomans repel the Serb and Montenegrin advance.

Although Sandzak’s current division between Serbia and Montenegro can be traced back to decisions taken by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in their dying days, its fate was sealed during the Second World War. As the Communist Partisans’ strength grew in Yugoslavia towards the end of the war they began discussing how its federal structure would be arranged in peacetime. Muslims wanted to make Sandzak part of the new republic of Bosnia. Failing this, they wanted it to be either unattached to any republic or part of Serbia or Montenegro, but not divided between them. According to Ivo Banac in “With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism” some Serbs and Montenegrins also favoured wholly  incorporating Sandzak into their respective federal units, which in the case of Montenegro would have had the interesting effect of giving that republic a very large Slavic Muslim minority. The partisans instead opted for the worst option from the Muslim point of view, reverting to the situation brought about by the 1912 Balkan War and dividing Sandzak between Serbia and Montenegro.

Bosniaks in the Sandzak may rue the decisions taken by the Ottomans, Austrians and Partisans that separated the region from Bosnia, but that separation probably saved them from the fate of their ethnic kin in neighbouring parts of Bosnia, which are today part of the ethnically pure “Republika Srpska”. The Sandzak’s Bosniaks live in Orthodox Christian countries that haven’t granted them any form of autonomy, but at least Sandzak remains a Muslim-majority region.