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.

The ICTY and re-writing history

I have been made aware of a recent lecture with the title “Legal Process as a Tool to Rewrite History”by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was a prosecutor in the trial against Slobodan Milosevic. 

The lecture, a transcript of which is available on the internet, contained an interesting discussion about the limitations on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY) ability to provide a balanced and complete historical record of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, it notes that ICTY’s ability to fully determine Serbia’s involvement in the Bosnian war was constrained by not being able to fully access Supreme Defence Council documents in Belgrade. Also of interest is Sir Geoffrey’s observation that the leaking in 2003 of ICTY documents constituting an investigation into allegations of Kosovo Albanian leaders’ involvement in “organ harvesting” has helped to “taint all Kosovars.”

Another limitation of the ICTY which is not discussed in the lecture but strikes me as important is that its contribution to the historical record largely depends on whether potential indictees are available to the court or not. Many believe that the former Croatian president Franjo Tudjman should have been put on trial for war crimes against Serbs in Croatia and against Muslims in Bosnia. Had he lived for another 10 years, this may well have happened. Such a trial would probably have helped to cement the conventional wisdom that the Muslim-Croat civil war of 1993 to 1994 was caused by Croatian interference. General Gotovina’s acquittal last year following an appeal against his conviction for war crimes against Serbs in Croatia in 1995 seems to me to have greatly enhanced Croatia’s international reputation. The effect would have been much greater had Tudjman been acquitted of the same crimes. Whether it intends to or not, the ICTY plays a central role in writing the history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Sir Geoffrey appears to believe that this is not the ICTY’s intention:

“We must recall that all judges at all these courts do say that they do not write history in their judgments - and they don’t,” he says.

To support his claim he quotes the summary of the judgement in the Kupreskic case which concerned Croat crimes against Muslims in central Bosnia in 1993:

‘the primary task of this Trial Chamber was not to construct a historical record of modern human horrors in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The principal duty of our Trial Chamber was simply to decide whether the six defendants standing trial were guilty of partaking in this persecutory violence or whether they were instead extraneous to it and hence, not guilty."

Note the use of the words “primary” and “principal” in this quotation, which leave open the possibility that constructing a historical record of the Bosnian war is at least a secondary task of the ICTY. Other statements, such as the following from the judgement against Dario Kordic, another Bosnian Croat convicted for crimes against Muslims in central Bosnia, suggest that it is very much in the business of writing history:

“ [Franjo Tudjman] harboured territorial ambitions in respect of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that was part of his dream of a Greater Croatia, including Western Herzegovina and Central Bosnia.”

The ICTY’s desire to control the narrative of the 1990s Balkan wars was also strongly suggested by a letter to the Swedish state broadcaster in 2011, which I discussed in a previous post: http://rgallivan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/combating-revisionism-controlling-past.html. The letter seeks to undermine various assertions made in a documentary about the Srebrenica massacre, even when these assertions do not contradict the ICTY's judgment that genocide occured there in 1995. This has the effect of stifling legitimate debate about the nature of the Bosnian war.

The ICTY has uncovered many important facts about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, which is to be welcomed. Its tendency to tell us how to interpret these facts is not.

A mild defence of Belgium

In Belgium, First World War memorials bear rousing inscriptions such as “POUR LA PATRIE” AND “GESNEUVELD VOOR HET VADERLAND”, but seem reluctant to give this “Patrie” or “Vaderland” a name.

Is this because Belgium is a completely artificial state with more in common with Bosnia, a country that struggles to command the loyalty of most of its population, than with Switzerland, which grew organically into a state with a strong identity? Opponents of European integration are particularly keen proponents of this view, seeing Belgium as a kind of prototype for the grander project of breaking down linguistic barriers across the continent to create a European superstate.

But those who wish to defend national identity against the anti-historical cultural vandalism of the European Union should perhaps be wary of denigrating Belgium, which in Britain at least, is sneeringly dismissed as both artificial and boring. Opponents of Belgium’s existence are fond of pointing out that it was created in 1831 by foreigners against the wishes of most of its inhabitants, in contrast to Switzerland’s much more gradual and consensual emergence as an independent state, a process that began in 1291.

But the similarities between Belgium and Switzerland could be much more important than the very different ways in which they came into being.

Perhaps the most important similarity is that, while both countries are made up of populations that speak the same languages as inhabitants of neighbouring countries, the Swiss and the Belgians do not see these countries as their home nations. The inhabitants of Geneva and Liege are French-speaking, but they are no more French than the citizens of Swansea and Glasgow are English. People from Antwerp speak Dutch and people from Zurich speak German, but they are not Dutch or German. In this regard, Belgium has much more in common with Switzerland than with Bosnia, where Serbs look to Serbia as their homeland and Croats to Croatia.

So the suggestion, made by some who see Belgium as an artificial state, that it should split into two, with Flanders joining the Netherlands and Wallonia France, may be problematic. It is difficult to see how this could be achieved without trampling over the Flemings’ and Walloons’ distinct identities, which have been shaped by hundreds of years of separation from their supposed mother countries. Flying the French tricolour from town halls in Liege and Charleroi in Wallonia and the Dutch flag in Antwerp and Ostend in Flanders would in many ways be just as artificial as the imposition of the EU flag.

Maybe Flanders and Wallonia could respectively join the Netherlands and France in the same way England and Scotland came together to form the United Kingdom in 1707? But it seems highly questionable that either Flanders and the Netherlands or Wallonia and France could emulate this unique coming together of nations. Would the highly-centralised French Republic, with its population of more than 60 million people, be willing to undergo the sweeping constitutional changes needed to create a federation with a territory of less than three-and-a-half million inhabitants? Conversely, would the 16 million Dutch welcome a merger with a new federal unit containing six million people? This seems doubtful.

Paradoxically, a union between Flanders and Wallonia may be the best way for these territories to preserve their distinct identities precisely because of the insurmountable differences between them. Flanders and Wallonia could easily be swallowed up by the Netherlands and France, but within Belgium, they will always be protected by the linguistic division between them.

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.