Dissolution of Yugoslavia and 1992-1995

Dissolution of
Yugoslavia and
1992-1995 Bosnian War
Mehmet Can
Muslim Bosnia
After Ottoman Period
Series
1. Last Century of the Ottoman Era in Bosnia

2. Austria-Hungary Dynasty Period in Bosnia
3. Bosnia between the Two World Wars
4. Tito Era in Bosnia
5. Dissolution of Yugoslavia and 1992-1995 Bosnian
War
6. Reunification Efforts of Muslim Communities after
Dissolution of Yugoslavia
7. Is 1992-1995 Bosnian War A Front From the Clash
Of Civilizations?
8. New Islamic Interpretations Arriving At Bosnia
During and After 1992-1995 Bosnian War
9. A New Vision in a New Era for Islamic
Organizations in Europe
PREFACE
Today, in 2012, it has been over 130 years since the attempt was made
to establish Islamic religious hierarchies in former Yugoslavia region.
Until now, the high positions were held by prominent leaders- alims,
who, each with his personality and actions, according to the depth of
his knowledge, the time in which he lived, and the personal religious
and national affiliation, marked a period within the Islamic
communities.
The question of the inner spiritual organisation of the Islamic
communities, their roles in the public life, and whose principles are
based on hierarchy has been posed starting from 1878, the period of
Austrian-Hungarian occupation.
Until the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia, there was no
islamic religious community as the Ottoman-Turkish state, which
former Yugoslavia region was a part of, was in a certain way an
Islamic theocratic state.
Numerous works have been published on the establishment of the
islamic spiritual hierarchy-based organisation in former Yugoslavia
region as well as on its manifestation and very existance. However,
this phenomenon, regarding the very role of the islamic community in
the Muslim society and its role in tumultuous times for over one
century and the role it is to have in the future, requires a more in-depth
approach.
This work is a monography on the above-mentioned hierarchy-based
institutions and the various factors. It is also an attempt to increase the
awareness of those interested, especially Muslims, on the numerous
factors regarding the earliest historical development of The Office of
Grand Mufties.
This book also aims at to contribute to the awareness about the
policies of New Western Colonialism targeted former Yugoslavia
region alongside a wider domain in Europe, Africa and Central Asia,
and implications of these policies on the functions of the Islamic
Organizations in the countries of the former Yugoslavia region.
x MUSLIM BOSNIA AFTER OTTOMAN PERIOD
In addition to the interviews, and field searches completed by the

author, in the former Yugoslavia region, the following sources are
extensively used:
1. O. Nakičević, Istorijski razvoj institucije Rijaseta, 1996.
2. M. Imamović, Istorija Bošnjaka, 1997.
3. M. Imamović, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Evolution of its
Political and Legal Institutions, 2006.
4. N. Malcolm, A Short History of Bosnia, 2002,
5. F. Karčić, The Bosniaks and the Challanges of Modernity,
1999.
Mehmet Can
International University of Sarajevo

Hrasnička Cesta 15
May 2011
CONTENTS
5. Dissolution of Yugoslavia and 1992-1995
Bosnian War
5.1 A turning-point in the history of the Yugoslavia 283
5.2 The 1992-1995 war 299
5.3 Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state 302
5.4 The destruction of Bosnia: 1992-1993 307
5.5 Islamic Organization in the 1992-95 War Period 322
5.6 Bosnian Islam since 1990: Cultural Identity or Political
Ideology? 337
CHAPTER 5
DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND 1992-95 WAR
In 28 June 1989 several hundred thousand Serbs assemble at the battlefield

site of Gazimestan, outside the Kosovar capital, Pristina, to celebrate the six-
hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. For many weeks a ferment of
national feeling had been created inside Serbia; the bones of Prince Lazar,
who died at the battle, had been taken on a tour of the country, becoming an
object of pilgrimage wherever they were. In the courtyard of the monastery
at Gracanica (south of Priština), while people queued to pay their devotions
to the Prince's bones inside, stalls sold icon-style posters of Jesus Christ,
Prince Lazar and Siobodan Milošević side by side. At the ceremony on the
battlefield Milošević was accompanied by black-robed metropolitans of the
Orthodox Church, singers in traditional Serbian folk costumes, and members
of the security police in their traditional dress of dark suits and sun glasses.
'After six centuries', Milošević told the crowd, “We are again engaged in
battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, but this cannot be excluded
yet.” The crowd roared its approval.1
5.1 A turning-point in the history of the Yugoslavia

This was a symbolic turning-point in the history of the Yugoslav lands. Now
had much of what he wanted. He had acquired an unchallengeable personal
standing in Serbia, by a combination of Communist methods and nationalist
rhetoric. Out of the eight votes in the federal government now controlled
four: Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. He had only to reduce
Macedonia to client status as well to be able to do what he wanted with the
federal government; and the federal constitution could then be rewritten to
entrench the dominance of Serbia.
However, the very process which had brought him to this point had made it
unlikely that the parts of Yugoslavia which he did not control would ever
submit to any such reordering of their country. The Croatian nationalist
feelings which had been simmering discontentedly ever since the
suppression of the 'Croatian spring' in the early 1970s had been stung into
action by the revival of Serbian nationalism in the rnid-1980s. Milošević had
not merely ended the taboo on certain forms of anti-Croat rhetoric, he had
positively encouraged them -so that by now the official Serbian media were
commonly referring to the head ofthe Croatian Communists, Ivica Rečan, as
1
N. Malcolm, Bosnia, A Short History, McMillian 2002, p. 213.
284 MUSLIM BOSNIA AFTER OTTOMAN PERIOD
an 'Ustaša'. All the old Croatian grievances came to the surface again, and in
the new atmosphere of breaking taboos about the second world war many
were beginning to resent both the automatic linking of Croats and the, and
the official histories which had crudely exaggerated the total numbers killed
in Croatia during the war. The result was an upsurge not of Ustaša apologists
(though there would be some of those later) but of Croatian nationalists, such
as the former Partisan and Yugoslav army General Franjo Tuđman, who
wanted to distinguish the long-standing national aspirations of Croatia for
independence of Belgrade from the Ustaša history with which they had
become entangled. And apart from all the historical debates, there were real
fears for the future too, such as those sparked off by Dobrica Cosić in July
1989 when he told an interviewer those large parts of Croatia should be re-
assigned to another republic.2
Meanwhile the most Westernized and independent-minded of the republics,
Slovenia, was making arrangements to protect itself from the next stages of
Milošević's slow-moving constitutional coup. In September and October
1989 it drafted and passed a new Slovenian constitution, giving itself
legislative sovereignty -in other words, saying that its own laws would take
precedence over those of the federal state -and explicitly declaring its right
to secede.” While this was happening, the dramatic collapse of Communist
power in Eastern Europe was filling the television screens night after night.
The trickle of independent political parties which had been started up in
Yugoslavia in 1988 now became a flood. In January 1990 the Slovenian
Communists walked out of the Yugoslav Communist Party Congress; two
weeks later they renamed themselves the Party ofDemocratic Renewal. Both
Slovenia and Croatia made arrangements for multi-party elections in the
spring of 1990: these were won in the former republic by a liberal-nationalist
coalition and in the latter by the new Croatian nationalist party, 'the Croatian
Democratic Union' (HDZ), led by Franjo Tudjman.
Milošević too renamed his party (as the 'Serbian Socialist Party'), and began
talking ofmulti-party elections in Serbia. These were postponed until the end
of the year; Milošević may have been unsettled by a period of relative
unpopularity which he underwent in the first half of 1990, and perhaps
wanted to wait for something more like a situation ofnational crisis to
develop in which he could resume his role as Serbia's saviour. Since he had
Serbian radio and television under close control, there was little risk of him
losing a properly planned election. But there was a need during the first half
of 1990 for him to rethink his strategy. Up till now he had pursued his first
preference, which was to gain control over Yugoslavia through the existing
structures of the Communist Party and the federal government. But this
option had slipped from his grasp, with the disintegration of the Communist
Party and the 'vertical' division of Yugoslav politics into a set of national
parties in the r al various republics. That left him with his second option: if
2
N. Malcolm, Ibid, p. 214.
CHAPTER 5 DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND WAR 285
Yugoslavia could not be controlled as a single entity, then he would carve

out of it a new entity, an extended Serbian territory, which would be his and
his alone. Slovene and Croatian politicians spent much of 1990 pleading for
a peaceful and negotiated transformation of Yugoslavia from a federal into a
confederal state -that is, from one in which federal law and institutions are
primary to one in which it is the republics which hold the real authority, and
the federal bodies simply act as their joint agencies. But Milokvic showed no
interest in any such schemes.3
The first clear sign of Milošević's new strategy came in the Knin region of
Croatia -part of the old Military Frontier or 'Krajina' zone on Bosnia's north-
western border which had a majority population of Serbs. For the Croatian
elections in April 1990 these Serbs had organized themselves into a 'Serbian
Democratic Party' (SDS); Milošević had probably taken an interest from the
start in this development, but it seems to have been essentially a local
initiative, expressing the fears of the local Serbs that they would lose their
cultural identity in the new nationalist Croatia. Some of the party's more
extreme members, echoing the propaganda from Belgrade, declared that they
had to defend themselves against an 'Ustaša state' -a reference in the first
place to the revival of the Croatian chequerboard flag, which had indeed
been an Ustaša symbol, but had also been the Croatian national flag for
hundreds of years. After the election, when the new government began
dismissing Communist functionaries, it was also claimed that Serbs were
being dismissed en masse from their jobs. Since the Serbs were heavily
overrepresented in the state apparatus in Croatia (making up nearly 40 per
cent of the Communist Party members and 67 per cent ofthe police force),
they were bound to figure disproportionately in the dismissals; and no doubt
there were some unjust settlings of old scores too.
In the summer of 1990, however, the Knin SDS was taken over by an
extremist leader who seems to have been in close contact with Milokvic. A
local referendum was held in August on 'autonomy' for the Serbs, in defiance
of the Croatian government, which declared it illegal; an armed Serb militia
began to appear on the streets of Knin, apparently aided by officers of the
federal army garrison (whose commanding officer, later, was Ratko Mladić);
the Croatian authorities tried to confiscate the arms supplies of the local
police reserve units; and the Serbs, told by their leaders and by the Belgrade
media that the 'Ustaša' were planning to massacre them, asked the federal
army for protection. Riots occurred, and Croatian policemen were shot. By
January 1991 the local Serb leaders were describing the area as the 'Serb
Autonomous Region of the Krajina', and forming their own 'parliament'.
Two months later armed men from the Krajina tried to take over the nearby
Plitvice National Park, the most important tourist resort in inland Croatia:
this was a direct and deliberate challenge to the Croatian government. A
shoot-out occurred with Croatian police, and the Federal presidency ordered
3
the army (over Croatia's strong objections) to occupy the park to “restore
peace.”4
These events occurring on the other side of Bosnia's northwestern border are
worth looking at in some detail, because they constitute the blueprint for
what was later done in Bosnia itself. Three techniques were at work, one
general and two particular. The general method was to radicalize the Serb
population by a non- stop bombardment of misinformation and fear-
mongering thorough the media and the local politiciaans: every action of
Tudjman's government was presented as an act of 'Ustaša' terror. (It must be
pointed out that some of the Croatian government's measures were crassly
insensitive, such as ordering the removal of street-signs in the Cyrillic
alphabet; whereas the Bosnian government Was to lean over backwards to
placate its own Serb population.) The second method was a standard
technique which could be found in textbooks on guerrilla warvare: the
technique of 'compromising the villages', as employed by; ths French
Resistance, the Viet-Cong and in numerable other guerrilla movements. This
technique involves staging an incidence, shooting a carload of Croatian
policemen outside of a particular village -to invite a crackdown or reprisal,
and then distributing arms to the villagers, telling them that the police are
planning to attack them. When armed police do arrive, it is easy to spark off
a gun battle; and suddenly a whole village, previously uncommitted, is now
on the side of the insurgents. And the third technique was a simple trick and
a very transparent one: creating violent incidents and then asking the army to
intervene as an impartial arbiter, when it was perfectly clear that the army,
with its loyalty to Belgrade and its Serb-dominated officer corps, was acting
on behalf of Milošević and the Serbs.
This carve-up of Croatian territory, which had thus begun year before the
Croatian declaration of independence of July 1991relied quite heavily on the
allegation that Serbs in Croatia were threatened by an Ustaša regime. In
Bosnia there was no possibility of maltirig such a claim seem plausible; so a
different threat to the Serbs had to be devised. Instead of 'Ustaša hordes', the
Bosnian Serbs were told that they were threatened by 'Islamic
fundamentalists'. It is necessary to look briefly at how the possibility of
making this claim arose, and why it was false.
In Bosnia, as in most of the other republics, the Communist Party had
disintegrated in early 1990 and a set of nationalist or national parties had
been formed. From 1989 onwards the neighbouring nationalisms ofSerbia
and Croatia had become intimidating presences, with the ultimate ambitions
of Milokvic and Tudjman barely concealed. Milošević was openly
associated with the pan-Serb political projects of the Cosic and Serbian
Academy; Tudjman, as on record as believing that most of the Bosnian
Muslims were 'incontrovertibly of Croatian origin' and that Bosnia and
4
Croatia form 'an indivisible geographic and economic entity. In the autumn
and winter of 1989 senior Bosnian officials were expressing fetars that both
Serbia and Croatia would seek to redraw the map, and in March 1990 the
chambers of the Bosnian assembly met in a special joint session to denounce
the idea of making any changes to Bosnia’s borders. The situation was not
altogether symmetrical between the Serbs and the Croats, however: there
was a clear sense that it was Miloševic who was making the running, and the
official policy of Tudjman's party, the HDZ, was against the idea of any
alterations to borders -since it knew that if any such idea were admitted,
Croatia's own borders would be the first to suffer. The bombardment
ofpropaganda from Belgrade about the 'imperilment' of the Serbs in Bosma,
which had already begun by the summer of 1989, had the effect of bringing
Bosnian Croats and Muslims together on one side of the argument and
putting the Serbs on the other. When a Croat party was founded in Bosnia in
early 1990 it was an offshoot of Tudjman's HDZ, and its official policy was
to keep the borders of Bosnia inviolate. But when a Serb party was founded
in Bosnia in July, it called itself the SDS -the same as the party which was
already agitating for 'autonomy' in the Croatian Krajina andwould soon be in
open revolt.5
Party of Demoratic Action (SDA) emerging

The main Bosnian Muslim party, which called itself the “Party of Demoratic
Action” (SDA), was founded in May 1990. Its leader was Alija Izetbegović
who had been released from prison in 1988; as the chief defendant in the
most famous trial of the decade, he was a natural choice for Bosnia's first
post-Communist and non-Communist Muslim party. (Indeed, when he
eventually became head of the Bosnian government he was the only head of
government in any of the post-Communist Yugoslav republics who had not
himself been a Communist official.) Placed between the hammer and the
nai1 of Serbian and Croatian nationalism, the Bosnian Muslims, reacted in
two different ways: they strengthened their own Muslim nationalism by
giving greater emphasis to the most distinctive thing about it, its religious
component, and they also emphasized that they stood for the preservation of
Bosnia's unique character as a multi-national, multi-religious republic. The
religion expressed in the public symbolism of the SDA with banners and
crescents; and the luralist element was expressed in the programme. That
there was some real tension between elements was shown in September
1990, three months before Bosnian elections, when one of the leaders of the
SDA, the returned emigre millionaire Adil Zulfikarpašic, broke away to
found his own party, the 'Bosnian Muslim Organization' (MBO), With an
explicitely non-religious programme. Despite the very name of his new
party, Zulfikarpašic was trying to lay the foundations of a new nonsectional
5
politics, in which people would vote on their choice of political programmes

(liberal, socialist or whatever) rather than voting simply to assert their
national identity. As Izetbegovic himself pointed out, “this was unrealistic
ambition at that time”. He told to a journalist.
By their oppression Communists created this longing among people
to express their religious or national identity, perhaps in four or five
years we shall have passed through the minefield the horizon of civil
society. For now, unfortunately, our party ia small and weak. There
is a real risk ofcivil war here; our main goal as a parry is to keep
Bosnia-Hercegovina together.
But Izetbegovic himself, of course, was personally identified the religious
element of the 'religious or national identity. The treatise which had been
used as the basis of the charges against him in 1983, the Islamic Decleration,
was republished in Sarajevo in 1990. Some readers may have thought that.it
was a kind of personal manifesto for the Bosnian elections, and It has often
been represented by Serbian propagandists as a blueprint for the
transformation of Bosnia into a fundamentalist Islamic state. But no such
plans were contained either in the programme of the SDA, or in the text of
the Islamic Decleration itself.6
This treatise written in the late 1960s is a general treatise on politics and
Islam, addressed to the whole Muslim world; it is not about Bosnia and does
not even mention Bosnia. Izetbegovic starts with two basic elements: Islamic
society and Islamic government. Islamic government, he says, cannot be
introduced unless there is already an Islamic society, and the latter exists
only when the absolute majority of the people are sincere and practising
Muslims. Without this majority, the Islamic order is reduced to mere power
(because the second element, Islamic society, is lacking), and can turn into
tyranny. This provision ruled out the creation of an Islamic government in
Bosnia, where Muslims -even nominal Muslims, let alone practising and
devout ones- were in a minority. The entire discussion of the nature of an
Islamic political system, which occupies most of the book, is thus
inapplicable to Bosnia too. When Izerbegovic says, for example (in a
sentence frequently quoted in isolation by Serbian propagandists) that 'there
is no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social
and political institutions', he is referring to countries which, unlike Bosnia
have Islamic societies, and arguing that where the majonty of the people are
practising Muslims they cannot accept the imposition of non-Muslim
institutions.II There is only one passage in the entire treatise which applies
directly to the political status of the Bosnian Muslims: 'Muslim minorities
comprised in non-Muslim communities, so long as there is a guarantee of
religious freedom and nonnal life and development, are loyal and are obliged
6
to carry out all obligations towards that community, except those which
harm Islam and Muslims.7
Some of the arguments in this treatise which have been described as
'fundamentalist' are simple statements of orthodox beliefwith which any
sincere Muslim would agree: thus Izetbegovic writes that an Islamic state
should try to stamp out alcoholism, pornography and prostitution; he argues
that Islam is not simply a set of private beliefs but a whole way of life with a
social and political dimension too; and he insists that the brotherhood 0:the
entire world of Islamic believers, the umme; transcends national
boundaries.'> None of these points can be described as fundamentalist. The
very term 'fundamentalism' is, admittedly, loose and impressionistic: it is not
much used by scholars of Islam, who would want to distinguish carefully
between different kinds ofneo-conservative, radical or anti-modernist
Islamic movements, ranging from the Wahhabi doctrine of the traditionalist
Saudi Arabian state to the revolutionary ideology of Ayatollah Khorneini's
Iran;':' Instead, the term 'fundamentalism' is used mainly by politicians and
journalists to lump together a number of characteristics. One of these is
political extremism, the belief that the end of establishing •u laffik. power
justifies any and every means. Izetbegovic explicitly reject this belief,
attacking the idea of seizing power in order to form an Islamic society from
above. His central argument is that'an Islamic society can be created (in a
population the majority ofwhich an: at, least nominal Muslims) only by a
long process of religious education and moral suasion.15
Another characteristic of what is loosely called fundamentalism is a fierce
political and cultural hostility to the West. Izetbegovic does criticize the
rapid and coercive seculaiization of Turkey under Atatürk, which, he
suggests, was based on the assumptioqthat everything Islamic was culturally
backward and primitive; and he inveighs against those 'so-called
progressives, Westernizers and modernizers' who apply a similar policy
elsewhere in the Muslim world. But his general position in this treatise
certainly does 'not involve the rejection ofWestern civilization. 'From its first
foundation,' he writes, 'Islam undertook, without prejudice, the study and
collection of the sum of knowledge bequeathed to it by earlier civilizations.
We do not see why Islam today should take a different approach to the
achievements of the Euro-American civilization with which it is in such
broad conract. Izetbegovic's views on these matters were set out much more
fuUy in a longer and more important book written in the early 1980s, Is1am
Between East anti West, in which he tried to present Islam as a kind of
spiritual and intellectual synthesis which included the values of Westem
Europe. The book contained some eloquent pages in praise of Renaissance
art (including portraiture) and European literature; it described Christianity
as 'a near-union of supreme religion and supreme ethics'; and it also had a
7
special chapter praising Anglo-Saxon philosophy and culture, and the social-
democratic tradition. No fundamentalist could have written that.
Talk of a fundamentalist threat in Bosnia was in any case particularly
inappropriate, because the Bosnian Muslims were by now among the most
secularized Muslim populations in the world. Small-scale and occasional
attempts at fundamentalist agitation in Bosnia were undoubtedly made in the
1980s: one report in a London-based Muslim extremist publication proudly
declared that such agitation had 'lit the fire of Islam by inspiring hundreds of
Bosnian Muslims. 19 But even 'hundreds' of militants could have little
effect on a population of two million Muslims, the absolute majority
ofwhom did not think ofthemselves as religious believers and only followed
some of the practices of Islam as a matter of culture and tradition. One
survey in 1985 put the proportion of religious believers in Bosnia at 17 per
cent.P” Decades of secular education and Communist political culture had
been reinforced, in this respect, by an ever-increasing Westernization of
society too. The growing urbanization of Bosnia, though slow at first, had
also had an effect; by the late 1980s 30 per cent of marriages in urban
districts were 'mixed' marriages. For many rural Muslims and the vast
majority ofurban ones, being a Muslim was reduced to a set of cultural
traditions: 'Muslim names, circumcision, baklava and the celebration of
Ramazan Bajram [the feast which marks the end of the fasting month of
Ramadan], getting a godparent to cut a oneyear-old child's hair, a preference
for tiny coffee cups without handles, a sympathy for spiders and various
other traditional practices, the origins of which are frequently unknown to
those who practise them.21 No 'fundamentalist' programme could ever have
been pursued by a party which had first to gain the votes of these secularized
Muslims, and then to function in government as part of an alliance with at
least one ofthe other two national parties.
When the votes were counted in the elections of December 1990,
Izetbegovic's party gained 86 seats out of the 240 in the assembly, and other
Muslims, including Zulfikarpasic's MBO, gained another 13. The Serbian
party, the SDS, led by the Sarajevo psychiatrist (of Montenegrin origin)
Radovan Karadžć, gained 72. It had campaigned in vague terms for the
defence of Serb rights, but had not said anything about dividing Bosnia even
by peaceful methods, let alone by war; so the idea can be excluded that this
election, which broadly entitled Dr Karadžć to call himself the 'leader' ofthe
Bosnian Serbs, gave him any democratic mandate for his subsequent actions.
(Many Serbs had not in fact voted for him, and there were 13 other elected
Serbs in the assembly who did not belong to his parry.) The Croatian HDZ
gained 44 seats. Altogether there were 99 Muslims, 85 Serbs, 49 Croats and
seven 'Yugoslavs'. These proportions (41 per cent Muslim, 35 per cent Serb,
20 per cent Croat) roughly matched those of the population as a whole (44,
31 and 17 per cent respectively).22 Izetbegovic formed what was in effect a
government of national unity, constructed out.'Ofa formal coalition between
all three major parties, and the government posts were shared out between
them. That Izetbegovie acted in this way, when he could have governed the
country simply through a Muslim-Croat alliance, was a token ofgood faith.
But from ancarly stage in the life of this government, it became clear that the
&rb party had a very different agenda.
The general situation in Yugoslav politics when IzetbegoviC's government
took office at the end of 1990 was very tense. The struggle between Serbia
on the one hand and Slovenia and Croatia on the other had intensified in the
second half of the year, to the point where Serbia had slapped import duties
in October on goods from those two republics. It also became clear that
Milo§evic had simply seized a large part of the Yugoslav federal budget and
spent it on Serbia, thus torpedoing the economic reform plan with which the
federal Prime Minister, Ante Markovic, was attemPt4ls to control the
country's rocketing inflation. In December 1990 the Slovenes held a
referendum on whether their republic should become an independent and
autonomous state; over 90 per cent of the electorate voted, and the vote in
favour was 89 per cent.23 In the: hazy retrospective view of some Western
politicians in 1991-3, Slovenia's move towards independence: was regarded
as the result of German 'pressure'. But to all serious observers in Slovenia,
and Yugoslavia at the time, it was quite: clear that the pressure which was
making economic and political life within Yugoslavia impossible for the
Slovenians in late 1990 was coming directly from Belgrade.
By early 1991 Milošević was saying publicly that if there were any attempt
to replace: the federal structure of Yugoslavia with some looser, confederal
arrangement, he would seek to annex whole areas of Croatia and Bosnia. Yet
at the same time, far from defending the federal status quo, he was actively
demolishing the federal constitution. In June 1990 he had unilaterally
abolished the provincial assembly in Kosovo, reducing the status of the
province to something less than a municipality; but he continued to field a
representative of Kosovo's now non-existent local government in the federal
Yugoslav presidency. In March 1991, rattled by student demonstrations
against him in Belgrade, he tried to force the federal
President, Borisav Iovic, to declare a state ofemergency throughout the
country; when Iovic refused, Milošević engineered his resignation, and also
forced out the representatives of Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosovo.
Milošević now went on television to announce that Serbia would no longer
obey the federal presidency. For a couple of days it looked as if his
constitutional coup had entered its final phase. But then Iovic simply
returned to his post. Milošević stepped back from the brink; he also
appointed, illegally, a new 'representative' for Kosovo on the presidency. As
Branka MagaS noted at the time: 'The new man, Sejdo Bajrarnovic, is an
oddity even for recent Serbian politics: elected by 0.03 per cent of votes in
his Kosovo constituency . . . this retired army sergeant is renowned only for
his addiction to tombola. 24
The position of the Bosnian government was logical but awkward. In any
debate about changing the federal structure into a looser confederation,
Bosnia would be on the side of Slovenia and Croatia as they pressed for
change, since it too wanted to reduce the scope for the domination and
manipulation of Yugoslavia by Belgrade. But at the same time Bosnia could
not support Slovenia and Croatia all the way in these arguments. The
prospect of those two republics actually carrying out their threat to leave
Yugoslavia was deeply alarming to most Bosnians, since they would then be
left, together with another weak republic, Macedonia, entirely under Serbia's
thumb.
While Izetbegovic tried to perform this difficult balancing act during the first
half of 1991, the future ofboth Croatia and Bosnia was being openly
challenged by the Serbs. The 'Autonomous Region of the Krajina' set up by
the SOS in Croatia was becoming more militant in its demands, as it became
more heavily armed by Serbia. In May the SOS in Bosnia began demanding
the secession of large parts of northern and western Bosnia, which would
then join up with the Croatian 'Krajina' to form a new republic. Three areas
of Bosnia with predominantly Serb populations were declared 'Serb
Autonomous Regions' by the SOS, following exactly the same method that
had been used in the previous summer in Croatia. Not long after this a minor
party in Croatia, the extreme nationalist Party of Rights, demanded the
annexation by Croatia of the whole of Bosnia. More alarmingly, by July
1991 there was evidence that regular secret deliveries of arms to the Bosnian
Serbs were being arranged by MiloScvic, the Serbian Minister of the
Interior, Mihalj Kertes, and the Bosnian SDS leader, Radovan Karadžic.25
Confirmation of this came in August, when the outgoing federal Prime
Minister, Ante Markovic, released a tape recording of a telephone
conversation in which Milošević could be heard informing Karadiic that his
next delivery ofarms would be supplied to him by General Nikola Uzelac,
the federal army commander in Banja Luka.26 There could be little doubt by
now that Karadsic's actions were being directed, step by step, by the Serbian
President: he even boasted to one British journalist in August that he and
Milošević 'speak several times a week on the phonet. 27
By then, full-scale war had begun in Yugoslavia. The final straw tor
Slovenia and Croatia had been Serbia's refusal in May to accept a Croatian,
Stipe Mesic, as the next holder of the automatically rotating federal
presidency. The federal system, which Serbia claimed to be defending, was
once again paralysed. Croatia then held a referendum (on 19 May) on full
independence: 92 per cent voted in favour. On 25 June both Croatia and
Slovenia declared independence; a column of federal army tanks entered
Slovenia the next morning. Encouraged both by the EEC, which had stated
in April that it was committed to the 'unity and territorial integrity of
Yugoslavia', and by America's Secretary of State James Baker, who had
made a similar pledge in Belgrade on 20 June, Milošević felt that he could
quickly make an example ofSlovenia pour encourR-iJer les R-utres.211 The
Serb-dominated federal army leadership, which broadly shared Milošević's

aims (it depended on a continuing Yugoslavia for its privileges, its finances -
more than 55 per cent of the federal budget -and its whole system of military
industries), thought it could quickly intimidate both Slovenia and Croatia
back into line. But Slovenia mounted a well-planned resistance, and was
soon dropped from Milošević's and the army's strategic plans. In Croatia
there was a two-track policy: general military intimidation (rather than
conquest, to begin with) directed at Croatia as a whole, and at the same time
a consolidation of the pockets of Serbpopulated territory which were already
controlled by armed Serbs.
By late August both of these operations had escalated to the point offull-
scale war: towns were now being attacked in Slavonia, and in September the
bombardment of Dubrovnik began. 29
A particularly ominous feature of the fighting, foreshadowing the war in
Bosnia) was the use of Serbian irregular forces. 'The strategy', one
commentator noted in September 1991, 'seems to be to link up various
pockets ofSerbian settlement by driving out the Croats in between through
terror and intimidation. 30 Small paramilitary units had been functioning
since 1990 in the Serb-held regions of Croatia: they had been used in such
operations as the attack on the Plitvice National Park in March 1991. Early
in 1991 the Minister ofthe Interior in Belgrade, Mihalj Kertes, had set up a
training camp for such a force, to be known as the 'Serbian Volunteer
Guard') under the command of Zeljko Raznjatovic, better known as 'Arkan'.
Arkan was a mafia-style criminal wanted by Interpol for several offences
and widely suspected ofhaving worked for the Yugoslav Secret Service in
the surveillance and/or assassination of Yugoslav emigres.” To begin with,
this force was financed by the Interior Ministry; later in the year, when it had
become known as 'Arkan's Tigers', it was self-financing -indeed, highly
profitable -with truckloads oflooted goods sent back from Croatian towns
and villages.
A similar force was the self-styled 'Cetnik' army set up by the Serbian
extremist Vojislav Šešelj, a man who had been prosecuted in 1985 for
publishing a demand that Yugoslavia be divided into two states, Serbia and
Croatia, with Bosnia shared out between them.32 Šešelj was now leader of
the extreme nationalist 'Serbian Radical Party', a position from which he
could engage in a kind of competitive auction of nationalist policies with
Milošević. (The competition was on a basis of mutual support, however: it
was Milošević who engineered Šešelj's election to the Serbian parliament in
July 1991.) 32 In an interview with Der Spiegel in early August 1991, he
presented the latest version of his plan, which involved transferring to Serbia
the whole of Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and most ofCroatia, leaving
the Croats with 'what you can see from the top of Zagreb Cathedral'. Asked
by the interviewer about Bosnia, he replied: 'The Muslims of Bosnia are in
fact Islamicized Serbs, and part of the population of so-called Croats consists
in fact of Catholic Serbs.' The interviewer continued: 'What if the Muslims

resist the suppression of their status as a nation?' Šešelj: 'In that case, we
willkick the mout of Bosnia. “Where to?''To Anatolia”. 34
With such views being openly expressed by Bosnian Serbs too, the
possibility of any political solution to the crisis within Bosnia was utterly
remote. One well-intentioned but doomed attempt was made in early August
by the minor Muslim party) the MBO, whose leader, Zulfikarpasic, tried to
establish a 'historic agreement' with Karadžć guaranteeing the integrity of the
Bosnian republic. As the deputy leader of the MBO, Professor Muhamed
Filipovic, explained: 'The Serbs are armed to the teeth, they have created a
state within a state in Bosnia . . . It is possible that a conflict between Serbs
and Muslims will break out any day. To prevent this, an attempt is being
made to sign an agreement on the preservation of the integrity of Bosnia.'
Such an agreement could be nothing more than a political pledge between
one large party and one small one; it could have no constitutional status, and
President Izetbegovic, who was trying to hold together a tri-national
government, objected to it on the grounds that the Croats had not even been
consulted. But in any case it was hard to see what such a pledge from
Karadžć could mean, when his own party was declaring large parts of the
country 'Serb Autonomous Regions' and demanding their secession from
Bosnia. A few days after Izetbegovic had expressed his criticisms, the SOS
representatives on the republican presidency took their opportunity to
declare that they would boycott the presidency meetings from now on. 35
In September 1991 the Bosnian Serbs -or rather, that tiny proportion ofthem
which was active in the local SOS leadership took their next step. The 'Serb
Autonomous Regions', of which there were now four, asked the federal army
to intervene to 'protect' them, after a number ofminor local incidents and
shootings. (They were by now, thanks to the help ofthe federal army and the
Ministry ofthe Interior, extremely well armed.) Federal troops were
immediately deployed: a column of one hundred vehicles was sent to
western Hercegovina, another column moved to the communications centre
in Nevesinje, and 5000 troops were sent into Hercegovina from Sarajevo. By
the end of September these forces had establ ished the 'borders' of the 'Serb
Autonomous Region of Hercegovina'; they had also created a heavily
manned military launching-point for their operations against Dubrovnik, just
over the Bosnian-Croatian border. 36 (As a quid pro quo, the Serbs of
Hercegovina sent hundreds of their own men, led by the mayor of Trebinje,
to assist in the bombardment ofthe Croatian city.) These were not the only
federal army operations on Bosnian soil; the tanktraining centre at Banja
Luka had been one ofthe bases ofoperations against Croatia from mid-
August. A federal armoured column, heading for Vukovar, tried to pass
through the Visegrad area at the end of September and was stopped by
Muslim and Croat civilians: it opened fire on them. 37
The situation was becoming intolerable for the Bosnian government.

President Izetbegovic, who had once remarked that choosing between
Tudjman and Milošević was like having to choose between leukaemia and a
brain tumour, declared in early October that Bosnia was neutral between
Serbia and Croatia. Radovan Karadiic denounced this declaration as 'an anti-
Serb act', explaining that the war in Croatia was a war against a 'vampirised
fascist consciousness'. Only a sovereign government, he said, could declare
neutrality. 38 On that last point he was strictly correct; and the Bosnian
assembly was now beginning seriously to debate the idea ofdeclaring
Bosnian sovereignty. By this it meant not full independence but legislative
sovereignty within Yugoslavia, so that it would be able, in legal theory at
least, to pass laws overriding the federal army's rights to use its territory. On
14 October Karadiic marched his deputies out of the assembly, which then
voted for Bosnian sovereignty. A few days later Karadžć and his party set up
what they called a 'Serb National Assembly' in the federal army stronghold
of Banja Luka, assuming all the trappings of a parliament, a government, and
indeed a state.39
The steps taken by Karadžć and his party -'Autonomous Regions”, the
arming of the Serb population, minor local incidents, non-stop propaganda,
the request for federal army 'protection', the Serb 'parliament' -matched
exactly what had been done in Croatia. Few observers could doubt that a
single plan was in operation. Any lingering uncertainties about the nature of
the plan were dispelled at the congress of Milošević's Serbian Socialist Party
at Pec on 9 October 1991. The vice-president of the party, the former
dissident philosopher Mihailo Markovic, described very clearly in his
speech to the congress the nature ofthe carve-up which he and his master
were planning:
In the new Yugoslav state there will be at least three federal units: Serbia,
Montenegro and a united Bosnian and Knin region [i.e, a territory consisting
of some of the Bosnian 'Serb Autonomous Regions' and the main Croatian
one]. If the Bosnian Muslims wish to remain in the new Yugoslav state, they
will be allowed to do so. If they try to secede, they must know that . . . the
Bosnian Muslims' state will be encircled by Serbian territory.
Commenting on this speech at the time, I wrote: 'Mr Milošević's plan, then,
is for a country which would be Yugoslavia in name, but Greater Serbia in
reality, with the option of a sort of enfeebled Muslim Bophutatswana in the
middle.t'“ Terms such as Bophutatswana and Bantustan would be heard
more often during discussions ofthe future ofthe Bosnian Muslims in 1993.
Such clear declarations of Serbia's war aims were ignored, however, by most
Western leaders, and by the EEC-appointed negotiator, Lord Carrington,
who continued to believe that some looser version of the old federal
Yugoslavia was still feasible. In September the United Nations imposed an
arms embargo on the whole ofthe Yugoslav territory: this had little effect on
the Yugoslav federal army, with its massive stockpiles and its large
armaments industry, but it did weaken the Croatian forces which were just
beginning to hold the federal army to a stalemate in many parts of western
and north-eastern Croatia. Had they been properly armed, they might have
been able to repel the attacks on cities such as Vukovar; as it was, they held
on there with extraordinary tenacity, to the point where the federal army
generals began to fed that the conquest of territory in Croatia was an
operation with steeply diminishing returns. (When Vukovar eventually fell,
with almost every building in the city destroyed, Arkan's men 'cleaned up'
the city and killed hundreds of its inhabitants.) The Croatian government did
manage to establish supply-lines for weaponry from ex exWarsaw Pact
countries and the Middle East; and a further blow to Serbia's plans was the
international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, which was finally agreed
by the EEC, at Germany's insistence, in mid-December, and came into
effect on 15 January 1992. A peace settlement in Croatia, negotiated by the
UN representative Cyrus Vance, was agreed a few weeks later: it placed the
territory conquered by the federal and Serb irregular forces in a limbo of
'UN-protected' zones, the long-term status of which remained very unclear.
The recognition of Croatia helped to end the war in that republic. It was in
any case recognition of reality: any idea that Croatia could have been
persuaded to rejoin a federal Yugoslavia, after cities such as Vukovar had
been reduced to rubble, was utterly unreal. One consequence of this move,
however, was that it was now necessary for Bosnia to seek independence
too; otherwise it would be left in a rump Yugoslavia under Serbian control.
The EEC had understood this, inviting applications for independence from
the other republics and asking Bosnia, as a condition ofrecognition, to hold a
referendum on the question. Lord Carrington complained that the EEC had
shot his horse, ruining his plans for a general settlement for all six republics
within the framework of Yugoslavia. But it is quite clear that his plans
would never have been accepted by the Croats or the Slovenians, and would
not have satisfied Serbia's ambitions either: his horse was already broken-
backed. 41 The only thing that has given Lord Carrington's complaints an
aura of plausibility is the fact that the move of Bosnia towards indepen-
dence was used as a pretext by Milokvic and to begin the military phase
oftheir carve-up of Bosnia.
The military planning was well advanced. Important commun-ications
centres in Bosnia had been occupied by the army in the autumn of 1991.
Heavy artillery positions were constructed round major Bosnian towns,
including Sarajevo, in the winter of 1991-2. As the fighting wound down in
Croatia in January and February, columns of federal army tanks and artillery
were 'withdrawn', with the approval of the UN, into Bosnia. Extraordinarily,
President
Izetbegovic had even allowed the army to confiscate the weapons supplies of
the local territorial defence units: it seems that he was trying thereby to
assure the army commanders of his own peaceful intentions, and he may also
have been misled, as was surely intended, l by the army's 'confiscation'

ofarms from some ofthe Serb paramilitary forces too. 43 That the army was
not impartial or unpolitical was made evident on 29 February and 1 March,
when the referendum was held in Bosnia. While Karadžić's SDS forbade
Serbs to votC.in, the referendum and erected road-blocks to prevent
ballot..:~es entering the areas of Bosnia it controlled, federal army 'planes
dropped leaflets supporting the boycott. Roughly 64 per cent of;the
electorate did vote, however, including many thousands ofSerbs in the major
cities, on a ballot-paper which asked: 'Arc you in favour ofasovereign and
independent Bosnia-Hercegovina,astate of-equal citizens and nations of
Muslims, Serbs, Croats and others who live in it?'43 Almost unanimously,
they voted 'yes'.
On the morning of 2 March 1992, the day when the results of the referendum
were announced, members of Serb paramilitary forces set up barricades and
sniper positions near the parliament building in Sarajevo. For twenty-four
hours it looked as .if the military takeover of Bosnia had begun; but
thousands of Sarajevo citizens came out onto the streets -in front of the
snipers -to demonstrate, and for some reason the coup was aborted. The
ostensible reason for the action had been the shooting ofa Serb by two young
Muslims at a wedding party in Sarajevo on the previous day. This killing,
which seems to have arisen from a sudden flare-up of tempers with no
premeditation, was taken as an excuse to denounce Muslim 'terrorism'. 44
The tactic was transparent; and of course no one had ever thought oferecting
barricades in Sarajevo to protest at the numerous killings of Muslims and
othersuch incidents in previous months, such as the shooting of Mehmed
Ganibegovic by members of a Serb paramilitary group in Sipovo on 7
October, or the machine-gunning of the Mehmed-aga mosque in TuzIa by
federal army reservists on 13 October.45
Still one possible choice remained for the Serb politicians: between the
carve-up of Bosnia by military means, and the carve-up of Bosnia by
political means backed with the threat of armed force . This second method
remained a possibility until the last week of March, and it depended very
much on the attitude of the Bosnian Croats. Some degree of symmetry had
been observable for a long time between the Serbian and Croatian positions
on Bosnia: in March 1991 Presidents Milošević and Tudjman had met to
discuss possible ways of dividing Yugoslavia, and the division of Bosnia had
been on their agcnda.r” But the symmetry was only partial: Serbia had gone
much further, much earlier, and whereas the Bosnian Serbs had set up
'Autonomous Regions' in May 1991 and a 'parliament' in October 1991
(finally declaring a Bosnian 'Serb Republic' on 27 March 1992), the Croat
counterpart, the 'Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna', was not proclaimed
until July 1992, after three months ofSerbian military offensive in Bosnia.
The leader of the Croat party in Bosnia, Stjepan Kljuic, was in favour
ofpreserving Bosnia's borders, and his party voted in favour ofBosnian
independence. Even the notion ofturning Bosnia into a Swiss-style
confederation of 'cantons' did not appeal to the HDZ leadership. As the

General Secretary of the party, Ivan Markdic, said in October 1991: 'Even in
a so-called “Serb” region such as Banja Luka, there are 120,000 Croats. We
cannot divide Bosnia into national cantons. In Switzerland the cantons were
there first, and Switzerland was created out of them. But in Bosnia cantons
would mean dividing the country, and you could not do that without a
war.'47
However, a lobby of Hercegovinan Croats, led by Mate Boban, had steadily
increased its influence within the party, and in January 1992, in a move
widely regarded as engineered by Croatia's President Tudjman, Boban
replaced Kljuic as leader ofthe Bosnian HDZ. 48 The Croats of Hercegovina
had some reason to be more hard-line, having witnessed the military build-
up and the establishment of the 'Serb Autonomous Region' there. (They were
also in close touch with the Croatian paramilitary force, the HOS; in late
1991 they refused to hand over the weapons of their territorial defence force
to the federal army, and began making their own preparations.) 49 The
general pattern of events, both military and political, was that the Croats
were responding to Serb initiatives and, to some extent, imitating them. Thus
when the SDS issued a map proposing the national 'cantonization' of Bosnia
(with roughly 70 per cent of the territory as Serb cantons) in December
1991, the HDZ replied not long afterwards with a map of its own (with
roughly 30 per cent as Croat cantonsj.s” It was quite clear that what the
Serbs meant by cantonization was setting up a constitutional half-way house
from which they could move to the full secession that they had previously
demanded; and when Radovan Karadžć went to Austria at the end
ofFebruary 1992 to discuss the future of Bosnia with Milošević and
Tudjman, it was partition, not cantonal confederation, that they talked about.
61 But the EEC and Lord Carrington, keen to clutch at the straw of
cantonization, chaired several negotiations on this topic between the three
main Bosnian parties in Brussels and Lisbon during March. On 9 March it
was the Serb delegation which refused to accept a plan for a federal Bosnian
constitution in which each national group would have had a veto on any
major political or economic issue.52 Later that month the EEC pushed
strongly for a 'cantonal' plan based on a modified version ofthe Serb map.
The plan was at first accepted by all three sides as the basis for further
negotiations; then the Croat HDZ rejected it on 24 March, followed by
Izetbegovic's party, the SDA, on the next day. That the Croats had rejected it
first is not surprising, since it gave them only 17 per cent of Bosnian territory
and left 59 percent of the Croat population in non-Croat cantons.53
The only thing which all such plans demonstrated in the end was the
impossibility of making any such divisions in a way that would not leave
hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens unhappy with the result. The
majority of Bosnians had in any case voted for a democratic and independent
Bosnia of equal citizens. Leaving aside the torrent of rhetoric in the Serb
media about how Bosnia was in the grip of an 'Ustaša-fundamentalist
coalition', there is no sign that any intelligent observer ever believed that
discriminatory laws were being introduced, or even dreamed of, by the
Bosnian government against any national group in Bosnia. But a kind of
political psychosis had been created by the Serb and Serbian politicians and
media, in which the 'defence' of the 'rights' of the Bosnian Serbs was given
such absolute status that people ceased even to wonder whether they were
really under attack. Once this psychosis was fully established, the final step
to military action was a small one to take.
5.2 The 1992-1995 war

The radicalization of the Yugoslav crisis and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
After Tito's death in 1980, there were open calls in some Serb intellectual
and political circles for the 1974 Constitution to be annulled. Particular
emphasis was laid, in this context on revoking the autonomy of Vojvodina
and Kosovo. In the mid-19805, with these demands thwarted by the balance
of power at the Federal level, there was open talk of the destruction of
Yugoslavia to create “Greater Serbia”. At the eighth session of the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, held in 1987
extremist greater-Serbian forces seized power in an “anti-bureaucratic
revolution;” in reality, they were dismantling the constitutional foundations
of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1989, the Presidency of
SFRY found itself in crisis, and the General Headquarters of the Yugoslav
National Army (JNA) as Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of SFR
was brought to the fore, authorized to make decisions independently. This
meant that a coven coup d'etat had been carried out in Yugoslavia.8
In the summer of 1990, three so-called national political parties were formed
in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Bosnian Muslim Party for Democratic
Action (SDA, in the local language), the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS. in
the local language), and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ, in the local
language). These three parties won the first free, multi-party elections, held
on 9 November 1990. They beat the former Communists, who had
constituted themselves as the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and
Herzegovina (SDP BiH) by winning among them 202 of the 240 seats in the
Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The SDA won 87 seats, the SDS 71,
and the HDZ 44. The three parties formed a coalition government and took
over power as a whole in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In reality, each in its own
way, the SDS above all, began from the very outset to undermine the
institutions of state, driving the country still deeper into crisis.
Not even the restoration of multi-party life throughout the country in1990
was able to help stabilize the state, which had been deliberately destabilized
8
M. Imamovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Evolution of its Political and Legal
Institutions, “MAGISTRAT Sarajevo”, 2006, p. 385.
with the intent of making the “Greater Serbia” project a reality. Worse, it had
now been joined by a “Greater Croatia” project. The only way either could
be achieved was at the expense of Bosnia and Herzegovina and by the
genocide of the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniacs). Serbia, Montenegro and
Croatia, aggressor countries against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and aided by
sundry paramilitary groups, perpetrated the worst war crimes and atrocities
in Europe since the end of World War II. More than 160,000people were
killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, most of them Bosnian Muslims, and more
than a million were driven from their homes to live as refugees or displaced
persons.
The international community described these events as violations of
international law and, in particular, of the 1948 Geneva Conventions, which
outlawed the crime of genocide. Under the terms of UN Security Council
Resolution 808 of 19 February 1993 and Resolution 824 of 25 May 1993,
the Security Council established an International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia “for the sole purpose of prosecuting persons responsible
for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the
territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991”.
The Security Council also adopted the Statute of the IC~ which was to have
its headquarters in The Hague, in the Netherlands, Here, on 3 December
1993, the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina signed a
Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation with the prosecutor of the
Tribunal. In addition, on 6 April 1995, the Government issued a decree with
legislative force on extradition, at the request of the Tribunal, of all persons
suspected of serious violations of international humanitarian law committed
since 1991.
Constitutional changes in Serbia

In 1988 and 1989, during the course of the “anti-bureaucratic revolution,”
the central Party committees of Kosovo and Vojvodina were stripped of their
powers. In early July 1990, as part of this illegal process, the Assembly of
the Autonomous Province of Kosovo was de facto dissolved by decision of
the Assembly of Serbia. In early September, in response, the Albanian
members of the disbanded Assembly of Kosovo proclaimed the
“independent and sovereign” Republic of Kosovo at a secret meeting held in
Kačanik.
On 28 September1990, the Assembly of Serbia promulgated a new Serbian
Constitution, under the terms of which the two autonomous provinces were
stripped of the attributes of statehood guaranteed them by the 1974
Constitution. Their status was reduced to that of territorial autonomy without
political or economic powers.
By way of response to this policy of national repression and denial of
reconstitution rights to nationality in Serbia, on19 May1991, a Bosnian
Muslim National Council of the Sandzak was constituted. This council

issued a declaration under the terms of which it would hence forth protect all
the interests of the Bosnian Muslims in Serbia within its jurisdiction.
Constitutional changes in Croatia and Slovenia

On 22 December 1990, the Croatian Parliament adopted the so-called
Christmas Constitution, which dismantled the principles of socialist
constitutionality that had pertained up to that time and restored the principles
of a “single, indivisible democratic and social state”. On 20 February, the
Slovenian Assembly adopted a constitutional amendment that defined
Slovenia as an independent state which, “as one of the successors to SFRY
would govern its relations with other states on the basis of international
law”.
In line with these policies, Slovenia and Croatia both declared
independenceon25June1991.Althoughtheydid so on the same day; the actual
declarations of independence were rather different in tone. On 25 June 1991,
the Slovenian Assembly adopted a Declaration of Independence and
Secession from SFRY A mere month later on 30 July, the Slovenian
Assembly adopted a Decision of Moratorium, suspending its secession from
SFRY by three months.
The Croatian Parliament, on the other hand, unanimously passed a
Declaration on the Proclamation of an Independent and Sovereign State,
which marked the start of the process of secession from SFRY The
Parliament also adopted, at the same time, a Charter on the Rights of Serbs
and Other National Minorities, the provisions of which were never actually
put into practice.
The internationalization of the Yugoslav issue

Meanwhile, on 26 February 1991, the Constitutional Committee of SFRY
offered a draft accord on some kind of confederal structure for the Yugoslav
state, and appealed to the republican assemblies to uphold the 1974
Constitution. At the same time, the appropriate SFRY authorities also
submitted a request to the European Community for assistance in resolving
the Yugoslav constitutional and political deadlock. The European
Community adopted a Declaration on Yugoslavia under the terms of which it
proposed to convene a peace conference on the former Yugoslavia and to
establish an independent international Arbitration Commission to rule on the
matter. This Commission, the five members of which were elected from
among the EC countries' Constitutional Court judges, was set up in the
autumn of1991. It was headed by the president of France's Conseil
constitutionnel, Robert Badinter, As a result, the Commission became
known as the Badinter Commission.
In Brussels, on 17 December 1991, 'the Badinter Commission issued a

Declaration on the Guidelines on the Recognition of New States in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, which determined the general criteria to serve
as guidelines for the EC in the recognition of new states “in conformity with
normal standards of international practice and political reality in any
particular case”. The final deadline for submitting applications for
recognition was set as 23 December 1991, by which dace Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia submitted applications. Serbia and
Montenegro submitted no such application. Their governments stated that
Serbia and Montenegro had gained recognition as fully independent states by
decision of the 1878 Congress of Berlin and that, ever since then, they had
enjoyed full international legality and legitimacy.
On 11January 1992, when considering Bosnia and Herzegovina's application
to be recognized as an independent state, the Badinter
Commission stated that (1) the current constitution of the Socialist Republic
of Bosnia and Herzegovina defined Bosnia and Herzegovina as a “sovereign
democratic-state” guaranteeing equal rights to its citizens and peoples, the
Muslims, Serbs and Croats, along with the members of other peoples and
nationalities living on its territory; (2) Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a
democratic state enjoying the rule of law was in a position to uphold human
rights; (3) the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina had provided
assurances that the republic had no territorial pretensions of any kind in
regard to its neighboring states; and(4) Bosnia and Herzegovina had
undertaken to uphold the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act and all other
international instruments guaranteeing human, civil and political rights and
freedoms.
On 15 January 1992, basing its decision on all the materials available to it,
the Badinter Commission ruled that SFRY had officially ceased to exist.
This was subsequently confirmed by the appropriate UN Security Council
Resolutions. As a result, 15January1992 maybe regarded as the date of the
official dissolution of SFRY the date when it ceased to exist.
5.3 Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state

On 15 October 1991, the Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted a
Memorandum on Independence, although, of the total of 240 deputies, the
71 members of the Serbian Democratic Party abstained, walking out before
the vote as a mark of protest.9
A referendum was held on 29 February and 1 March 1992 at which the
citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for an independent, sovereign
state. On 4 March 1992, the Assembly confirmed the decision, again in the
9
M. Imamovic, Ibid, p. 389.
absence of the SOS deputies. This constitutional act confirmed Bosnia and
Herzegovina as a sovereign, independent state of equal citizens and peoples,
Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and others.
Following this, on 27 March 1992s a total of 77 Serb deputies (71

From the SDS and six from other parties) quit the Assembly of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. They held their own separate session at which they adopted the
Constitution of the “Serb nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina” and proclaimed
that they regarded this “Serb national entity” as a federal entity within what
was left of Yugoslavia, or rump Yugoslavia. This gave rise to a situation
known in law as “de facto government,” which operated in defiance of the
fact that the EC and the UN repeatedly stated that they respected the
territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole. This de facto
situation was legalized by the 1995 Dayton Agreement as Republika Srpska,
on the same day as Serbian aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina
began. 6 April 1992, the European Community recognized the international
personality as a state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, on 21 and 22 May
1992, the Republic ofBosnia and Herzegovina was admitted to the United
Nations.
TIN war against Bosnia and Herzegovina

Although war was already being waged against Bosnia and Herzegovina in
one way or another for almost a year, the Assembly of Bosnia and
Herzegovina declared an “imminent threat of war” only on 8 April 1992, as
a result of the effective occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the ]NA.
At the same time, the Assembly authorized the Presidency to issue decisions
with the force of law. Pursuant to this, on 4 May 1992 the Presidency issued
a decision proclaiming a state of war, explicitly naming rump Yugoslavia
(Serbia and Montenegro), the former JNA, and paramilitary groups of
Bosnian and other Serbs as the aggressors against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Presidency also decided to call for foreign military assistance, which
was formalized as a decision on 27 May 1992.
Legally speaking, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a war of
aggression, with all its legal implications. The object of the aggression was
the multi-national state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war, or aggression,
was planned, prepared for, launched, and waged by the Socialist Republic of
Yugoslavia (that is, by Serbia and Montenegro) and Croatia. This legal
description of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina was confirmed on 30
May 1992 by UN Security Council Resolution 757, under the terms of which
economic and diplomatic sanctions against SR Yugoslavia were introduced,
while Croatia was threatened with similar sanctions.
On 18 December 1992, the UN General Assembly adopted a new resolution

on “the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, strongly and unambiguously
condemning Serbia and Montenegro for “for violation of the sovereignty,
territorial integrity and political independence of the Republic of Bosnia and
Herzegovina and urging the Security Council to “call upon the Serbian and
Montenegrin forces to ... bring to an end the aggressive acts against the
Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina... no later than 15January 1993”. This
UN Resolution, in common with its predecessors, was not enforced; rather,
the international community began to misrepresent the nature of the war
against Bosnia and Herzegovina seeking to represent the act of foreign
invasion of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an “internal armed conflict,” or civil
war. between the country's three ethnic groups. The war against Bosniaand
Herzegovina did indeed have certain features of a civil war, but the “internal
conflict” that arose was generated by foreign aggression, and two of the
“three warring parties” were on the side of the aggressors.
In 1992, the Croatian Defense Council (HVO, in the local language) was
formed as the armed forces of the Croatian Union of
Herceg Bosna, later renamed the Republic of Herceg Bosna. In effect,
Herceg Bosna was the counterpart in every respect to the Serb Republic in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the sole, but vital, difference that it was not
recognized as a “de facto government” by either the Washington Agreement
or the Dayton Agreement.
The Washington Agreement and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
In line with the agreement between Serbs and Croats to carve up Bosnia and
Herzegovina between them, aimed conflict broke out in early 1993 between
the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, who had, until then, been allies in the
fight against Greater Serbian aggression. The conflict covered mainly central
Bosnia and the Nererva valley.The United States intervened in early 1994 to
bring the conflict to an end with the Washington Agreement, which
established the Federation ofBosnia and Herzegovina as a kind ofalliance
between Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
The Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was
promulgated on 30 March 1994. Under the terms of this Constitution,
“Bosnian Muslims and Croats, as constituent peoples (along with Others)and
citizens of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the exercise of their
sovereign rights, transform the internal structure of the territories with a
majority of Bosnian Muslim and Croat population in the Republic of Bosnia
and Herzegovina into a Federation, which is composed of federal units with
equal rights and responsibilities”.
The Federation consists of ten cantons, enjoying considerable powers and
jurisdiction in all areas of governance. It also has a bicameral federal
parliament and federal government.
The Washington Agreement also stipulated that “Decisions on the

constitutional status of the territories of the Republic of Bosnia and
Herzegovina with a majority of Serb population shall be made in the course
of negotiations towards a peaceful settlement and at the ICFY'“. The talks
held in Dayton in November 1995were in a sense part of the International
Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY).
The Dayton Peace Agreement

Throughout the years of aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, peace
plan after peace plan was launched. Common to all of these plans, and to the
various peace missions, was that they imagined peace being established in
Bosnia and Herzegovina by partitioning the country along ethnic lines,
retaining it as an unstable but internationally recognized state. Maps were
drawn and endless “constituent entities” proposed within th is ostensibly
“integral” state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The first such peace plan, or, more properly speaking, “European working
draft,” for the future constitutional structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina was
drawn up in March 1992 by a Portuguese diplomat, Juan Cutilliero. He was
followed as peace mediator by a US politician, Cyrus Vance, soon joined by
Britain's David Owen. When Vance pulled out, his place was taken by a
Norwegian diplomat, Thorwald Stoltenberg. Not one of these plans came to
anything; diplomatic efforts had no active military backing on the ground? It
was only when the US intervened militarily in the autumn of1995 that the
aggressors in Bosnia and Herzegovina were brought to the negotiating table.
Peace talks were held during the first three weeks of November 1995 in the
US Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. The result ing peace agreements were
formally signed in Paris on 14 December 1995 by representatives of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia (SR Yugoslavia), and by the
“sponsors,” members of the Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia, the
US, and Great Britain). The fact that Serbia and Croatia were signatories to
the agreement signified implicit recognition and confirmation of the act
ofaggressionagainstBosniaand Herzegovina, which had lasted for almost
four years, killed 160,000 people, and given rise to the greatest refugee
crisis in Europe since World War II. Under the terms of the Dayton
Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in effect, had fourteen separate
constitutions, together forming the country's constitutional system. First is
the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina itself (Annex 4 of the Dayton
Agreement), followed by the constitutions of the two constitutional entities
of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Federation and Republika Srpska), and the
ten cantonal constitutions of the Bosnian Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia
and Herzegovina. On 5 March 1999,a further constitution was added, that of
Brcko District, as the country's fourth constitutional component. The Dayton
Constitution stipulated that Bosnia and Herzegovina was to be “a democratic
state, which shall operate under the rule of law and with free and democratic
elections”. The rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention for
the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its
Protocols form an integral part of the Constitution and “shall apply directly
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These shall have priority over all other law”.
Although the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina incorporates and
stipulates a number of institutional legal mechanisms for the enforcement of
these provisions, in practice they have-so far proven to be extremely hard to
enforce.
Bosnia and Herzegovina and the International Community

In early 1992, when the European Union became involved in the events
surrounding Bosnia and Herzegovina, the international community's so-
called mediators, disregarded the fact of aggression and, instead, treated the
three warring parties on an equal footing, which meant that they equated the
victim with the aggressor. Although economic sanctions were imposed on
rump Yugoslavia, and a number of Serb and Croat politicians were declared
war criminals, Vance, Owen, and Stoltenberg provided them with legitimacy
by meeting them at the negotiatingtable. The international mediators dealt
with both aggressor and victim in line with their military strength at the time,
which served via facti to legalize territorial conquest and genocide
(euphemistically dubbed “ethnic cleansing”). The European Union treated
the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina as a humanitarian disaster,
which led to a distortion of the legal nature of the war, with aggression
represented as civil War. This enabled the aggressors to use civil war as
another means of aggression.
The international community neither defeated the ultra-nationalist aggressors
nor protected their victims. With representatives of the international
community extending only feeble threats and misrepresenting the nature of
the conflict so as to justify their own inaction, the armed perpetrators of grue
some “ethnic cleansing” ravaged Bosnian society, which had shared many of
the democratic values and convictions that the West claims as its own
achievements and central to its identity. In reality, the Western mediators
demonstrated that they followed the politics of appeasement, of making
concessions to aggressors and criminals; they showed that they were the kind
of politicians ofwhom Winston Churchill said, “an appeaser is one who
feeds a crocodile, hopingitwill eat him last”.3 IgnorantWesterndiplomats
persistantly sought to draw a kind of cloak of morality over the dismal
reality in Bosnia, and thereby to bring matters to a close in the eyes of the
world and their own consciences. They neither saw, nor wished to see, that
the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina was cataclysmic, a disaster that
destroyed many mental worlds, to which the international community, and
Europe above all, made no small contribution.
The fundamental question, finally, is why the aggression and war against
Bosnia, and the genocide, were represented and conducted internationally as
a peace-keeping operation. In this “peace-keeping” operation, Bosnia and the
Bosnian Muslims were deprived of their right to self-defense. The Bosnian

Muslims were not regarded as victims, but turned into one of the “warring
parties”. In line with this, the Dayton Agreement wholly ignored the fact that
the Bosnian Muslims were the victims of genocide. The euphemism “ethnic
cleansing” suggested that all “sides in the war” had perpetrated it. In this
way.the differences and distinctions were systematically erased between a
war ofdefense, in which there had been certain local and individual excesses,
and a campaign of conquest and destruction that had long been planned and
prepared. This has deprived the Bosnian Muslims even ofjustice. This
equivalence, however, is the Western condition for the future of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. The words of the famous Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, to
the effect that persuading the victim to accept the outcome of genocide is
also genocide, have been forgotten. As regards state law, this means forcing
the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to accept the existing partition of
Bosnia and Herzegovina into ethnically-based entities. This has no historical,
nor ethnic, nor economic, nor geographical basis or justification. The only
basis for such a partition is aggression and genocide. The aftermath of
genocide can thus be annulled, from the point of view of state law, only by
replacing the Dayton Agreement with a constitution that returns to the
fundamental principles of ZAVNOBiH. This would restore Bosnia and
Herzegovina as a modern, civic state in line with its long history as a legal
entity.10
5.4 The destruction of Bosnia: 1992-1993

On 6 April 1992 Bosnia was recognized as an independent state by the EC.
There had been brief moments of quasi-autonomy or semi-independence
during the previous two centuries -Husejn-kapetan's ascendancy in 1831, the
national government in Sarajevo in July 1878, the handing of power by
Baron Sarkotic to the Bosnian National Council in November 1918 -but
properly speaking this was Bosnia's first appearance as an independent state
since 1463. Commentators were quick to point out that Bosnia had spent the
intervening 529 years as part of two empires, a kingdom and a Communist
federal republic. Bosnia could never be a state, they claimed, because it
contained three different nationalities; history showed that it could exist only
as part of a larger whole. The first of these claims begged the question of
whether only nation-states are viable states. If so, the majority of the 170-
odd member-states of the United Nations must be deemed unviable. As for
the lesson of history, what it indicated was not that Bosnia had to be kept in
check by a larger power to prevent it from destroying itself from within, but
almost the opposite: what had always endangered Bosnia was not any
genuinely internal tensions but the ambitions of larger powers and
neighboring states. The history of Bosnia shows that, leaving aside the
10
M. Imamovic, Ibid, p. 395.
economic conflict between landowners and peasants, the “national'

animosities within the country have reached the point of inter-ethnic
violence only as a result of pressures coming from outside Bosnia's borders.
Even the conflict between landowners and peasants was significantly -
perhaps decisively -intensified by the international political situation during
the nineteenth century, with the rise of a semi-autonomous Serbia creating a
sense of embattled isolation among the Bosnian Muslim ruling class.11
A long process of nationalist competition between Serbia and Croatia had,
from the late nineteenth century onwards, made Bosnia's internal politics
much more intractable than they would otherwise have been, by persuading
the Orthodox and Catholic Bosnians that they should think of themselves as
Serbs and Croats. After they had been joined in the same country with Serbia
and Croatia for seventy-four years, it was natural that many of the members
of these communities in Bosnia would identify with those two ethnic
fatherlands. But once Yugoslavia had ceased to exist, the very same fact
which made the preservation of Bosnia difficult -its nationally mixed
population -also made it imperative. So kaleidoscopically intermingled were
these two peoples, together with a third which had no other fatherland to
look to, that their separation could only be achieved at an appalling and
unjustifiable cost. The price demanded of ordinary Bosnians that would have
enabled them to live together in peace, on the other hand, was a
comparatively small contribution of normality and goodwill. The majority
were happy to pay that contribution. A minority, acting under the direction
of a neighbouring state, was not; and they had the guns.
One day before international recognition, Serb paramilitary forces repeated
the operation which they had aborted in Sarajevo one month before. This
time between 50,000 and 100,000 Bosnians, of all national groups, came out
onto the streets in protest. In the words of a news report, 'One speaker said,
“Let all the Serb chauvinists go to Serbia and let the Croat chauvinists go to
Croatia. We want to remain here together. We want to keep Bosnia as one.”
This moving spectacle was interrupted repeatedly by rounds of automatic
weapons fire.” Those bursts of gunfire were not the first fighting in the war,
however. For more than a week there had been shootings and bombings in
several Bosnian towns: Banja Luka, Bosanski Brad and Mostar. In the first
two of these it was apparently Serb paramilitary forces which took the
initiative; in Mostar the blowing up of a petrol tanker near the federal army
barracks could have been either the work of Croat paramilitaries, or an
attempt by Serbs to prove that the federal army was being threatened,” On
30 March the federal army chief, General Abdic, had announced,
predictably, that his army was prepared to intervene to protect Serbs against
'open aggression'.
11
But the most sinister development in the first days of April was the arrival of
Arkan's paramilitary force in the north-eastern Bosnian town of
Bijeljina.These heavily armed men, most of them Serbians, not Bosnian
Serbs, had recently finished their 'clean-up' operations in Vukovar. Some of
them had moved into Banja Luka at the end of March, where they took
control of the city, mounting road-blocks and 'roaming the streets with
rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s and Scorpion automatic
pistols'.” They arrived in the peaceful and predominantly Muslim town of
Bijeljina and began to 'liberate' parts of it, including the central mosque.
Muslims were harassed and expelled; a Muslim member of the Bosnian
presidency, Fikret Abdic, was turned back at gunpoint when he tried to enter
the town; and by 4 April it was reported that water and electricity supplies
had been cut and that bodies were lying in the streets.s The main aims,
clearly, were first to terrify the local Muslims into flight, and secondly to
radicalize the local Serb population, recruiting some of its young men into
this glamorous new occupation, in order to establish Serbian control over the
area. For these two purposes mass-murder was not necessary; a good number
of random killings in cold blood would suffice. One later report estimated
that nearly one hundred Muslims were killed.” As the events of the next few
weeks would show, Bijeljina was chosen first because ofits strategic
importance. It was the axial point, close to the Serbian border, from which
extended the two main swathes of territory to be taken over by Serbian
forces: a broad strip of land across northern Bosnia, linking Serbia with the
military base at Banja Luka, the Bosnian 'Krajina' and the occupied areas of
Croatia, and a swathe on the eastern side of Bosnia, running all the way
down the Bosnian-Serbian border (thus including vital entry-points for
supply lines from Serbia) to the ethnically Serb areas of eastern
Hercegovina.”
Within a few days, several more of the towns with large Muslim populations
in that eastern swathe of Bosnia had been subjected to the same treatment.
Apart from Arkan's Tigers, other Serbian paramilitary groups were also
used, including the 'White Eagles', led by Mirko Iovic, and Sddj's Cetniks, In
several cases, such as the attack on Zvornik in the second week of April,
artillery units of the federal army were used to bombard the town for several
days; -then, when it capitulated, the paramilitaries were sent in to deal with
the population. The psychology of terror which the paramilitary commanders
introduced into these places was not just a matter of frightening the local
Muslims into flight -though in this they were successful, and it was
estimated that 9S per cent of the Muslims of Zvornik, Višegrad and Foča had
fled their homes by the end of April,” An equally important part of the
psychological operation was to convince the local Serbs that they had to
'defend' themselves against their Muslim neighbors. The ground had been
prepared, of course, by the broadcasts of Radio Television Belgrade,
warning Serbs of Ustaša pogroms and fundamentalist jihads. And having
seen genuine news footage of dead bodies and burning villages in Croatia
over the previous nine months, ordinary Serb peasants and townsmen were
easily persuaded that these threats were real. All that was needed was a few
more local details to complete the picture. A chilling news report from Foča
by the Reuters correspondent Andrej Gustincic shows how it was done:
'Do you sec that field?' asks a Serbian woman, pointing to a sloping meadow
by the Drina river. 'The jihad was supposed to begin there. Foea was going
to be the new Mecca. There were lists of Serbs who were marked for death,'
the woman says, repeating a belief held by townspeople and gunmen. 'My
two sons were down on the list to be slaughtered like pigs. I was listed under
rape! None of them has seen the lists but this does not prevent anyone from
believing in them unquestioningly.”
Whether the federal army commander in eastern Bosnia, Colonel Milan
Jovanovic, believed such stories is altogether more: doubtful. While his men
were expelling Muslims from their homes in the town of Višegrad he told
one British journalist that he was still on Yugoslav soil, and added: 'There
was a rebellion here by the Muslims. It had been prepared for quite some
time and the brunt of it was against the Serbs.”? But what is evident is that it
was this entire joint operation of regular and paramilitary forces which had
been prepared for quite some time. In the words of one leading analyst: 'In
view of the speed with which they were implemented and the high level of
coordination they revealed, these operations clearly had not been mounted
spontaneously.”!' Using the advantages of surprise and overwhelming
superiority, the federal army and its paramilitary adjuncts carved out within
the first five to six weeks an area of conquest covering more than 60 per cent
of the entire Bosnian territory.
Some local Serb forces raised in the 'Serb Autonomous Regions' of Bosnia
also joined these operations in several areas of the country. But it is quite
clear that the conquest was mainly achieved by federal army forces
(including planes, which were used to bomb the towns of Kupres, Doboj and
Tuzla) directed by Belgrade, and paramilitary groups from Serbia. In other
words, even though some of the soldiers serving in the federal army were
Bosnian Serbs, and even though it was coordinated with elements of a Serb
insurrection in some areas, this was predominantly an invasion of Bosnia
planned and directed from Serbian soil. During the early weeks of the
invasion, the official statements issued by Milošević and the federal army
commanders consisted of two claims, both of them false: first, that the army
was acting only as a peacekeeper to separate local fighters, and secondly,
that no Serbian units were crossing the border into Bosnia. P Not only were
paramilitary units crossing into the country, but also, as one eye-witness
report from the border put it, 'the federal army has this week strung a
massive presence of men, artillery and tanks along the road from Serbia as it
surges into Bosnia'.13
On 27 April, however, President Milošević and the Montenegrin government
declared the creation of a new federal state of Yugoslavia consisting of their
two republics alone. This placed the federal army in Bosnia in a peculiar
position; since it could no longer pretend even to be acting as a peacekeeper
on Yugoslav soil. In early May Milošević announced that he would
withdraw those soldiers in the army in Bosnia who were citizens of the new
two-republic Yugoslavia; those who were Bosnian Serbs would be
transferred, together with all the armaments and supplies, to the so-called
'Serb Republic', and placed under the command of General Ratko Mladic.
That Mladic was appointed by Milošević, and that the entire change-over
was a largely cosmetic exercise, was clear. No foreign observers had any
way of checking whether all the Serbian and Montenegrin soldiers did in
fact leave Bosnia; by 20 May it was claimed that 14,000 had gone, but that
would have left atleast 80,000 the testimonies of victims of war crimes from
later in l992 June comes across numerous references to soldiers from Serbia
and Montenegro. It is not possible to believe that the army whidi.was
fighting in Bosnia from late May onwards consisted entirely of Bosnian
Serbs. And for those soldiers in it who were from Bosnia, the change-over
would have made no essential difference to what they were doing: they were
fighting with the same federal army weaponry, receiving constant supplies
ofammunition, food and fuel from Serbia, acting in cooperation with
paramilitary forces frC)m Serbia and pursuing the same overall strategy
which the Serbian leader had established. Not until eleven months later,
when General Mladic disagreed with Milošević over acceptance of the
Vance-Owen plan, was there any divergence between the strategy .of the
'Bosnian Serb' army leadership and the policies of Belgrade.
Nevertheless, this cosmetic exercise had the desired effect. Prominent
Western politicians, such as the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd,
were soon describing the fighting in Bosnia as 'a civil war'. A distinguished
former editor of The Times published a number of articles in which the
fighting was described as a .typical 'civil war'. The BBC referred constantly
to aU sides in the conflict, including the Bosnian government, as 'warring
factions'; otherwise it described the war as 'a breakdown in law and order'.
(On one occasion in late April 1992 when six UN aid trucks were hijacked
by Serbian paramilitary forces, the BBC reported that 'efforts to bring aid to
the refugees are being hampered by a breakdown in law and order'; this must
be the first recorded instance in history of a truck being driven away by a
breakdown.}” In Britain there was one extra reason for this inability to
understand what was happening, which was that in the crucial early days of
April 1992 Britain was in the throes of a general election. Few commentators
and no politicians could ' devote any attention to what was happening in
Bosnia; by the time they woke up to the existence of a war there, as they
could see was a number of equally fierce-looking combatants fighting one
another for equally incomprehensible reasons. In the USA the presidential
elections were not to happen for another seven months; but the Bush
administration was already worried about making any policy commitments
on Bosnia which might prove electorally damaging, and was content to
accept the strangely possessive argument of EEC leaders who had claimed
from the start of the Yugoslav war that this was 'a European problem'.
Starting from a state of extreme unpreparedness, the local territorial defense
forces of the Bosnian government, numbering perhaps 3500 armed men
altogether, did attempt to mount some resistance during April. But at this
early stage the main opposition to the Serb invasion-cum-insurrection was
Croat. In western Herzegovina the local Croats had made some preparations,
and had been joined by men from the Croatian paramilitary force, the HOS.
This force had been officially merged with the Croatian army during the
1991-2 war in Croatia, and as that war drew to a close many of its members
had gone to Herzegovina as a way of moving out of Croatian army control.
In April 1992 they made up roughly 5000 of the force of 15,000 Croat
fighters which was assembled in that area; the local Croats had been
organized under the aegis of the 'Croat Defense Council' (HVO). At the end
of May they began a counter-offensive which, after more than a month of
fighting, succeeded in pushing the federal army forces away from the Mostar
region. In this they were joined by up to 15,000 regular army troops from
inside Croatia, who brought with them a small quantity of tanks and artillery
pieces; on 16 June Presidents Izetbegovic and Tudjman had signed a formal
military alliance between their two countries, legitimizing the use of both
Croatian army troops and the local HVO forces. w In parts of northern
Bosnia too, notably the Posavina region close to the Croatian border, the
resistance by Croat forces held the Serb advance in check and in some places
succeeded in repelling it.
The political intentions of the Croatian and Bosnian Croat leaderships were
open to some doubt. For many weeks they had pleaded with Izetbegovic to
declare a confederation of Bosnia and Croatia; he had always refused to do
this, either because he feared an eventual absorption of Bosnia into a Greater
Croatia, or because he thought such a move would give an aura of
justification to the arguments of the Serbs. His thinking seems to have been
dominated by the idea that his government must represent Serbs as well as
Muslims and Croats, and he did indeed maintain Serb ministers in his
government throughout the war. Izetbegovic's attempts to be even-handed
irritated the Croats, whose strategic military thinking was clearer than his at
this stage; and he also offended them by appointing to his senior command
one of the few Muslims who had risen to a senior rank in the Yugoslav
federal army Sefer Halilovic, who had commanded federal army units
attacking Croatia during the previous war. Throughout June and July the
Bosnian HDZ leader Mate Boban put pressure on Izetbegovic to agree to a
confederation, either by threatening to withdraw forces or by blocking arms
deliveries. And in early July Boban declared the creation of the 'Croat
Community of Herceg-Bosnia', a kind of Croat Autonomous Region in
which the Croatian currency was introduced and the Croatian flag was
flown. Later, an official statement by one of Boban’s advisers would still
insist that this was a temporary measure, and that the area should eventually
become 'an integral part of Bosnia' once again.17
That Boban himself really wanted this area to join Croatia may be presumed;
but President Tudjman's official pronouncements continued to recommend
preserving the integrity of Bosnia's borders. Some of Tudjman's close
advisers, notably his Hercegovinan-born Defense Minister, Gojko Susak,
were in favor of carving territory out of Bosnia; but many other ministers,
and most of the opposition parties in Croatia, were against it. It is probably
fair to say that Tudjman's own position was that of a rational opportunist, If
he were given clear signs by the outside world that they would not allow the
defeat and carve-up of Bosnia, then he would go along with that policy; but
if the world was prepared to let the Serbs seize territory and hold it, then he
would wish to have his slice of the cake too. In the event, the outside world
gave him no clear signs that it would follow the former policy. And at the
same time the signs it was giving about the future of the Serb-occupied areas
of Croatia were extremely unclear, with a succession of merely temporizing
measures designed to extend the UN mandate over them. This gave Tudjman
an added reason to wish to acquire more bargaining chips in Bosnia.
The reaction of the international community had been generally confused or
negative. When the fighting started in Bosnia, the UN was just in the process
offsetting up a headquarters in Sarajevo, and bases in some northern Bosnian
towns, in order to direct its peace-keeping operations in Croatia. In early
May the Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ruled out the use of UN
peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, and on 16 May most of the UN force already
in Sarajevo was withdrawn. Two weeks later Boutros-Ghali issued a report
which repeated the main line of Milošević's public relations exercise, which
was that the army and paramilitary forces in Bosnia were 'independent' and
had nothing to do with Belgrade. The purpose of this report was to argue
against the imposition of sanctions on Serbia-a measure advocated by the
American government, but resisted by the British and the French, who said
they wanted Milošević to be given 'a further opportunity to halt the violence
in Bosnia.!” (Sanctions were in fact imposed on Serbia on 30 May, but they
had little effect on the Serbian war effort, and were strongly undermined by
deliveries of oil and other supplies, which came overland from Greece and
up the Danube from Russia and the Ukraine.)
The fundamental failure of the Western politicians was that they looked only
at the symptoms of the war, not at its causes: it was as if they did not even
want to understand the nature of Milošević's project. They insisted on
treating the war as essentially a military problem rather than a political one.
Apportioning responsibility or blame simply became a matter of pointing to
people who were firing guns; and since there were two sides now firing
them, the blame was apportioned to both. 'Everybody is to blame for what is
happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina', declared the EEC negotiator, Lord
Carrington, in one of his most revealingly uncomprehending remarks, 'and as
soon as we get the cease-fire there will be no need to blame anybody.'!” The
fixation with cease-fires -of which, on some counts, more than a hundred
were made and broken during the rest of the year -became the most telling
symptom of this lack of political understanding.
Because the war was seen essentially as a military problem caused by a thing
called 'violeng' which had 'flared up' on 'both sides' -the efforts of the West
were directed at what was described as 'reducing the quantity of fighting' .
Hence the biggest single contribution by the West to the destruction of
Bosnia: the refusal t(;'“lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian
government. This embargo had been introduced by the UN in September
1991 against the whole of Yugoslavia, which at that stage was still, formally
speaking, a single country. Although the UN itself recognized Bosnia and
admitted it as a member-state distinct and separate from Yugoslavia on 22
May 1992, it continued to apply the embargo as if nothing had changed. Of
course it continued to apply it to Serbia too; but Serbia held most of the
stockpiles of the former federal army, and had a large armaments industry of
its own. (Some of the key armaments factories in Bosnia were also located in
ethnically Serb areas, such as the artillery shell factory in the Serb district of
Vogosca outside Sarajevo, which was seized by Serb forces at the beginning
of the war.) In addition, the Yugoslav army had purchased an extra 14,000
tons of weaponry from the Middle East just before the arms embargo came
into force in 1991.20 Serb military commanders sometimes boasted that they
had enough arms and ammunition to continue the war in Bosnia for another
six or seven years; the embargo could have no real effect on their military
capability. But to the Bosnian defense forces it was in the long term a
sentence of death. Small supplies of arms did reach the Bosnians, mostly via
Croatia, despite the blockade of the Croatian coast mounted from July 1992
by NATO and WED flotillas. A few armaments factories still lay within
Bosnian government-controlled areas, and some production was kept up
there despite the dislocation of supplies. Occasionally the Bosnian
government forces also captured material from the Serb army: in the most
spectacular such operation, north of Tuzla in May, an entire armored column
was seized. But what the Bosnians always lacked was heavy armor, artillery
and anti-tank weapon. In September it was estimated that they possessed two
tanks and two armored personnel carriers (APCs), while the Serb army in
Bosnia had 300 tanks, 200 APCs, 800 artillery pieces and 40 aircraft.”! A
later estimate, in June 1993, was that the arms captured by the Bosnians
included up to 40 tanks and 30 APCs, together with a larger number of light
artillery pieces; the Croat forces were thought to have roughly 50 tanks and
more than 100 artillery pieces.
Yet despite this heavy imbalance, and despite the constant flow of fuel and
supplies to the Serb forces, the military history of the war during 1992 was
one of virtual stalemate from the moment the Croat and Bosnian
government forces began to be properly organized in late May 1992. For the
next nine months, the Serb forces were to be kept mainly in check, and in
some areas they were actually pushed back: notably in Herzegovina in May
and June, round Gorazde in August, in the Brcko 'corridor' of north-eastern
Bosnia intermittently throughout the autumn, and in parts of the Drina valley
region of eastern Bosnia in January 1993. There was a difference in tactics
between the two sides, expressing a difference in psychology and
motivation. The main tactic of the Serb side was the one previously used in
Croatia: to sit back at a prudent distance and soften up the areas it was
attacking with artillery bombardments for weeks or even months on end.
Many of the conscripts serving in this ex-federal army did not bring the same
degree of motivation to the attack on Muslim and Croat homes that the
owners of those homes brought to their defense. P Had the Bosnian
government ~en able to exercise the normal right of any government to
obtain arms for the defense of its people, it is quite likely that the Serb gains
would have been rolled back in many parts of Bosnia1 if not to the point of
outright defeat for the Serb leaders, then at least to the point where they
would have realized that they would not get the territory they wanted by
conquest. The war might then have ended within four to six months. This did
not happen, because the delivery of arms to the Bosnian government was
vigorously opposed by statesmen such as Douglas Hurd, who argued that
allowing the Bosnians to defend themselves would 'only prolong the
fighting'.
The first sign of a possible change in Western policy came in early August
1992, after a number of journalists and a television crew had reached one of
the Serb-run detention camps in northern Bosnia. For the first time ordinary
Western voters -and politicians-could see with their own eyes startling
evidence of what was happening to a large part of the Muslim population in
that area. The facts were not, or should not have been, unknown to the UN
and Western governments: a stream of reports from UN personnel in
neighboring areas of Croatia had referred to these detention camps over the
previous two months, and a report issued by the International Society for
Human Rights on 29 May had already listed many examples of Muslim
civilians being rounded up, held in schools or other centers, and, in some
cases, murdered. In early June the Bosnian government had issued a list of
ninety-four known locations of Serb-OlD prisons and detention camps,
together with an estimate of the number of people killed in them so far,
amounting to 9300.2 S This was nowhere near the total number of civilians
killed, of course: apart from the victims of bombardments, there were many
who had been rounded up and shot in villages and towns all over Bosnia. In
one particularly well-documented case, that of the Muslim village of
Zaklopaca, at least eighty-three villagers nearly all the men folk in the
village -were 'summarily executed' by Serbian pararnilitaries on 16 May
1992. In the words of one typical statement: My brother-in-law, Haso
Hodzic, was outside in front of the house when the Četniks approached.
They started calling him an Ustaša. My brother-in-law started to walk
towards them and they told him to give up his weapons. He told them that he
did not have any weapons but that they could take his cows. Then one of the
Četniks opened fire and killed him.16
In some places there was a deliberate killing of educated Muslims and
leaders of the local community: teachers, doctors, lawyers. Detailed reports
which emerged later in the year showed that some of the detention camps
had also been used for .systematic murder. And there were also some well-
documented reports of women being held in special buildings for the
purpose of systematic rape. P The politicians in the West reacted to the sight
of the emaciated prisoners in the camps with expressions of indignation and
concern. Lord Owen, writing as an individual commentator, called for air
strikes against Serb forces. Douglas Hurd replied to all such calls for
intervention with the statement: 'There is ample justification for ~. If we
judged that a few days of sharp military action would . bri h fferi litnng t e su
enng to an end, the case would be overwhelmning. P” -v, Here he was
admitting for the first time the point of principle that it might be right to
'increase the quantity of fighting' in the short term in order to enQ.it in the
long term. But he was still resolutely opposed to the idea of applying this
principle by allowing the Bosnian government to defend itself using its own
forces and an adequate supply of weapons. And since he, like most other
Western leaders, still viewed the fighting in terms of a civil war ('it is a war
with no front line ... village is divided against village'), he was
understandably reluctant to intervene with British troops on the ground -
something the Bosnian government was not, in any case, asking him to do.
lt fell to the British government, as holder of the rotating presidency of the
EEC, to chair a joint EEC-UN conference on the entire situation in
Yugoslavia, which was held in London during the last week of August. The
paralysis of the West was made ool)'Plore apparent. John Major obtained
what he thought were solemn pledges from the Serb leaders to lift the sieges
of Bosnian towns and cities and place their heavy weaponry under UN
supervision. It later emerged that 'supervision' was to be interpreted in its
original, etymological sense: UN monitors were allowed to look over the
artillery pieces above Sarajevo every day while they were being fired.
The other measures agreed at the conference included tightening the

enforcement of sanctions against Serbia on the Danube (though there was
still no method for stopping barges from proceeding, apart from the use of
loud-hailers), declaring a no-fly zone over Bosnia (though there was no
provision for enforcing it) and appointing the belligerent Lord Owen to
replace Lord Carrington as EEC negotiator (though Lord Owen then
immediately dropped his support for threats of military action, and began
treating the Serbs as an equal party in the negotiations with equally valid
claims).
Once again the international community had failed to consider the
fundamental causes of the conflict. The emphasis was now on two kinds of
things: cease-fires to solve all military problems, and humanitarian solutions

to humanitarian problems. Although the term 'ethnic cleansing' was now in
general currency, there was still a tendency to assume that the essential
problem was military, and that the flight of coerced and terrorized
populations was merely a byproduct of the fighting. It was then described as
a humanitarian problem which could be 'solved' by moving refugees into
refugee camps outside Bosnia. What was still not fully understood was that
ethnic cleansing was not a by-product of the war. It was a central part of the
entire political project which the war was intended to achieve, namely the
creation of homogeneous Serb areas which could eventually be joined to
other Serb areas, including Serbia itself, to create a greater Serbian state.
The humanitarian missions mounted by the outside world undoubtedly saved
lives. They also had some undesired but not unforeseeable consequences:
local militias treated them as a source of supply, regularly receiving as much
as a quarter of the deliveries which passed through their checkpoints, and
extorting large sums of money as well.s? While private and public aid
agencies made strenuous efforts to bring food and medicines into Bosnia
during the second half of 1992, they were joined by a growing number of
UN troops (nearly 8000 by the end of the year), whose role, apart from
protecting aid convoys, was unclear. The political consequence of placing
this small and lightly-armed UN force in Bosnia was) however, that they
n~w functioned as hostages1 making the Western governments extremely
reluctant to adopt any policies which might invite retaliation by the Serbs
against these vulnerable troops. Thus by December the British government,
which had helped to set up the theoretical no-fly zone over Bosnia, was
arguing at the United Nations against measures to enforce it, for fear of what
might happen to British soldiers in Bosnia if a Serbian plane was ever shot
down by RAP fighters.?”
In late October 1992 the EEC and UN negotiators, Lord Owen and Cyrus
Vance, produced the first detailed proposal for a political settlement. This
was a 'solution' arrived by taking the demands of the Serbs, Croats and
Muslims and trying to find some geometrical mid-way point between them.
The result gave the Serbs enough to make the Muslims feel that the Serbs
were being rewarded for their a~ons1. and enough also for the Serbs to feel
that if they continued )
their actions they cot!ki press for more. Put together originally by a Finnish
diplomat, Martti Ahtisaari, the plan was for tum4:!g Bosnia into a set of
'autonomous provinces' or cantons which would exercise almost all the
functions of government, including policing. The central government of
Bosnia would be concerned only with national defense and foreign affairs.
Than Serbs pushed harder, and when the plan was issued in what was said to
be its final form at Geneva in January 1993, even defence had been stripped
from the powers of the central governrnent.
The merits of the Vance-Owen plan were its insistence that refugees should
he allowed to return to their homes throughout Bosnia, and its provision that
the cantons corresponding to Serb occupied areas would not be connected on
the map in such a way as were outbreaks of heavy fighting between Muslims
and Croats in th;j to make it easy for them to seek to join Serbia as a single
territorial block. Unfortunately these two meritorious principles were flatly
contradicted both by the rest of the plan, and by reality. The rest of the plan
gave full legislative, judicial and executive powers (including policing) to
the cantons, making it impossible to believe that Muslim refugees could
safely return to Serb-ruled cantons. V And the reality on the ground was that
the Serb-held areas were already joined on the map; Serb military leaders
would never sacrifice these links, which were a key element in their own
plans.
But there was one feature of the Vance-Owen plan, as it was now set out,
which was to prove not just unsuccessful but immensely harmful. In the
January version, it like the initial version proposed in October, the cantons
were given 'ethnic' labels on the map, and i~; at the same time the impression
was given that the precise boundaries on the map were not yet final. This had
the entirely predictable effect of inciting renewed competition for territory.
And, worst of all, it incited competition between Croat and Muslim forces
for1 parts of central Bosnia where there had been a mixed Muslim-Croat
population. After the arms embargo, this was the second most important
contribution of the West to the destruction of Bosnia: it stimulated the
development of a genuine Bosnian civil war, and in so doing it broke down
the Croat-Muslim alliance which had been the only effective barrier to the
Serbs.
There had already been tensions between the Bosnian Muslim and Croat
leaderships, as we have seen. In September 1992 there had been a report that
the Croat leader, Mate Boban, was telling his HVO forces to cease helping
the Bosnian defense force in its attempts to break the siege ofSarajevo.33 In
October there were some clashes between Muslim and Croat militias in
Travnik and Prozor, and bitter recriminations between the two over the fall
of Jajce to the Serbs. But still there was no large-scale fighting between
them, and the overall alliance held. This situation gradually changed under
the influence of the Vance-Owen plan in early 1993: in February Muslim
forces in Gornji Vakuf were besieged by HVO soldiers, and in the area
between Vitez and Kiseljak (a contested zone on the Vance-Owen map) both
Muslim and Croat militias engaged in what one report described as 'freelance
ethnic cleansing'.:14 By early April there Travnik-Vitez-Zenica area of
central Bosnia.35 The UN human right rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki
issued a report in the following month clearly warning that the Vance-Owen
plan was stimulating ethnic cleansing; but by then it was too late. 36
The combined effects of the arms embargo and the Vance-Owen plan
had fatally weakened the military resistance to the Serbs.
As late as January 1993 there were reports of Serb forces being pushed back
in several areas, especially the Bratunac region of the Drina valley.37 But
the -lack of ammunition was beginning seriously to hamper the Bosnian
defense force, and in the early months of 1993 Serb forces stepped up their
campaign against a number of Muslim enclaves which remained within the
Serb-conquered area of eastern Bosnia. Despite some well-publicized
initiatives by the UN commander, General Morillon, and by the US Air
Force, which dropped supplies to them by parachute, these enclaves could
not hold out. Srebrenica, which, with its German miners, Ragusan merchants
and Franciscan friary, had been in the late middle ages the most prosperous
inland town in the whole of the western Balkans, had turned into a giant
refugee camp stinking of human excrement. Žepa, when it was finally
entered by foreign observers, had become a Marie Celeste township: when
its defenders ran out of ammunition the people fled into the hills above the
town, where they lived in caves and were kept alive by American air-
drops.38
Bowing to this military pressure, the Bosnian government moved during
March and April towards an acceptance of the Vance-Owen plan. There was
by now little hope that the West would remove the main cause of the
Bosnian military weakness, the arms embargo: both the American and the
German governments had briefly expressed an i . . it but the had been
energetically persuaded by Douglas Hurd 0 change their minds.:” Even the
outspoken intervention of Lady Thatcher on British and American television
in mid-April did not shake the policies of the governments of those
countries. The British government in particular was mesmerized by the
Vance-Owen 'peace process', and would not contemplate any move that
could be seen as jeopardizing it -even though it required no clairvoyance at
this stage to say that 'a blind man can see that the Vance-Owen plan is never
going to be fulfilled' .40
The only way in which the Vance-Owen plan could gain even token
acceptance among the Serbs was on the clear assumption that it would be a
tern ora r .n -lace on the way to the full secession of the Serb-conquered
territories. On that asis ovan Karadžć was encouraged by Slobodan
Milošević to sign the plan at a special meeting convened in Athens on 2 May
1993. The basis of the Serbian approach was explained by Dragoslav Rancic,
the confidant and spokesman of the nationalist ideologue Dobrica Cosic
(who was now President of the Serbian-Montenegrin rump Yugoslavia). 'It is
just the first stage', he said. 'It is not going to last long. Not even Lord Owen
believes in it.' He added that the Muslims would eventually be left with 'a
Balkan Lesotho', and that the Serbs would get everything they wanted. v'
Many of the Bosnian Serb politicians and military commanders believed,
however, that they could get what they wanted without even bothering to
pass through the diversion of the Vance-Owen plan. Opposition was

especially strong among those Serb politicians who had become in effect the
personal rulers of larger territorial fiefdoms, and did not want their powers to
be clipped by any administrative interference. They rejected the plan which
Karadžć had signed at Athens, and organized a 'referendum' on 15 May at
which they successfully persuaded the Serb soldiers and peasants to reject it
too. Their position was backed by General Mladic, who appeared to have a
strong disagreement with Milošević over this tactic. For a few days
Milošević insisted publicly that he would close the border between Serbia
and Bosnia; but he refused to allow international observers to monitor the
border, and within a couple of weeks the flow of supplies was resumed. t”
The final death-warrant for Bosnia was written on 22 Matin Washington, at a
gathering of the foreign ministers of Britgin, France, Spain, Russia and the
USA. All talk of air strikes, which had been used as a threat to the Serbs in
the run-up to the Athens meeting, was now dropped. Even the idea of
enforcing the Vance-Owen plan was also abandoned. Instead, it was decided
that the remnants of Bosnia's two million Muslims would be allowed to
congregate in a number of so-called 'safe areas', where their safety would not
in fact be guaranteed: they would be guarded by UN forces whose mandate
entitled them to return fire not if the Muslims were shot at but only if they,
the UN soldiers, came under attack..
When President Izetbegovic heard the news of this agreement -the foreign
ministers having not even bothered to consult him in the matte' -he issued the
following statement: 'If the international ~ community is not ready to defend
the principles which it itself has proclaimed as its foundations, let it say so
openly, both to the people of Bosnia and to the people of the world. Let it
proclaim a new code of behavior in which force will be the first and the last
argument. Over the remaining summer months, those who wielded that
argument -Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman and the ever-adaptable Lord
Owen -would put forward a succession of cruder, more naked plans for the
division of Bosnia into three states. Whether the fig-leaf of an overall
Bosnian 'confederal state' was preserved or not hardly mattered. Each
version of the plan would create an unviable Muslim Bantustan a settlement
which the most determined of the already uprooted Muslim soldiery would
never accept. Such a prospect, with all the long-term instability which any
carve -up of Bosnia would create in the region, was described by Lord Owen
as 'not an ideal solution'. To be more accurate, it was not a solution at all.
Looking back at the history of this war, one sees that the real cause's of
Bosnia's destruction have come from outside Bosnia itself and have done so
twice over: first in the form of the political strategy of the Serbian
leadership, and then in the form of the miscomprehension and fatal
interference of the leaders of the West. And yet every observer who has
looked at the almost unimaginable atrocities committed during this war
(atrocities committed in the first place overwhelmingly against Muslims and
Croats, and later against Serbs too), has sometimes wondered whether there
was not some deep psychosis within the population of Bosnia as a whole
which finally broke to the surface. It cannot be denied that there are some
gruesome practices, such as the mutilation of corpses, the knowledge of
which has been passed down in a kind of tradition from earlier wars and folk
memories -stretching back at least as far as stories of the feared martolosi of
the sixteenth century. There were old men still in Bosnia who could
remember such things from the Second World War. But to suppose that this
Bosnian war was some sort of spontaneous continuation of the inter-ethnic
fighting of the Second World War is to read from the script prepared by
Karadžć and Milošević.
The atrocities in Bosnia in 1992 were not committed by old men, or even by
young Bosnians nursing grudges about the Second World War. The pattern
was set by young urban gangsters In expensive sunglasses from Serbia,
members of the paramilitary forces raised by Arkan and others; and though
the individuals who performed these acts may have gained some
pathological pleasure from them, what they were doing was to carry out a
rational strategy dictated by their political leaders -a method carefully
calculated to drive out two ethnic populations and radicalize a third. Having
travelled widely in Bosnia over fifteen years, and having stayed in Muslim,
Croat and Serb villages, I cannot believe the claim that ~e country was
forever seething with ethnic hatreds. But having watched Radio Television
Belgrade in the period 1991-2, 1 can understand why simple Bosnian Serbs
came to believe that they were under threat, from Ustaša hordes,
fundamentalist jihads or whatever. As the independent Belgrade journalist
Milos Vasic put it to an American audience, it was as if all television in the
USA had been taken over by the Ku Klux Klan: 'You must imagine a United
States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same
editorial line -a line dictated by David Duke. You too would have war in five
years.'46 But perhaps the best comment on the tactics of Milošević and
Karadžć, and on what they have achieved in Bosnia -more than 150,000
deaths, more than two million people expelled from their homes, villages
and towns burnt and devastated, and several hundred mosques and churches
deliberately blown up -is a judgment by another historian on another
country's descent into blood:
Like the protagonists in Dostoyevsky's Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill
blood in order to bind their wavering adherents with a band of collective
guilt. The more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience,
the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize there was no retreating,
no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their
leaders, and could only march with them to 'total victory' regardless of the
cost.
5.5 Islamic Organization in the 1992-95 War Period
In the former Yugoslavia the four Islamic Communities of:

1. Macedonia (Skopje)
2. Serbia-Kosovo (Pristina)
3. Montenegro (Podgorica)
4. Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo)
were united under the Islamic Union Assembly. In the year 1986. Assembly
President Mujić Hussein, was too old. In 1989 an upraise emerged, called the
Imam Movement in Yugoslavia. Mujic Hussein resigned from his post. At
the end of the year 1989, Union Assembly, to comply the needs of Muslims
in Yugoslav Socialist Republics which started to depart from the federation,
to form a new Yugoslavia Islamic Union Assembly, authorized Macedonia
Mufti, the Yaqub Selimoski to prepare a statute and to preside the assembly.
During the emergency conference of the Supreme Assembly of SFRJ IC held
on April 12th 1990 in Sarajevo, a new IC Constitution was adopted. The so-
called Ramadan Constitution completely reorganised the Islamic
Community.
Article 11 of the Constitution said that IC property consisted of waqfs in the
first place, and there was much hope that denationalisation would returned
the once expropriated or usurped waqf property. Temporarily, the war
slowed down this process.
According to Artcle 18, IC units are: IC boards and muftiluks, assemblies
and mashihats, the Supreme IC Assembly, the IC The Office of Grand Mufti
and Grand Mufti.
The 'board' is the basic IC unit for several jemaats, whereas the 'muftiluk' is
the main religious unit covering several IC boards.
According to Article 29, assemblies are the highest representative units of IC
and there are five of them: Sarajevo (for B&H), Pristina (for Serbia), Skoplje
(for Macedonia), Podgorica (for Montenegro) and Zagreb (for Croatia and
Slovenia).
The assembly mandate lasts for four years. Mashihat is the executive branch
of an assembly. The highest representative body in a state is the Supreme
Assembly that has 46 members chosen in the way that Sarajevo delegates 13
members, Pristina 12, Skoplje 9, Titograd and Zagreb 6 each.
Their mandate is four years. The executive branch of the Supreme Assembly
is The Office of Grand Mufti, headquartered in Sarajevo and it at the sam
time represents the religious unity of Muslims in all the country.
Finally, according to Article 46, Grand Mufti is the religious leader and the
highest representative of IC in SFRJ. He presides at the The Office of Grand
Mufti meetings.
The negative effects of this Constitution were evident even before the crisis
and total dissolution of SFRJ because it created a disbalance in the structure
of the Supreme Assembly and The Office of Grand Mufti, which was to the
disadvantage of the Bosnian Muslims in general, and which had
consequences in practice as well.
All in all, regardless of the past and the useful lessons we have from it, every
situation is always a new one, historically speaking, and so is the one we
have today. In all the five above-mentioned cases, there was always a state
that was a mediator and that imposed IC the structure that suited its own
interests.
Today, in these crucial moments for the Muslims in Bosnia, IC is capable of
making its own decisions. That is why all the IC members and all the
Bosnian Muslims should feel a special responsibility.
In the new statute prepared by Yaqub Selimoski, each Yugoslav Socialist
Republic would have a Mešihat, and Yugoslavia Islamic Union Assembly
would be presided by Reis-ul Ulama. Also selection methods for Assembly
members and Reis-ul Ulama were being set. In this statute to the former four
Meshihat, the Croatian-Slovenian was added whose center was in Zagreb.
Assembly of the Islamic Association of Yugoslavia adopted the
constitution, prepared in one year by the Regulation Commission led by
Yaqub Selimoski in August 1990.
According to the former Statute of the Yugoslavia Islamic Union Medzlis,
the seats of four Muftuluk were distributed as follows:
1. Macedonia (Skopje), 7,
2. Serbia-Kosovo (Pristina) 10,
3. Montenegro (Podgorica), 3-5
4. Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarabosna) 12-13.
According to new regulations from each of the five Mešihat, equal numbers
of 10 representatives would be sent. The mufties of 16 muftiluk in the whole
of Yugoslavia, Mešihat executive committee members, the dean of the
Islamska Nauka Fakulty in Sarajevo, managers of the three madrasas active
at that day in Yugoslavia, the number of the new selective board members
over 100.
According to the new statute, Reis-ul Ulema would be selected by the secret
vote among the candidates nominated by five Mešihats, till sixty days before
the election date, by the selection committee. The candidates nominated by
each Mešihat would not be less than two. The candidates that would be
nominated for Reis-ul Ulema, are choosen by the Mufties of the relevant
Mešihat. For example, Macedonia, has 13 mufties. For a person to be
nominee, to become the head of Macedonia Mešihat, he must be nominated
by at least 10 mufties of the Meşahati.
Macedonia's Reis-el-Ulema candidates nominated in this way were:
Yaqub Selimoski (Macedonia Mešihat President)

Tevfik of Tahsin (Kalkandelenli)
Recep Suleyman, and
Bahri Aliju
Mešihat Croatia-Slovenia (Zagreb) candidates:

Mustafa Ceric (New Mosque Imam of Zagreb)
Yaqub Selimoski
Bosnia-Herzegovina is Mešihat (Sarabosna) candidates:

Senahid Bistric (Deputy Chairman of Bosnia-Herzegovina Mešihat)
Dr. Joseph Ramiç (in Sarajevo, Fakultet Islamska Nauka'nın dean)
Yaqub Selimoski
Montenegro Mešihat candidates

Idris Demirović (Mešihat Montenegrin President, then withdrew from the
nomination)
Yaqub Selimoski
Kosovo-Serbia Mešihat candidates

Yaqub Selimoski
As shown by Jacob Selimoski five Mešihat was nominated a single
candidate.
On the election day, there had been only four candidates:
Yaqub Selimoski
Mustafa Ceric
Senahid Bistric
Dr. Joseph Ramiç
Fifteen days before the election, candidates published their programs.

According to the Statutes, in the first round, candidate who receives more
than half of the votes is elected for eight years. If election is not concluded in
the first round, in the second round, first and second of the first round race.
While Reis-ul-Ulema is eligible to be elected for more one term of mandate,
For Meshihat presidents four years tenure was limited.
In the spring of 1991, on Election Day, for four hours selectors asked various
questions to candidates. Yaqub Selimoski won 70% of the votes in the first
round of this election and elected as Reis. Mustafa Ceric collected only 12%
of votes.
In front of the Yaqub Selimoski, the main challenges were:

1. Yugoslavia had been entered into a disintegration period
2. He was younger than all of three Reises of the Assembly of the
Islamic Union of Yugoslavia, had served before him during the last decade
3. He was the first non-Bosnian president.
Yaqub Selimoski, the elected new President of the Yugoslavia Islamic Union
Assembly vehemently denies the allegations about that he followed policies
close to Belgrade. His tenure did not officially end, he was not dismissed, he
was still carrying the title of the last president of the council.
Interview: Yaqub Selimoski

We pointed these claims to Yaqub Selimoski. Here is how he responded:
“we supported the referendum for Bosnia-Herzegovina's independence from
Yugoslavia. Following independence decision as a result of the referendum,
my membership application to the Organization of Islamic Conference
responded within 24 hours.
I was President of the Islamic Union of Macedonia since 1980. Starting from
1981, in Yugoslavia Serbs increased their weight in management. In
Macedonia resistance began against Serb dominance in administration.
Islamic Union of Macedonia has supported this resistance. As a result of our
efforts, Pristine Madrasah remained open. Kosovo Albanians had taken us an
example.
Former two presidents of Assembly of the Islamic Union of the Yugoslavia
before me, Hussein Muhic, and previous Reis Naim Haciabdic may be said
to be pro-Belgrade.
When I was appointed as Deputy President of the Assembly of Islamic
Union of Yugoslavia in 1989, although the center was in Sarajevo, I made
first meeting in Pristine. At that time Nevzat Khalili had been founding the
Albanians Party of Macedonia. Mohammad Sharif, and Shayip Sharif
brothers were also included in that ranks.
I did not actually take part in SDA which is founded in 1990, but I've always
supported. SDA statute was written in my room. I gave great support to Alija
Izetbegovic in his first election. I participated in the election campaign in
Focha. There was a symbolic meaning of the Focha rally. Alija was put in
prison in Focha. In 1943, Serbs massacred 5000 Muslims in the town of
Drina. We prayed funeral prayer in absence for those shahids in Focha. 70
000 people had gathered that day in Focha. I was the imam of the funeral
prayer in absence, and then I made a speech.
To the First Congress of SDA held in Sarajevo in 1991 in Alexandria, we
entered the hall hand in hand with Alija.
At that time the International Community's handling Lisbon agreement was

being signed. With this agreement, Bosnia was divided into cantons.
Muslims were sure that there would be no war. They believed that the
international force would be able to protect Bosnia against attacks.
Bosnian Muslims were reacting violently to be divided into cantons. Alija
asked me to support the Canton decision to reject. Alija came to me, to the
Assembly of Islamic Union of Yugoslavia’s old yellow building, nowadays
had been occupied by Radio Bir. There is a small park in front of the
building. At that day, Alija and I, went out to that little park. Chitchat as we
navigate up arm in arm, for around forty minutes, to let people see us that
day and wanted to get to understand that we are in consensus.
In 1992, when Serbian army, attacked Bosnian Muslims which declared
independence, as the first non-Bosnian Reis, I could move the Rijaset to
Skopje.
At that moment, the Macedonia Mešihat Rijaset post which I left back in
Skopje upon my selection to the current chair had been filled by today’s
Grand Mufti of Macedonia Suleyman Recep. The Reis of the Bosnia
Meshihat was Salih Çolakoviç. In the year of 1992, during the festival of
sacrifice would be made live television broadcast from the town Plevlje.
While traveling to join the Program in Plevlje, I witnessed myself that the
Serbian Army which had been converted from the Yugoslav People's Army
had been distributing weapons to Serb civilians. One-third of the Plevlje
population was Muslim and the rest were Chetnik (Serbian Warrior).
The same day, there was feast celebration in Begova Mosque. Loyal to my
place, I sent Çolakovic for the celebration to represent me. Canceling the
ceremony, Çolakoviç flied to Mostar, and never returned back to Sarajevo
till the end of the war.
I left Bosnia first time in June 1992. We brought to Macedonia those
employees’ families who want to leave Sarajevo. They went from here to
Turkey. In the same month, we returned to Sarajevo. The war began. Ten
days after in order to mediate between Serbs and Muslims, a delegation
came from Turkey. Deputy Prime Minister Muhammad Çengiç brought
delegation to my office. After two hours the delegation was returning to
Turkey over Belgrade.
We had the opportunity a few times until today. However, every time my
wife and my children to be able to board the plane, the same number of
women and children had to be taken out of the plane boarded before. Since
my heart is not satisfied, until that time we have not succeeded in leaving
Sarajevo.
Together with the Turkish delegation, we came to Belgrade. Three hours
later there was a plane in Belgrade which will take off for Ohrid. My wife
and my children have found seats in that plane.
Now the Bosnian President Haris Sladzic, who is the SDZ General
Chairman, was my friend from Begova Madrasa days. His father was imam
at Gazi Husrev Bey Mosque and was a teacher in the madrasa. He had
completed the remained part of his education in Libya. Until I became the
Reis, he had been always discriminated by the Islamic Union of Yugoslavia
management. I made him my special pen manager.
In those days we were sitting at Presidency. Some friends in the garden with
their children were busy cooking something to eat. A rocket suddenly fell to
the garden, tearing the garden wall off. Five people were killed immediately
in the garden. I also hurt my ears. My right ear cannot hear any more.
Haris Sladzic attended the Islamic Countries Foreign Ministers Conference
in June 1992, as the Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I also
participated as Reis. I came to the meeting from Skopje. We then represent
Bosnia at this conference together.
I could not return to Bosnia. In August 1992 Alija went to Helsinki for a
conference, and was returning from there. I went to Zagreb. Next day Alija
also came to Zagreb to pass to Sarajevo. Şemso Tankoviç was the Croatian
representative of SDA. I visited him with Alija. I said: I want to go to
Sarajevo; it would be great moral support to Muslims. Alija said to me that I
need to get permission from Butros Gali.
I did not sound. Turkey’s Croatia Ambassador interjected, brought me up to
the airplane. Alija was really surprised seeing me on the plane.
However, in the months of March or April 1993, the last time I left Sarajevo,
and I could not return again.
In the meantime, among them now professor emeritus in Sarajevo, Fakultet
Nauka Islamska, hadith specialist (Fine Turkish Speaking) Omar Nakişeviç,
including the Marx expert Hilmi Jika a group of experts emerged. We were
meeting with the muftis to form a Balkan Mešihat. Jika asked me to preside
the Rijaset. But archive, employees, and the money were entrusted to me.
I proposed two Centers for Rijaset; Zagreb or Skopje. Two meetings were
held in Skopje. This group nominated Mustafa Ceric as Reis. I could appoint
Mustafa Ceric in place of Salih Çolakoviç as Bosnia Reis.
I've been attacked by this group during Skopje meetings, since I never
deliver the archive and the money to them.
I was far away from Sarajevo, Bosnia. During this gap this group applied to
the court. With a court order they had delivered budget records and library to
Mustafa Ceric. From that day on, Mustafa Ceric is the Bosnian Reis.
From the budget of Rijaset, $ 200 000 grants were made to the Bosnian
army, with the remaining foreign exchange reserves of the Rijaset, the Vakuf
Bank was founded.
Assembly of the Islamic Association of the Yugoslavia period, thus

effectively ended in October 1993. “
The Idea of Balkan Muslim Association

Appointed by a Sarajevo court decision in 1993, to the position of Deputy
Reis of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, is still the Bosnian Reis.
The only organization of Muslims in Yugoslavia during Tito times was the
Assembly of the Islamic Union of Yugoslavia. The center was in Sarajevo.
In the early 1990s, Mustafa Ceric, was the New Mosque imam in Zagreb.
He was sharing the same office room with Sulejman Recep who is the Reis
of Macedonia these days. Mustafa Ceric returned to Sarajevo when war
exploded in 1992. Ceric said to elected Reis Yaqub Selimoski' that, he
cannot sit in this office no longer. Suleyman Recebi who is in the position of
Macedonia Reis, which is evacuated by Selimoski upon his election to the
post of Yugoslavia Reis, refuses to return the position back to Selimoski.
Lutfi Balik while being a student at the Faculty of Theology in Ankara in
1995, have been invited to the Ministry of Religious Affairs very often to
interpret the delegations particularly from the Balkans. Although Kosovo is
not invited to the 1995 meeting of the Eurasia, Lutfi Balik attended as an
observer from Kosovo. At this meeting Yaqub Selimoski proposed the
establishment of the “Balkan Islamic Union”. Mustafa Ceric opposed this
idea since he predicted that he cannot be elected President to this Union.
Maintaining Autonomy of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and

Herzegovina
When the SFR Yugoslavia fell apart, there was a need to, in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, re-establish the broken continuity of the Islamic Community
autonomy. Therefore, the Restoration Council of the Islamic Community in
Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded on April 28th 1993.12
On the same day, the Restoration Council had its first meeting in Sarajevo
and proclaimed the Constitutional decision of the Islamic Community in
RB&H its highest normative act.
Pursuant to the Constitutional regulations, the Restoration Council appointed
Dr. Ef. Mustafa Cerić Naibu Grand Mufti and Hfz. Ef. Ismet Spahić Naibu
Grand Mufti Deputy.
As the Restoration Council was composed of all the muftiluks (Mufti
offices) in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Restoration Council
became the Council of the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
12
O. Nakičević, Istorijski razvoj institucije Rijaseta (The Historical Development of
the Institution of the Riyasat in Bosnia and Herzegovina), Sarajevo, 1996. P.183.
On its first regular meeting held on August 28th 1995 in Tuzla, the Council
brought the decision to rename the title Naibu Grand Mufti to Grand Mufti
al-Ulama (Bos. 'Reis-ul-ulema'), and to rename the Naib Grand Mufti
Deputy title to Grand Mufti al-Ulama Deputy.
On this meeting, it was decided that Grand Mufti al-Ulama, Dr. Ef. Mustafa
Cerić be granted with the Manshurat. The Manshurat Board was established
and constitues of the following members: Hilmo Neimarlija, Hfz. Ef. Ismet
Spahić, Dr. Omer Nakičević, Muhammed Salkić and Nihad Halilbegović.
The Commission decided that the Manshurat be granted to Grand Mufti al-
Ulama on August 5th 1996 in the Careva Mosque and following the usual
procedure.
Here is the translation of the Manshura:

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
Praise be to Allah, the Ruler of the Worlds, the Master of the Judgement
Day, the Almighty and the Greatest, who endowed humankind with Shari'ah
and its followers with scholars that teach about the Path of Rigtheousness.
Blessings on Prophet Muhammad, his honourable family and his
companions who teach about the good and dissuade from false belief! In the
Holy Qur'an, God commands Muslims not to deliver trusts to those unworthy
of them.
The most responsible duties in the community of Muslims are the duties of
imams and teachers who are on the Path of Righteousness.
These responsibilities are entrusted to alims who follow the Path of Allah
with determination and who perform the duties they have taken in the Name
of God.
This Manshurat certifies the appointment and the right of Grand Mufti al-
Ulama to perform this duty for the Islamic Community of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The Menshurat is hereby granted to Dr. Ef. Mustafa Cerić
Dr. Ef. Mustafa Cerić is the thirteenth Grand Mufti al-Ulama of the Islamic
Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
By public acceptance of this Menshurat and by taking the Oath to exercise
the entrused responsibility in the Name of God, Dr. Ef. Mustafa Cerić is
hereby granted with Shari'ah authorities as the leader of the Islamic
Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is the community of Muslims
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bosniaks abroad.
Oh, you who believe, be patient with admirable patience, keep a watch on
the borders and be afraid of Allah in order to achieve what you want!
Sarajevo,
Rabi-ul- Evvel 20th 1417/ August 5th 1996.
Manshurat Board members:
Hilmo Neimarlija
Dr. Omer Nakičević
Hafiz Ismet Spahić
Muhammed Salkić
Nihad Halilbegović 13
Dr. Ef. Mustafa Cerić, successfully keep this title for two decades. He
followed a long chain of Bosniak Religious Leaders (Grand Mufti al-
Ulamas): 14
1. Ef. Mustafa Hilmi Hadžiomerović (1882 -1893)
2. Ef. Mehmed Teufik Azapagić (1893 -1909)
3. Ef. Hafiz Sulejman Šarac (1910-1912)
4. Ef. Mehmed Džemaludin Čaušević (1913 -1930)
5. Ef. Hafiz Ibrahim Maglajlić (1930 -1936)
6. Ef. Fehim Spaho (1938 -1942)
7. Salih Safvet Bašić, the first Naib (1936 -1938)
Grand Mufti al-Ulama Deputy (1942 -1947)
8. Ef. Ibrahim Fejić (1947 -1957)
9. Ef. Sulejman Kemura (1957 -1975)
10. Ef. Naim Hadžiabdić (1975 -1987)
11. Ef. Hafiz Husein Mujić (1987 -1989)
12. Ef. Jakub Selimoski (1991 -1992)
13. Dr. Mustafa Cerić (1993- )
Ties Between SDA, Islamic Community

The mandates of Reisul-ulema Mustafa effendi Ceric and his deputy, Ismet
effendi Spahic, have been affirmed. They are expected toconsolidate the
SDA [Party of Democratic Action] stronghold within the IslamicCommunity
[IZ]. But since the latest elections, the IZ itself has fallen preyto the
atmosphere of conflict on the SDA Executive Board and within thatparty's
federal parliamentary caucus, with clashes between the “Zagreb lodge”and
the “Alija loyalists.” The new-old spiritual leaders also have otherproblems
besides these: Ever since they were first elected in the spring of1993, an
open clash has been smoldering between Islamic leaders in Sarajevoand
13
O. Nakičević, Ibid,. P.187.
14
O. Nakičević, Ibid,. P.188.
Zenica, the consequences of which are being felt to this day. The case
ofImam Mehtic is the most illustrative example of how the IZ deals with
thosewho oppose the SDA monopoly, but whether it is truly finished is a
matter ofconcern right now to the reis and to Alija alike.15
The elections within the Islamic Community that have been sought for
yearsnow have ended with the constituting of the Congress and the election
ofmembers of Rijaset (17 October) and the election of the reisul-ulema and
hisdeputy (19 November). Aside from formal congratulations, there have
been nospecial analyses or commentaries within the Bosnian public. One
Westernanalyst with lengthy experience in Sarajevo wondered after these
elections”whether the 'hardcore' faction of the SDA is turning the Islamic
Communityinto its new 'stronghold' now that it is slowly losing control of
the partyand knows that it will experience a profound crisis when Alija
leaves.” Oneformer high-ranking official with the Islamic Community says,
“Those people inthe SDA are now looking for a base of support in the
Islamic Community.” Inboth cases, the observers of the situation in the SDA
and the IZ are referringto the young Muslim faction, the group of people
around the “champions ofconscience” from the end of the 1940s and mid-
1980s, and their relatives andchildren.
Sources familiar with the current situation in the SDA and the IZ point
outthat since the latest elections, the Islamic Community itself has fallen
preyto the atmosphere of conflict on the SDA Executive Board and within
thatparty's federal parliamentary caucus. They speak of a clash between
the”Zagreb lodge” and “Alija's loyalists.” Asked about the position of the
new-old reis, Mustafa effendi Ceric, relative to the Cengic-Bicakcic party
conflict,insiders say that Hasan Cengic and Reis Ceric clashed directly at the
veryfirst session of the new Congress. After Cengic voiced numerous
objections andadvisements, Reis Ceric asked Hasan Cengic not to bring the
atmosphere presentin the Federal Parliament to the Islamic Community
Congress.
The party conflicts within the SDA are personified by the two deputies
fromSarajevo who, according to these sources, are the leaders of the
opposingfactions: Hasan Cengic and Bakir Izetbegovic. Within the Islamic
CommunityCongress, the president's son is the undisputed leader of the
majority factionof “Alija's loyalists,” who “intend to ward off the influence
of the 'Zagreblodge.'“ The list of Islamic Community deputies elected for the
1998-2002 termis headed by Hilmo Neimarlija, the chairman of the IZ
Congress, a deputy tothe House of Representatives of the Bosnia-
Herzegovina Parliament, and a mainSDA functionary. Besides Cengic and
Izetbegovic, the Sarajevo delegationincludes other less important political
figures, such as Sarajevo CantonGovernor Mustafa Mujezinovic, Dr. Faris
Gavrankapetanovic, Prof. Dr. BehijaZlatar, Prof. Dr. Sahzija Dreca....
15
E. Hečimović: "Priest in the Jaws of Power", (first paragraph is Dani
introduction), Sarajevo Dani in Serbo-Croatian 07 Dec 98 pp 22-25
More than half of the Sarajevo delegation to the Congress was on the
SDAelectoral lists over the past two years or was closely linked to the
“SDAhardcore.” Deputies or SDA functionaries from cantonal governments
are alsofound in the delegations from other muftijstvos, functioning more or
less as”cantonal SDA commissars for the Islamic Community.” Examples of
this aredeputy Kemal Terzic, the head of Donji Vakuf, and Semsudin
Mehmedovic,(advisor) police minister from Zenica. Izet Hadzic from Tuzla
(a formergovernor and SDA deputy) has even become a member of the IZ
Rijaset; under adecision by the Congress he was elected “from the ranks of
prominent citizenswho are not employed by the Islamic Community.”
Sarajevo Initiative
Through the exclusion of the new Zenica mufti, Ejub Dautovic, from the
Rijaset, that leading Islamic center of Bosnia-Herzegovina is at the same
timeleft without a representative in the top ranks of the Islamic Community.
Thosefamiliar with the situation within the IZ say that the decree under
which notall muftis are members of the Rijaset was thought up in order to
exclude theformer Zenica mufti, Hafiz Halil effendi Mehtic, whose dismissal
was neverexplained to the public. Although the deputy reis, Ismet effendi
Spahic, was bornin Puhovac, near Zenica, he has spent his career in Visoko
(16 years) andSarajevo.
Like Reis Ceric himself, deputy Spahic was elected to that position at
therecommendation of a group of individuals and organizations in Sarajevo.
Hiselection to that post in the spring of 1993 provoked an open clash
betweenIslamic leaders in Sarajevo and Zenica, the repercussions of which
are stillbeing felt to this day. Just as even now the Bosnian public knows
next tonothing about the current factional struggle within the leadership
ranks ofthe SDA and the Islamic Community, so too is it unfamiliar with the
eventsthat preceded it. Before the Congress became a scene of internal
partyconflict, those who opposed the establishment of party control over
thereligious community were removed from IZ bodies.
The struggle for control over the IZ began way back during the
1990elections. In opposition to Ceric's candidacy, promoted by the
foundingnucleus of the SDA, the Clergy Association nominated Jakub
Selimoski as the IZreis for the SFRY, Salih effendi Colakovic as president of
the Mešihat for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Dr. Dzelal Imamovic as chairman
of the Bosnia-Herzegovina IZCongress. At that time, the candidates
nominated by the Clergy Association wonthe elections within the Islamic
Community. To this day, supporters of Saliheffendi Colakovic recall that the
chairman of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency, Alija Izetbegovic, “never
sent a note of congratulations to the then-Islamicleader regarding his
election, but he did attend the inaugurations of leadersof other religious
communities.”
In the spring of 1993, in besieged Sarajevo, a group of professors from

theGazi Husrev-begova Religious Secondary School [GHM] and Muslim
intellectualsclose to the SDA decided to take control of the Islamic
Community. The”Initiative-Organizational Committee of Muslim
Institutions for theRestitution of the Rijaset of the Republic of Bosnia-
Herzegovina” was founded,whose members were, in alphabetical order:
Nusret Cancar, instructor at theFIN [School of Islamic Sciences -- Fakultet
islamiskih nauka]; Resid Bilalic, professor at the GHM; Senahid
Bistric,director of the GHM; Prof. Dr. Enes Durakovic; Hadzem Hajdarevic,
author; Nihad Halilbegovic, jurist; Prof. Dr. Kemal Hrelja; Prof. Dr. Mustafa
Imamovic; Alija Isakovic, author; Mustafa Jahic, director of the GHM; Prof.
Dr. Enes Karic, FIN; Zijad Ljevakovic, professor at the GHM; Semsudin
Music, architect; Prof. Dr. Muhamed Nezirovic; Mustafa Spahic, professor
at the GHM; Mustafa Susic, official with the Mešihat; Hafiz Ismet effendi
Spahic, professor at the GHM; Hafiz Mahmut Traljic; and Ismet Veladzic,
professor at the GHM. The chairman of this committee was Semsudin
Music.
At the end of March 1993, this committee sent a letter to Musliminstitutions
in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was during the agonyof the
towns of Cerska and Kamenica, right before another major instance
ofMuslim agony in Srebrenica and the beginning of open warfare with the
CroatianDefense Council [HVO]--only two weeks before the massacre in
Ahmici. In thisletter, the Committee cited as the basis for the initiative “a
broaddiscussion among representatives of Muslim--religious andsecular--
institutions in Sarajevo.” That very letter also proposed new leadersfor the
Islamic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina: Dr. Mustafa Ceric and
Ismeteffendi Spahic. “Based on the attitude of the citizenry and
representatives ofMuslim institutions in Sarajevo, the greatest amount of
confidence for thefunction of reisul-ulema is enjoyed by Prof. Dr. Mustafa
Ceric and Hafiz Ismeteffendi Spahic. We feel that it is absolutely necessary
to establish orreconstitute the function of deputy reis, for which we nominate
Ismet effendiSpahic,” the Sarajevo initiative “explained.”
Gang of Emissaries in the Field

Over the course of the next month, April 1993, during which eastern
Bosniaunderwent the great tragedy of being transformed into isolated
enclaves, andHVO units set out from Herzegovina and central Bosnia for the
purpose ofeffecting a final ethnic demarcation with the Muslims and creating
pure andethnically compact Croat territory, the entire matter was resolved.
On 28April 1993, the Restoration Congress was held in Sarajevo, whose
delegates,through engineered actions, included not only representatives of
parts of theIZ, but also representatives of various Muslim associations, such
as the KDM[Muslim Cultural Association -- Kulturno drustvo Muslimana]
“Rebirth,” the Congress of Bosnian-Muslim Intellectuals,the Muslim
Charitable Society “Merhamet,” the Association of Muslims for Anti-

Genocidal Activities, the MAK [women's association MAK -- named after
poet Mak Dizdar] “Bosnian,” and Sumejja.
In Sarajevo itself, the temporary body of the Mešihat of the IZ of
theRepublic of Bosnia-Herzegovina spoke up, pointing out the senselessness
ofsuch an action at a time “when nearly half of this nation is in exile and
theremainder, aside from these activists, is at war”: “These people have
begunholding meetings, skirmishing through the media, leveling
accusations, andputting forward scholastic arguments for the purpose of
justifying theiractions, and an entire gang of emissaries has been sent out
into the field.”It was also pointed out that “the public is little aware of the
fact thatcertain structures or groups of people are constantly attempting to
takecontrol of the IZ finances, and that individual subjects are getting
theirhands on the few resources at the IZ's disposal in order to build up their
ownimage.”
The office of the Mešihat in Zenica and the Clergy Association, led byHafiz
Mehtic, opposed “any misuse of the war situation.” Tuzla Mufti
Huseineffendi Kavazovic and the imams and committees from that region
sought apostponement of the Congress and action to prevent interference in
the IZ'saffairs by any institutions against the will of the Islamic
Community.Herzegovinan Mufti Seid effendi Smajkic announced that the
people in Mostar were”opposed to any spurious wartime and crisis solutions,
because under present-day conditions various so-called crisis staffs are
proposed whenever someonewants to push through his own solutions
without recourse to legal andlegitimate institutions.”
At the so-called Restoration Congress of the IZ in “besieged Sarajevo,”
Dr.Ceric and Hafiz Spahic were elected reis and deputy reis despite
opposition tothat method of voting in the interior of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in
what was thenso-called “free territory.” Activists from the Initiative
Committee becameambassadors, diplomats in the Islamic world, high-
ranking officers in the Armyof Bosnia-Herzegovina, national prominent
figures, national history andtextbook writers, ministers, editors and
publishers.... Those who resistedlater lost every vestige of respect. “A group
of citizens of Sarajevo, some ofwhom were employed by the IZ but were not
its representatives, decided toorganize the IZ without the involvement of its
institutions. Instead ofsupport from regional centers, they received the
explicit response that anyreorganization of the IZ would be out of the
question without the involvementof its institutions and without the joint
participation of all regions.Despite that, on 28 April the so-called
Restoration Congress was held,comprising only the group of people from
Sarajevo. At that time, theirCongress 'chairman' and secretary were also
elected, followed by the naibu-reis and his deputy. A source of particular
irritation to the Muslim public isthe fact that at that the delegates to that
Congress repealed all existinglegal instruments and IZ organs, from the
Supreme Council, the Rijaset, andthe reisul-ulema to the republican

congresses and Mešihats. The actions ofthat group contain all the elements
of a classic putsch,” Hafiz Halil effendiMehtic said in late March 1993 in an
interview with Zenica's Nasa Rijec.
In that interview, Hafiz Mehtic publicly came out against the
establishmentof party control over the Islamic Community: “Especially
indicative are the'congratulations' from the SDA Headquarters for Bosnia-
Herzegovina and theinitiatives from Sarajevo, to the SDA Main Committee,
at its session on 8 and9 May in Tuzla, to support the initiatives of the
'Restoration' Congress.Thanks to the political good sense of the majority of
those present at thatgathering, the 'Restoration' Congress did not receive
support. A similarinitiative was on the agenda of the SDA regional
committee meeting heldrecently in Breza, where a stance identical to the one
in Tuzla was taken. Atthat time it was concluded that this problem should
not be dealt with by apolitical party, in this case the SDA; rather, it is an
internal matter of theIslamic Community,” said Hafiz Mehtic. “I am afraid
that there is a desirehere to create a state IZ over which the ruling party
would have maximuminfluence, using the IZ to implement its political and
partisan ideals, whichwe should not permit under any circumstances. The
cases of Tuzla and Brezashow that these are indeed the aspirations of
individuals in the SDA who, justas they are attempting to achieve a
monopoly within their own party, areattempting the same thing in the area of
religious life. The IslamicCommunity, or rather its imams, played a large
role in the formation of theSDA and its election victory, but now that party is
attempting to destroy theautonomy and unity of this Community, which has
in fact helped the party themost. Aware that it has lost much of the
confidence of its members, the SDA isnow attempting to secure future
confidence and achieve influence through itsown imposed religious leaders.
I think that the SDA leaders would be betteroff concerning themselves with
their own affairs instead of interfering withreligious affairs and the Islamic
Community. Through these activities theywant to place Islam and the
Islamic Community at the service of politics,instead of the other way
around,” said Imam Mehtic.
Mehtic Amuses Observers

These public reactions on his part are key evidence indicating that thefirst
opposition to the political use of religion and to party control overthe Islamic
Community came from within the IZ itself, not from secularpoliticians or
“enemies of Islam.” Imam Mehtic remained consistent in thisdemand for
Islamic Community autonomy. In midsummer 1996, Hafiz Mehtic
turneddown an offer from SDA leaders in Zenica-Doboj Canton to be
included on theSDA electoral list for the cantonal elections being held at that
time. Hisexplanation at the time--that he did not want to offend his faithful
fromother parties, such as “Haris's” or the SDP [Social Democratic Party]--
amusedwell-informed observers, who began predicting how long he would

retain thepost of mufti following that.
In the May-June 1996 issue of the Islamic magazine Muallim, which
ispublished by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Clergy Association, Hafiz Halil
effendi Mehticwrote in an introductory piece that “political pluralism for
Bosniaks does notnecessarily mean eating into their national and spiritual
substance, which isto say their overall unity. On the level of politics it is
illusory, given thenature of politics, to expect full consensus among
Bosniaks; that must and canbe achieved only when their fundamental
spiritual and national interests areat stake.” “In that sense, public
declarations by IZ officials on behalf ofspecific parties leave an extremely
tasteless and inappropriate impression. Somany times in the past we have
witnessed the harmful consequences of theCommunity and the ulema
bowing to politics, so it is more than extraneous todiscuss that in greater
detail here. If we want to be good, then we must notbe outside or inside
politics, but rather above it. For these reasons, theemissary has praised those
representatives of the government who have come toulemas in order to
exchange opinions and advice, but has reproached the ulemaswho have
approached the rulers in order to reach agreements. Indeed, Mohammedsaid
this: 'When you see a religious scholar who associates with a ruler, youwill
know that he is an imposter,'“ Hafiz Mehtic, as president of the
ClergyAssociation, wrote in Muallim on the eve of preparations for the
1996elections.
At the same time, Imam Mehtic publicly criticized the postponement of
theelections within the Islamic Community and the extension of the “state of
war”that had been declared merely on the basis of a decision by the group
ofpeople from Sarajevo at the so-called Restoration Congress. Observers of
thesituation within the IZ were convinced that there was an important reason
forpostponing the elections. The holding of elections was unacceptable to
the”wartime government” of the IZ until there existed an independent
channel forexerting influence over the 1,000 imams in Bosnia, beyond the
control of theSDA's founding nucleus. The Clergy Association was always
regarded as anunacceptable choice for such a channel as long as its president
was Hafiz Mehtic.
Over the course of 1997, rumors began circulating within Zenica
Islamiccircles to the effect that Mehtic was expected to be dismissed from
the postof mufti and replaced by Mahmut effendi Karalic. At first the report
seemedincredible because it was known that the central people in the
“Zagreb shadowgovernment” rejected any and all aid for the 7th Muslim
Brigade as long as itsemir was Mahmut effendi Karalic. Moreover, Karalic
and Mehtic had closelycooperated on its creation and Mehtic, although
elected, left it up to Karalicto be the primary emir for what later came to be
considered one of the mostimportant units of the Army of Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Insiders claimed that keypolitical and security functionaries
asked Halil Brzina (later a general) to intervene in persuading Karalic to take

on the position of mufti. According tothis source, Karalic said that he
thought that Mehtic deserved his position and that he would never injure his
colleague in such a way.
Period or Comma
The net was cast at Imam Mehtic for the third time in the past 15 years. Ina
sense, things were certainly harder for him than they had been in 1983,
whenhe refused, even at gunpoint, to give false testimony in a rigged trial, or
inJanuary 1986, when he was subjected to a 40-month investigation and
trialstaged by the then-state security service. At that time he was
acquitted,because the charges did not stand up to eyewitness testimony and
proof ofpolice manipulation of the charges. Now the charges were not even
public.
On the eve of the Clergy Congress in the fall of 1997, all that remained to be
done was to coordinate the speeches, but Reis Cerić did not show up at
thescheduled meeting. Instead of an agreement, what was made public was
acommuniquĂ?Â?Ă‚Â© in which the leadership of Bosnia's imams was
accused of supportingthose who “are bringing about a schism between
Bosniaks with their legalisticdifferences.” At the same time, Salih effendi
Colakovic was accused ofcollaborating with Fikret Abdić. Without any
written explanation, Imam Mehticwas relieved of his duties as Zenica's mufti
on 26 November 1997, under adecision by the Congress. In a verbal
explanation, the deputies to theCongress were simply told that Imam Mehtic
“cannot play on this team.”
Elected as the new president of the clergy was the reisul-ulema's chief
ofstaff, Muharem effendi Hasanbegovic. It was only after this incapacitation
of the”opposition” within the Islamic Community that the elections were
organizedand held. Nevertheless, in the electoral “pre-qualifying round” in
the TravnikMuftijstvo, Hafiz Mehtic was nominated for leading functions in
the IslamicCommunity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The “cantonal SDA
commissar for the IZ” therereacted sharply, accusing the nominator, the
director of an Islamicinstitution and a “priest from the trenches,” of sowing
discord in theCommunity: “The 'Mehtic affair' is over, period!” This is the
third time inthe “Mehtic affair” that the authorities have written a period but
eventuallyit turns into a comma. So this story will be continued....
5.6. Bosnian Islam since 1990: Cultural Identity or Political Ideology?

It is a delicate exercise to analyze the role of Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina
during the recent war. There are two main reasons for this. The first one is
that Islam, and religion in general, played only a secondary role in the
Yugoslav crisis: religious symbols were primarily used as substitutes for

national ones, and religious institutions were largely instrumentalized by
political elites, who must be the first to be blamed for the crisis. An analysis
of Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war should therefore not be taken
as an analysis of the war itself.16
The second reason is more closely linked to Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina
itself. During the war, two conflicting representations of Bosnian Islam have
appeared: one presented it as a model of tolerance and modernity, and the
other as a bunch of fundamentalists and mujahideens. Some have maintained
that the « Islamic Declaration » written by the Bosnian President Alija
Izetbegovic was no more than a summary of the main principles of Islamic
faith, while others have asserted that it was a kind of Islamic « Mein Kampf
». Yet, as opposite as they may seem, these two approachs share a common
basis: each treats Bosnian Islam as a stable and homogeneous whole, and
Alija Izetbegovic as its sole legitimate representative.
This section aims to contradict such caricatured and simplistic
representations. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, as everywhere, Islam constitutes a
diverse and changing reality, includes numerous approaches, and is shaped
by various actors with different aims and strategies. Similarly, it is probably
not very useful to speculate whether Bosnian Muslim leaders have aimed to
create a “secular” or an “Islamic” state, given that recent political
developments in Turkey and Iran have compeled us to reconsider categories
which, for a short time prior this, seemed to be self-evident. Moreover, we
have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Dzemaludin Latic, one of the main
ideologists of the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije –
SDA), when he writes about A. Izetbegovic: “The aspiration toward an
Islamic state in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not and is not his aim – not because
such a state would deprive Muslims or non-Muslims of their freedom, but
because the brutal European environment surrounding this state would
destroy it, even with atomic bombs if necessary. (…) Everyone who knows
about Islam knows that even God does not require of us the establishment of
an Islamic order here, in Europe. “
But, in writing this, does Dz. Latic tell us everything about the evolutions of
Bosnian Islam, about its place in the projects and the strategies of the SDA?
16
Xavier Bougarel, Bosnian Islam since 1990: Cultural Identity or Political
Ideology?, Paper presented for the Annual Convention of the Association for the
Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New-York, April 15-17, 1999.
French version published as “L’islam bosniaque, entre identité culturelle et idéologie
politique”, in : Xavier Bougarel / Nathalie Clayer (dir.), Le nouvel Islam balkanique.
Les Musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001,
pp. 79-132.
Bosnian version published as “Bosanski islam od 1990 : kulturni identitet ili
politicka ideologija”, n° 107 à 109, August and September 1999.
Definitely not. In order to better understand the role and trajectories of Islam
during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is necessary to explore the
ideological origins of the founders of the SDA and their place in the political
and religious diversity of Bosnian Islam. We must also analyze how this
ideological current managed to take over the leadership of the Muslim
community, and to keep it throughout the war. It will then be easier to
determine to what extent this Islamic factor may have influenced the violent
reshaping of the Yugoslav space or, more narrowly, the cultural and political
transformations within the Bosnian Muslim community itself.
The Role of the Pan-Islamist Current in the Creation of the SDA

The origins of the Bosnian pan-Islamist current reach back to the 1930s, with
the creation of an organization called “Young Muslims” (“Mladi
Muslimani”). During World War II, these “Young Muslims” supported the
idea of an autonomous Bosnia-Herzegovina under German tutelage, and
some of them joined the “Handzar” SS-division, created at the initiative of
Jerusalem mufti Amin el-Huseini. Forbidden by the new communist
authorities, the “Young Muslims” continued to work clandestinely with the
aim of creating a common state for all Balkan Muslim populations, closely
patterned on the Pakistani experience. In 1949, a wave of arrests broke up
the organization, and the Young Muslims who were not jailed had to cease
all political activity or flee abroad.
It was not until the 1970s that this pan-Islamist current was informally
reconstituted. At that time, a general political liberalization and the “national
affirmation” of the Bosnian Muslims allowed some former “Young
Muslims” to take part in the renewal of Islamic religious institutions.
Through a discussion circle led by a young imam, Hasan Čengić, they made
contact with a group of pupils of the Sarajevo madrasa (Islamic secondary
school). The new pan-Islamist current therefore came to consist of two
distinct generations. Its central figure was Alija Izetbegovic, a former «
Young Muslim » and the author of the « Islamic Declaration » which can be
regarded as the informal manifesto of this renewed pan-Islamist current. In
1983, their activities were interrupted when A. Izetbegovic and twelve others
were charged with of « Islamic fundamentalism » and « Muslim nationalism
» and sentenced to prison. At the same time, however, this turned the main
members of the pan-Islamist current into martyrs, which in turn helped them
to overcome their own marginality.
Seven years later, indeed, the members of this pan-Islamist current came to
play a central part in the creation of the SDA: among its fourty founding
members were eight former « Young Muslims » and several others close to
the pan-Islamist current or the Zagreb mosque, then the main centre of
islamic contestation in Yugoslavia. The central influence of the pan-Islamist
current, however, does not turn the SDA into an Islamist party. The SDA
intended initially to gather the whole “historical and cultural Muslim circle”
of Yugoslavia (Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Turks, etc.), and some

religious requests were included in its founding platform (e.g., the re-
establishment of major religious feasts as state holidays, the return of the
waqfs – religious estates – to the Islamic religious institutions, the freedom
to build mosques in towns and new suburbs without mosques, the
introduction of halal food in army barracks, hospitals and prisons). But the
SDA pronounced itself in favour of a parlamentary democracy along the
Western pattern, and concentrated its activities among the Muslims of
Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sandjak.
On the ground, there has been a great contrast between the very limited
success of the SDA among Albanians and Turks, and its growing influence
within the Bosnian Muslim population. This rapid growth in the SDA
compelled the pan-Islamist current to integrate in the party various currents
of Muslim nationalism, as well as numerous notables from the League of
Communists. This was exemplified by the situation in the Bihac region,
where the SDA was launched by local pan-Islamists (Mirsad Veladzic, Irfan
Ljubijankic, etc.), but gained mass appeal as a party only after the rallying of
Fikret Abdic, a powerful local notable involved in the “Agrokomerc affair”,
a financial scandal which shook the Bosnian League of Communists in 1987.
Despite this transformation of the SDA into a « catch-all party », the pan-
Islamist current managed to maintain control. Except for A. Izetbegovic,
who ran for the Collegial Presidency side by side with the former
communists Fikret Abdic and Ejup Ganic, the pan-Islamists were seldom
candidates for public offices. But they were predominant in the top ranks of
the party, Omer Behmen (a former « Young Muslim » and one of the
accused in the 1983 trial) being for example president of the all-powerful
staff commission. In order to understand the ability of the pan-Islamist
current to keep the SDA under control, however, it is not enough to know
how the party apparatus functioned. The real strength of this current laid in
its ability to put itself at the center of the political recompositions set into
motion by the collapse of communism and the crisis of the Yugoslav
federation.
In 1990, the pan-Islamist current itself had probably no more than a few
hundreds members. It controled the Islamic weekly “Preporod” (“Rebirth”)
since the wave of contestation which had shaken the Islamic religious
institutions a year earlier, but it was still in the minority among members of
the executive bodies of the Islamska zajednica (Islamic Community, the
official name of the Islamic religious institutions). Similarly, it had almost
no influence among the Muslim secular intelligentsia. Given this situation,
the members of the pan-Islamist current were careful not to put forward their
own understanding of Islam, but nevertheless made use of it as a rallying
point for the support of the Muslim population This they accomplished
through the use of many Islamic symbols (green flags, the use of religious
greetings, etc.) at the election rallies for the SDA. This instrumentalization
of Islam allowed pan-Islamist party leaders to involve the ulemas (religious

leaders) in the electoral campaign, to ensure themselves the loyalty of
secular notables and intellectuals in search of a new legitimacy and, in the
end, to turn the nationalist mobilization of the Muslim population to their
own advantage.
That this evocation of Islam was cultural rather than ideological in nature
can be seen in the fact that the first internal conflict in the SDA broke out
around the very definition of Muslim identity. In September 1990, Adil
Zulfikarpasic, the main representative of the Muslim political emigration,
together with several secular intellectuals of Sarajevo and other Bosnian
towns, suggested giving up the national name « Muslim » in favor of a new
one : “Bosniac” (“Bosnjak”). The members of the pan-Islamist current were,
of course, hostile to such a “secularization” of Muslim national identity, and
they managed to marginalize their opponents with the support of the ulemas
and some of the main intellectual figures from the « national affirmation »
movement of the 1970s.
Expelled from the SDA, the advocates of « neo-bosnjastvo » created a new
party, the Muslim Bosniac Organization (MBO), which won only 1,1 % of
the vote at the general elections of November 1990. The SDA, for its part,
won 30,4 % of the vote (that is more than two thirds of the Muslim vote) and
thus became the largest political party in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the
presidential election, F. Abdic won noticeably more votes (1,040,307) than
A. Izetbegović (874,213), but the latter was nevertheless made President of
the Bosnian Collegial Presidency. In this way, the decision of the top ranks
of the party prevailed over the choice of the voters.
The Transformations of the SDA during the War

The electoral success of the SDA can also be attributed to its informal
coalition with the two other nationalist parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka – SDS) and the
Croatian Democratic Community (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica – HDZ),
against the « civic » parties which had grown out of the former League of
Communists and its mass organizations. The SDA exerted thus only limited
control over the state apparatus until the beginning of the war in April 1992.
On one hand, it had to share power with the two other nationalist parties; on
the other hand, the top of the main administrations and state companies were
staffed with former communists close to the « civic » parties. But the SDA
already began to set up its own communitarian networks: the cultural
association « Preporod » (« Rebirth »), the humanitarian organization «
Merhamet » (Charity ») and, most importantly, the Patriotic League, an
underground organization in charge of the military defense of Bosnia-
Herzegovina.
After the beginning of the war, the SDA shifted certain functions from what
had become a completely disorganized state apparatus to the party’s own
parallel networks. The « civic » parties succeeded in winning places in the
Collegial Presidency but, at the same time, the SDA managed to circumvent
and marginalize such state institutions in order to more effectively
monopolize power. One of his greatest successes on this front was its
gaining control of the young Bosnian armed forces. Within the army itself,
some militia leaders close to the Patriotic League acted as a counterbalance
to the influence of officers who had come from the Yugoslav army or the
Bosnian Territorial Defense. From the outside, the SDA also took control of
money collection and weapons smuggling channels, and was therefore able
to influence the political orientation of the army.
Within this context, foreign policy has served a double function for the
leaders of the SDA: to compensate both for the weakness of the Bosnian
state within the Yugoslav space, and for the weakness of the SDA within the
Bosnian state apparatus. Hence the strenuous efforts of the SDA to take over
key positions of the Bosnian diplomatic apparatus, beginning with the office
of Minister of Foreign affairs, which was held successively by Haris
Silajdzic, Irfan Ljubijankic and Muhamed Sacirbegovic. Hence also the
clear split in the diplomatic corps between some embassies in the Western
countries, entrusted to members of the « civic » parties, and other embassies
charged with solliciting donations from the Bosnian diaspora and the
Muslim world, which were monopolized by members of the pan-Islamist
current (beginning with the Bosnian embassy in Teheran, entrusted to Omer
Behmen).
The reorganization of the Bosnian state apparatus, which took place after the
violent secession of F. Abdic in the Bihac area in September 1993, and was
marked by the nomination of H. Silajdzic as the new Prime Minister, only
partially altered the way the SDA ruled the territories under its control. The
arrest of some militia leaders and local bosses contributed to the restoration
of state authority, but this was followed by the entrance of members of the
pan-Islamist current into positions of the state, as shown by their
appointment as regional ministers (Mirsad Veladzic in Bihac, Fuad Djidic in
Zenica) or directors of state companies (Edhem Bicakcic in Energoinvest).
Moreover, the parallel networks set up by the pan-Islamist current did not
disappear. On the contrary, they managed to take over some of the supply
channels previously controled by F. Abdic, and began to organize
themselves along an axis of influence running from Vienna to Visoko, a
town in central Bosnia. In Vienna, the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA),
led by Fatih al-Hasanein of Sudan and Hasan Cengic, gathered money
collected in the Muslim world and the Bosnian diaspora, and organized the
delivery of weapons to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Visoko, the main logistical
center of the Bosnian army led by Halid Cengic (Hasan’s father) dispatched
financial and material aid according to political criteria. Such « ideological
clientelism » can also to be found at the local level, in areas ranging from the
allocation of jobs and accomodations to the provision of electricity and the
distribution of humanitarian aid.
This form of rule, in which official institutions are circumvented by parallel
networks from which the bulk of power is exercised, has led to a dual reality
of the Bosnian state. The members of the Collegial Presidency, for example,
have been reduced to a mere legitimation function, as they were denied any
real influence by Alija Izetbegovic and his entourage. A Bosnjacki sabor
(Bosniac assembly), made up of political and cultural representatives only
from the Muslim community, was convened alongside the Bosnian
Parliament. And in the Bosnian army, « Muslim brigades », directly financed
by SDA’s parallel networks, have appeared alongsides regular units.
In February 1995, Collegial Presidency members close to the « civic »
parties protested the existence of these « Muslim brigades ». In return, they
were attacked by Alija Izetbegovic and Ejup Ganic, together with the general
staff of the army, which was supposed to be subordinated to the Presidency
rather than the party! Six months later, Haris Silajdzic, the main architect of
the recovery of the Bosnian state, suggested during a Parliament session that
donations collected by the SDA be returned to state coffers. In so doing, H.
Silajdzic sealed his break with SDA leaders.
The SDA’s use of parallel networks to circumvent state processes, and its
simultaneous moves to progressively monopolize the state have led to the
reconstitution of a party-state system in which state and party
responsabilities tend to merge. Alija Izetbegovic, for example, was at the
same time President of the Collegial Presidency and President of the SDA,
and made skilful use of this presidential ubiquity. The Muslim-Croat
Federation, as a new coalition between nationalist parties, has exaggerated
this tendency, as shown by the rise of Edhem Bicakcic, co-president of a
SDA-HDZ joint commission, eclipsing Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic.
In addition to extending its control over the state, the SDA has surrounded
itself with « transmission belts » intended to supervise the population. The
Bosnjacki sabor is made up of representatives of the main Muslim
communitarian organizations, which have been coopted in a manner similar
to that which operated under the « delegation system » of Yugoslav self-
management. In the assistance economy of the wartime, the humanitarian
organization « Merhamet » and various organizations of refugees, veterans
or martyr families linked to the SDA have played a part similar to the trade-
unions in the planned economy of the communist regimes.
There are therefore blatant similarities between the political practices of the
SDA and those of the League of Communists; but there are also important
differences. The SDA considers itself to be the sole legitimate representative
of the Muslim nation and has reduced the role of the « civic » parties within
the Collegial Presidency to one of outward legitimation, but it has also never
questioned the principle of multiparty pluralism. Similarly, the SDA has
controled the state radio and television, but also tolerated some independent
newspapers and TV stations. Above all, the party has not attempted to win
the active support of the population, but merely to ensure its passive
allegiance. Thus, the manner in which the SDA exerts power is less
reminiscent of the former communist regimes than of the authoritarian
regimes which appeared after 1990 in other former republics of Yugoslavia
(Serbia, Croatia, etc.) or the Soviet Union (Bielorussia, etc.).
The reconstitution of a party-state has been accompanied by an important
turn-over in the party itself. The first months of war saw the removal of
numerous notables by militia leaders and criminals who, at that time, held
power at the local level. Then, after Fall 1993, the SDA’s penetration into
the restored state apparatus was followed by an opposite trend, that is the
entrance into the SDA of officers, high civil servants and directors who were
formerly active under the communist system. Indeed, the former communist
executives have joined the new ruling party or have been dismissed from
their jobs. In this way, the SDA has succeeded in getting the managerial staff
it had lacked in November 1990, and in securing the take over of a state
apparatus it had, until then, controlled only indirectly. In March 1994, the
Police Minister Bakir Alispahic and the chief of military security services
Fikret Muslimovic entered the Executive Committee of the party, followed
by general Atif Dudakovic and Mehmet Alagic in January 1996. These
promotions illustrated this process of reconversion of parts of the former
military, political and managerial elites into the SDA.
Far from endangering the central position of the pan-Islamist current within
the party, these internal changes in the SDA have actually worked to
consolidate its influence. In the first months of the war, the ideological
cohesion of this current, reinforced by long-standing personal and family
ties, gave its members an important advantage over their political opponents.
Later on, control of key positions in the SDA’s parallel networks enabled the
pan-Islamists to retain control over the restoration of the state as well as the
renewal of the party. They could also put pressure on former communist
elites, who sought new career paths and new legitimacy, to eliminate more
independent figures like Haris Silajdzic. Finally, during the war, the pan-
Islamist current has acquired the financial power and political experience it
had lacked at the founding of the SDA. But it remains necessary to explore
whether the reinforcement of the power of this current means also the
implementation of an Islamist political project in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
any real process of re-Islamization among the Muslim population.
The SDA and the Yugoslav Crisis

From the wider view of the Yugoslav crisis, it is most important to know
which were the real political choices of the SDA, and which was the specific
influence exerted on them by the pan-Islamist current. This is due to the fact
that, whereas the SDS and the HDZ have not hid their nationalistic projects,
the attitude of the SDA before and during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina
was much more ambiguous, and, in fact, remains a subject of controversy

today.
Paradoxically, the initial commitment of the SDA to the upholding of
Yugoslavia can be explained by the specific influence of the pan-Islamist
current, as Yugoslavia was seen as the sine qua non condition for uniting the
whole « historical and cultural Muslim circle » of the Yugoslav space.
However, other reasons for this commitment can be found in a « tactical
Yugoslavism », similar to the position of interwar Muslim parties, and in the
then strong attachment of the Bosnian Muslims to the Yugoslav idea.
Moreover, the worsening of the Yugoslav crisis very quickly led SDA
leaders to focus solely on the Bosnian Muslim nation and to throw their
support behind the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. By February 1991,
the SDA had already submitted a « Declaration on the sovereignty and
indivisibility of Bosnia-Herzegovina » to the Bosnian Parliament, and had
clashed openly with the SDS.
In reality, save these few vaguely articulated pan-Islamist and Yugoslav
aspirations, the political project of the SDA has always revolved around
three main goals: the sovereignty of the Bosnian Muslim nation, the
independence and territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the
territorial autonomy of the Sandjak. Together, these three objectives
comprise what could be called the « greater Muslim » project of the SDA: a
state composed of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sandjak, in which Muslims
would be the majority, and the Serbs and Croats would be reduced to
national minorities. Hence the SDA’s insistence during the 1991 census on
the majority status of the Muslim nation, and the slogan calling the Muslims
to take part to this census: « On our number depend our rights ».
Such a project is sometimes implicitly included in the speeches of SDA
leaders ; it is, however, doubtful that it has significantly influenced their
concrete political choices. The balance of power inside the Yugoslav space
has compelled the SDA to fall back on much more limited objectives.
Moreover, the party’s various goals were, in fact, contradictory: the claim
for the territorial autonomy of the Sandjak contradicted the previously stated
principle of inviolability of the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the
insistence upon the own political sovereignty of the Bosnian Muslim nation
called into question the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This tension between Muslim sovereignty and Bosnian territory represents
the core of the « Muslim question » in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But, whereas
the interwar Muslim parties gave up the sovereignty of the Muslim
community in order to better preserve Bosnia-Herzegovina as a specific
territorial entity, the SDA has tended to do the opposite. The SDA’s
nationalism is thus a Muslim rather than a Bosnian one, a cultural rather than
a territorial. And this reality can, to a great extent, be explained by the
specific influence of the pan-Islamist current.
This primacy given by the SDA leaders to the sovereignty of the Muslim
nation explains their main political choices between 1990 and 1996, as well
as the main conflicts within the party. In the first months of the war, the
SDA rejected the idea of a « Bosnian patriotic front » put forward by the «
civic » parties, and prefered a « Croato-Muslim alliance » resting on a
coalition between the SDA and the HDZ. For the SDA, to sacrifice the
sovereignty of the Muslim nation for the sake of the defense of Bosnia-
Herzegovina was out of question. One year later, the outbreak of fighting
between Muslim and Croat forces (May 1993) and the presentation of the
Owen-Stoltenberg peace plan (July) proposing the transformation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina into an union of three constitutive republics, led to internal
tensions in the SDA, most notably the conflict between Fikret Abdic and
Alija Izetbegovic.
In this major crisis, A. Izetbegovic is deemed to be the defender of Bosnian
territoral integrity, against F. Abdic who accepted the Owen-Stoltenberg
plan, and thus the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the reality is
different. In 1993, the military inferiority and the diplomatic isolation of the
Bosnian Muslims had led both F. Abdic and A. Izetbegovic to give up the
principle of the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But this
renouncement did not have the same meaning for the two men. For F. Abdic,
it was combined with a renouncement of Muslim sovereignty, the Muslim
entity being compelled to declare allegiance to the neighbouring Serbia and
Croatia in order to survive. For A. Izetbegovic, in contrast, giving up the
Bosnian territorial integrity was the necessary price for the constitution of a
sovereign Muslim state. In the first scenario, boundaries did not matter. In
the second one, they were of paramount importance (for territorial continuity
and free access to the sea and to the Sava river).
When Alija Izetbegovic rejected the Owen-Stoltenberg plan, it was,
therefore, not because he was hostile to the principle of partition, but
because he did not accept the concrete boundaries proposed by the Owen-
Stoltenberg plan. What was at stake in his conflict with Fikret Abdic was not
the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the sovereignty of the
Muslim nation. The proof of this assertion is the fact that on September 16,
1993, during the negotiations of the Owen-Stoltenberg plan, A. Izetbegovic
signed an agreement with Momcilo Krajisnik allowing the Serb entity to
secede from the future Union of republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Five
months later, in February 1994, a group of SDA deputies proposed to the
Bosnian Parliament the proclamation of a « Bosnian republic » defined as «
the independent and democratic state of the Bosniac nation, with Serbs and
Croats enjoying in this state a status of national minorities ».
Thus, during the fighting between Muslims and Croats, the temptation to set
up a separate Muslim entity did indeed exist within the SDA, and in
particular among its pan-Islamist founding members. But several major
obstacles stood in the way of this project. On one hand, the local and
international balances of power made it impossible to satisfy the minimal

territorial demands set by the proponents of partition, which was, according
to Demaludin Latic (former co-defendent in the 1983 trial and chief editor
of « Ljiljan », a newspaper close to the SDA), « 45 % of the territory of
Bosnia-Herzegovina plus the Sandjak » . On the other hand, every statement
in favour of partition provoked sharp reactions from the « civic » parties and
from within the SDA itself. The proposition made in February 1994, in
particular, had to be withdrawn after it provoked a wave of internal
contestation led by Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, a SDA leader, until then
considered to be close to the pan-Islamist current.
Later, the creation of the Muslim-Croat Federation and the secret lifting of
the arms embargo by the United States put an end to the military inferiority
and the diplomatic isolation of the Muslim community. But the
establishment of this Federation gave rise to new conflicts. For the « civic »
parties, the Federation was only one step toward the political reintegration of
Bosnia-Herzegovina : they therefore insisted on the primacy of republican
institutions and on their multi-ethnic composition and orientation. For the
SDA leaders, in contrast, it was an opportunity to restore the coalition with
the HDZ and to identify the republican institutions solely with the Muslim
nation. Similar disagreements appeared in the SDA itself, between the Prime
Minister Haris Silajdzic and the executive bodies of the party. In August
1995, the « civic » parties criticized a constitutional reform reserving
implicitly the Presidency of the Collegial Presidency for a Muslim. In
January 1996, H. Silajdzic opposed a new transfer of competences from
republican to federal institutions and resigned in protest of this decision. A
few days later, he was expelled from the party and replaced by Hasan
Muratovic (as republican prime minister) and Izudin Kapetanovic (as federal
prime minister). Acting in this way, the SDA favored again the sovereignty
of the Muslim nation at the expense of the political reintegration of Bosnia-
Herzegovina.
However, the fact remains that within the Yugoslav space as in the Muslim
community, the pan-Islamist current was not strong enough to impose its
own conception of the political future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Given these
conditions, the SDA adopted an ambiguous stand and reiterated its
commitment to an united and multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina while
turning the territories held by the Bosnian army into a de facto Muslim
entity. Since 1994, this ambiguity in the SDA position has been justified by
the idea of a « two stage reintegration » of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
immediate consolidation of Muslim territories being said to further a long-
term reintegration of Serb and Croat territories. During the election
campaign of 1996, this was reflected in two largely contradictory slogans put
forth by the SDA: « On our own land, in our own faith » and « For a
sovereign, united and democratic Bosnia ».
In reality, this strategy of ambiguity has offered several advantages for the
SDA leaders. Firstly, it has allowed them to continue presenting themselves
as the defensor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the representation that constituted
one of the party’s main sources of internal and international legitimacy
during the war. Secondly, it has permitted them to present the results of the
war as provisory, and to reestablish its original goals into the ambiguities
inherent in the Dayton agreements (December 1995). Shortly after the
signing of these agreements limiting the sovereignty of the Muslim nation
along with the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic
declared that the SDA « has remained faithful to the idea of Bosnia, in spite
of the price we payed and the risks we ran, has woke up the national
consciousness of the Bosniacs and did not forget his brothers in the Sandjak
». For the SDA leaders, indeed, the institutional framework set up by the
Dayton agreements represents only a step toward the realization of a
nationalistic project centred on the assertion of sovereignty for the Muslim
nation.
Islam in the Reconfigurations of Muslim National Identity

Between 1990 and 1996, the SDA did not succeed in uniting all the Muslim
populations of the Yugoslav space, nor did it manage to ensure the
sovereignty of the Muslim nation over Bosnian territory. This failure shows
that the influence of the pan-Islamist current has less concerned the general
reshaping of the Yugoslav space than the political recompositions happening
inside the Bosnian Muslim community. Besides, the primacy given by the
SDA leaders to the Muslim sovereignty itself is a choice of identity rather
than strategy. This insistence on Muslim sovereignty has gone together with
certain reconfigurations of Muslim national identity, in which members of
the pan-Islamist current have played an active part, although the
developments and consequences of these have been largely beyond their
control.
Whereas the political project of the SDA remained ambiguous and
inconsistent, its cultural project seems at first glance to have been much
more precise. On one hand, the SDA wanted to carry on the Muslim «
national affirmation » initiated in the communist period by providing the
Muslim commmunity with all identity attributes of a nation (language,
literature, history, etc.). On the other hand, it wanted to reassert the central
place of Islam within this nascent national identity. During the first Congress
of the SDA held in December 1990 in Sarajevo, the Commission for social
questions chaired by Rusmir Mahmutcehajic declared that « the culture of
the Bosnian Muslims is sacred in its foundations, even though some people
(…) have attempted to impose a brutal ‘secularization’ on it. In fact, this
secularization has consisted of a separation of the cultural superstructure
from its sacred basis. Atheist ideology, elevated to the rank of a state religion
and turned into a vulgar antitheism, has in this way contributed to destroying
the Muslims’ awareness of their own culture, of its historical forms and
achievements ».
The breakout of the war in April 1992 made the implementation of the
SDA’s cultural project easier. In addition to the Muslim communitarian
institutions such as the association « Preporod » or the Congress of Muslim
intellectuals founded in December 1992, the Ministry of Education and
Culture also contributed to the reconfiguration of Muslim national identity.
The formalization of a Bosnian language was entrusted to an expert
commission, the editing of Muslim literary works was undertaken in a
systematic way, and new schoolbooks were introduced in 1994. Above all,
the war circumstances led to a « re-Islamization through war » of the Muslim
national identity. The SDA and the Islamska Zajednica put forward an
interpretation of the war in religious terms : the Muslim dead are shehids
(martyrs of the faith), the Serb and Croat aggressions were said to constitute
a « new Crusade », and the passivity of the Western countries was explained
by their deep-rooted hostility towards the Muslim world. Fikret Muslimovic,
then the chief of the Department for Morale at the general staff of the
Bosnian Army, explained, for example, that « the commandants (…) must
play an active part in the creation of a space and an environment favourable
to the fulfilment of religious duties by the members of their units ». He also
specified the attitude the officers were expected to adopt towards Islam and
its rituals:
« In their personal attitude, the commandant, its assistants for questions of
morale and all those who have a leading function may in no circumstances
contradict the traditional values of our nation, including the customs related
to the religious tradition, in order that our army may resemble our
nation.(…) It is desirable that the officers, and particularly those in key
positions, adapt their behaviour to the religious tradition of their nation, on
the occasion of demonstrations of patriotism and adherence to the objectives
of the liberation struggle (official gatherings), or when homage is paid to the
shehids (burial, for example). In these circumstances, when respect is
expressed with a great emotion for the victims of the genocide against our
nation, the officers must show that they are aware that the genocide against
our nation has precisely the purpose of eliminating our religious traditions. »
Facilitated by the actions of the Serb and Croat nationalists (likening the
Bosnian Muslims to « fundamentalists », systematic destruction of the
mosques, etc.), the reconfigurations of Muslim national identity launched by
the SDA have affected the whole Muslim population. The feeling of
belonging to the Muslim nation has constantly intensified, to the detriment
of local (urban or rural) identities as well as attachment to the former
Yugoslav idea of « brotherhood and unity » (« bratstvo i jedinstvo »). As for
Islam, it has been more and more perceived as a common and sacred
heritage. But these identity reconfigurations have been accompanied by
evident dilemmas and disagreements. Is Bosnian language the language
solely of the Bosniacs, or of all Bosnians? Is Islam merely the substratum of

the Muslim national identity, or does it transcend this identity to merge the
Bosnian Muslims into the great brotherhood of the Umma (Community of
the faithful)? And was the war itself a patriotic and antifascist struggle along
the pattern of Tito’s partisans, or a jihad (holy war) inspired by the Iranian
and Afghan examples?
The SDA leaders have been unable to give a coherent answer to these
questions, and to master the consequences of the identity reconfigurations
they have themselves initiated. As far as Islam is concerned, the best
illustrations of these contradictions put forth by the SDA leaders are the
creation of Islamic religious institutions peculiar to the Bosnian Muslim
population, and the replacement of the national name « Muslim » by the
name « Bosniac », both of which occurred in 1993.
In 1991, after the SDA failed to unite the « historical and cultural Muslim
circle », the Islamska zajednica remained the only institution linking the
various Muslim populations of the Yugoslav space. At the initiative of the
Reis-ul-Ulema, Jakub Selimoski, the Yugoslav Islamska zajednica even
undertook the project of gathering the other Balkan Muslim populations into
an Union of East European Islamic Communities. But the members of the
pan-Islamist current themselves put an end to these institutional links in
April 1993, by organizing a « coup » against J. Selimoski and announcing
the creation of an Islamska Zajednica limited to Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Sanjak, led by a new Reis-ul-Ulema, Mustafa Ceric. There were two main
reasons for this apparently paradoxical behaviour of the Bosnian pan-
Islamist current. On one hand, J. Selimoski, who opposed any form of
politicization of Islam and had been elected by the religious structures of the
various Yugoslav republics, was a major obstacle to the seizure of the
Islamska zajednica by this pan-Islamist current. On the other hand, assertion
of the national character of the Bosnian Muslims also implied the necessity
for the creation of their own religious institutions: thus, the will of the pan-
Islamists to « re-Islamicize » the Muslim national identity eventually led to a
« nationalization » of Islam.
Similarly, in September 1990, the members of the pan-Islamist current had
successfully opposed those in the SDA who advocated the replacement of
the national name « Muslim » with the name « Bosniac ». Three years later,
however, they accepted a resolution from the Bosnjacki sabor « to give back
to our nation its historical and national name ‘Bosniac’, in order to closely
link us to our country Bosnia, to its political and legal continuity, to our
Bosnian language and to all the spiritual tradition of our history ». Pan-
Islamists have even sometimes boasted that they were the true initiators of
this change. In reality, however, the national name « Bosniac » was
promoted by former communist intellectuals rallied to the SDA, and acting
from within SDA-controlled cultural instititutions. The members of the pan-
Islamist current were only ratifying a change which was by this time
favoured by a large majority of the Bosnian Muslim elites, and was made
necessary for the insertion of the Muslim community into an European
political order resting on the nation-state principle. As Dzemaludin Latic
lamented: « In Europe, those with no national name can also not have a state.
(…) The Bosniacs will become a European nation, not only in the
geographical sense, but also in the cultural sense -a large and ugly copy, with
an European life-style, European disregard for God, and therefore
indifference towards moral questions ».
The members of the pan-Islamist current then tried to compensate for the
relinquishing of the national name « Muslim » by insisting on Islam as the
central element of this new Bosniac identity. According to Reis-ul-Ulema
Mustafa Ceric, « Islamic tradition is the foundation of the Bosniac national
identity », for « without Islam, without Islamic civilization, we are nobody
and nothing ». In the 1970s, the Muslim intellectuals close to the League of
Communists had done their utmost to demonstrate that the national name «
Muslim » had in reality few links to Islam; twenty years later, the members
of the pan-Islamist current were attempting to achieve the opposite.
But this kind of intellectual pirouette has not resolved their contradictions,
because the insistence on the national dimension of Islam has undermined its
religious content. For example, the general use of the word « shehid » as a
designation for those killed in the war has deprived it of its religious
meaning, and is rarely accompanied by respect for the funeral rituals which
should be associated to it. Similarly, the transformation of the Ajvatovica
pilgrimage into a patriotic gathering has deprived it of its mystical
dimension and has promoted this Bosnian « small hajj » as a sort
replacement for the true hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca).
Thus, the project to re-Islamicize Muslim national identity, cherished by the
members of the pan-Islamist current, eventually backfired on its authors : the
more the Muslim community acquired the symbolical and institutional
attributes of a nation, the more Islam was reduced to a « raw material » from
which were extracted some identity markers lacking in real religious content,
and the more the Islamska Zajednica lost its function of a substitute national
institution which explained its renewal in the communist period.
From Authoritarian Re-Islamization to the Fragmentation of Bosnian

Islam
Whereas the pan-Islamist current has reinforced its position within the SDA
and the state apparatus, its desire to unite the people of the Umma has given
way to narrow national concerns, and its will to re-Islamicize Bosnian
Muslim national identity has led to a « nationalization » of Islam in Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Does this mean that the pan-Islamism of the SDA founding
members had no influence on the internal political recompositions of the
Muslim community?
In truth, pan-Islamism never represented an identity project shared by the

whole Bosnian Muslim community; rather it has gradually become a
discriminatory ideological criterion within this community. Adnan Jahic, a
leading figure of the pan-Islamist current in Tuzla, did not convey anything
else when he stated in 1993 that the Muslim state he wished to establish in
Bosnia-Herzegovina « will have a Muslim Ideology based on Islam and its
juridical, moral and social principles, as well as on those elements of
Western origin which do not contradict them », and that « the principle of a
complete equality will be guaranteed by the law to all citizens, but the level
of social success of each individual will depend not only on his own work,
but also on his degree of acceptance and enforcement of the principles and
spirit of the Muslim Ideology».
Adnan Jahic’s words have been labelled « immature » by « Ljiljan », the
weekly close to magazine close to the SDA. Nevertheless, adherence to the
ideological project of the founding members of the SDA is still an important
factor for promotion within the party and state apparatus, and a political or
military career is unthinkable for anyone with open hostility to this project.
As Alija Izetbegovic euphemistically said in 1994 : « Of course, we will not
ask an officer whether he fasts or not, whether he goes to the mosque or not.
We first expect him to fight properly. And let him believe what he wants to
believe. But he does not have the right to blaspheme God. He has to
resemble this nation. And in our nation, to blaspheme God is a completely
unknown thing. »
In other words, it is possible to say that, while Muslim nationalism has
substituted itself for pan-Islamism as a cultural identity, pan-Islamism has
substituted itself for communism as an political ideology. At that level too,
however, there are some important differences from the communist period.
Firstly, adherence to pan-Islamist ideology has not been the only criterion in
the selection of new elites: military prestige, financial power or some rare
profesionnal skills have also played an important part in this process.
Secondly, the pan-Islamist ideology remains a confidential one: it never
clearly appears in public documents and speeches from the SDA, and is not
intended for ordinary people.
While pan-Islamism as a political ideology represents a sign of recognition
limited to elite-circles, Islam as a marker of national identity is used to
control the population. This is evident in the presence of « assistants for
morale and religious affairs » at every level of the military hierarchy, in the
introduction of religious instruction and the opening of prayer rooms in the
public educational establishments, and in various forms of pressure exerted
through the distribution of humanitarian aid (wearing of the veil for women,
attendance at the main prayers and religious ceremonies for men, attendance
at religious instruction and choice of Muslim first names for children). This
relation between an ideological discourse reserved for the elites and a
cultural one aimed at the broader population holds an evident advantage for
the members of the pan-Islamist current: in this way, they can conceal their
own ideological project behind religious generalities, and present any
criticism of this project as an attack against Islam. The apparent
reinforcement of the Islamic religious institutions and the alleged re-
Islamization of the Muslim population have to be understood within this
context.
After its seizure by the pan-Islamist current in 1993, the Islamska zajednica
began to experience rapid growth in its administrative and educational
infrastructures, with the appointment of six regional muftis (Sarajevo,
Mostar, Tuzla, Banja Luka, Travnik and Novi Pazar ) and the opening of
seven new madrasas (Tuzla, Mostar, Cazin, Travnik, Visoko, Zagreb, Novi
Pazar ). At the same time, its influence on the state apparatus has increased
significantly, as is evident in the great number of imams exercising
responsibilities in the areas of diplomacy, the secret services and the
ideological control and training of the army. Indeed, the Islamska zajednica
has a lock on several functions which cannot be carried out by the state or
the party because of the officially secular character of the later two. The
Islamska zajednica has therefore become a key element in the institutional
and discursive dualities set up by the pan-Islamist current in order to secure
its political supremacy.
This institutional reinforcement of the Islamka zajednica, however, has not
corresponded to a real movement of re-Islamization in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The political influence of the Islamska zajednica, for example, was not
sufficient to question the results of the authoritarian secularization
accomplished during the communist period, as shown by its inability to
recover the waqfs confiscated after World War II, or its recurrent conflicts of
competence with the Ministry of Education and Culture about the
organization of religious instruction and the upkeep of religious monuments.
Similarly, the growth of its material infrastructures is not due to a renewed
religious fervour of the Muslim population, but to the influx of financial aid
from the Muslim world.
Above all, the attempts to initiate top-down reislamization of the Muslim
population have been met with serious resistance. In 1994, the issuing by
Reis-ul-Ulema Mustafa Ceric and the new appointed muftis of fatwas
(religious decrees) concerning the consumption of alcohol and pork has not
significantly changed the dietary habits of the Bosnian Muslims, but has
given rise to strong protests. In view of the political consensus created by the
war, internal conflicts in the Muslim community tend to crystallize precisely
around questions related to the re-Islamization of individual behavior.
During the war, polemics on mixed marriages and the celebration of Father
Christmas and the (catholic) New Year caused disturbance in the public
sphere. For the population and the « civic » parties, these polemics have
offered a way to criticize, in veiled terms, the ideological orientation of the
SDA. Conversely, they represent for this party an occasion to test the
cohesion of its supporters and the loyalty of its civil servants.
The attempts at an authoritarian re-Islamization led by the SDA and the
Islamska zajednica have therefore resulted in forms of resistance reminiscent
of the communist period : the population has tended to leave the definition of
its public identity to those in power in order to concentrate on the defence of
its private practices. As for the « new converts » to the SDA, they are
reminded of their former political commitments: sometimes nicknamed «
lubenice » (« watermelons » : « green on the outside, red on the inside »),
they are the target of various sarcastic remarks, as illustrated by this well
known Bosnian joke :
« An imam enters his mosque to preach the main Friday sermon. Adressing
the audience, he declares: To those in the third row and behind, I say selam
alejkum, brethren; to those in the second row, I say good morning, sirs ; and
to those in the first row, I say hi, comrades ! »
Mosque attendance is thus not perceived by the population as a sign of
religious fervour, but of political opportunism, and the institutional
reinforcement of the Islamska zajednica is not accompanied by increased
prestige, but by a loss of credibility. Therefore, all the analyses which
describe re-Islamization in Bosnia-Herzegovina as an undifferenciated
process or as a « spontaneous » result of the war are decidedly wrong. In
Bosnia-Herzegovina, re-Islamization is an authoritarian process, the origins
of which are located in clearly identifiable political projects and practices,
and the results of which have been a transformation of the collective identity
of the Muslim community without corresponding changes in the individual
behavior of its members. Within this context, the apparent reinforcement of
the Islamic religious institutions and the increased visibility of Islam have
concealed other phenomena working to prolong the process of secularization
initiated a century ago, and leading sooner or later to a deep crisis of Islam in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
To this end, the influx of financial resources from the Muslim world
provides short term reinforcement of Islamic religious institutions, but in the
long term destroys their unity and their authority. Rivalries between Muslim
countries or religious obediences have sharpened internal conflicts in the
Islamska zajednica. They also favour the proliferation of independent
Islamic cultural centers and re-Islamization movements, in this way
endangering the monopoly enjoyed by the Islamska zajednica on the
religious life of the Muslim community. Thus, in the end, the authoritarian
re-Islamization initiated by the pan-Islamist current has led to the
fragmentation of Bosnian Islam.
Moreover, the ideological instrumentalization of Islam has revealed itself to
be, in the long term, incompatible with its function as a common identity
marker. Indeed, as Islam has become the cultural foundation of the Muslim
community, various social actors in this community have tended to
instrumentalize it for their own political or cultural purposes, to work out

their own interpretations and uses of the Islamic religion. Members of the
pan-Islamist current are thus faced with an insoluble dilemma. Either they
accept the internal diversification of Bosnian Islam, and are compelled to
renounce their ability to instrumentalize it for their own ideological
purposes, or they attempt to secure themselves a monopoly over the
interpretation of Islam, but thereby risk plunging the Muslim community
into a new major identity crisis. In either case, the whole political
construction set up during the war is threatened with collapse.
Mehmet Can
Izmir/1943-

Dissolution of Yugoslavia and 1992-1995

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Dissolution of Yugoslavia and 1992-1995

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Dissolution of

1. Last Century of the Ottoman Era in Bosnia

In addition to the interviews, and field searches completed by the

International University of Sarajevo

In 28 June 1989 several hundred thousand Serbs assemble at the battlefield

5.1 A turning-point in the history of the Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia could not be controlled as a single entity, then he would carve

Party of Demoratic Action (SDA) emerging

politics, in which people would vote on their choice of political programmes

Serb-dominated federal army leadership, which broadly shared Milošević's

in fact of Catholic Serbs.' The interviewer continued: 'What if the Muslims

The situation was becoming intolerable for the Bosnian government.

have been misled, as was surely intended, l by the army's 'confiscation'

confederation of 'cantons' did not appeal to the HDZ leadership. As the

5.2 The 1992-1995 war

Constitutional changes in Serbia

Muslim National Council of the Sandzak was constituted. This council

Constitutional changes in Croatia and Slovenia

The internationalization of the Yugoslav issue

In Brussels, on 17 December 1991, 'the Badinter Commission issued a

5.3 Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state

Following this, on 27 March 1992s a total of 77 Serb deputies (71

TIN war against Bosnia and Herzegovina

On 18 December 1992, the UN General Assembly adopted a new resolution

The Washington Agreement also stipulated that “Decisions on the

The Dayton Peace Agreement

Bosnia and Herzegovina and the International Community

Bosnian Muslims were deprived of their right to self-defense. The Bosnian

5.4 The destruction of Bosnia: 1992-1993

economic conflict between landowners and peasants, the “national'

The other measures agreed at the conference included tightening the

things: cease-fires to solve all military problems, and humanitarian solutions

pass through the diversion of the Vance-Owen plan. Opposition was

5.5 Islamic Organization in the 1992-95 War Period

In the former Yugoslavia the four Islamic Communities of:

Yaqub Selimoski (Macedonia Mešihat President)

Mešihat Croatia-Slovenia (Zagreb) candidates:

Bosnia-Herzegovina is Mešihat (Sarabosna) candidates:

Montenegro Mešihat candidates

Kosovo-Serbia Mešihat candidates

Fifteen days before the election, candidates published their programs.

In front of the Yaqub Selimoski, the main challenges were:

Interview: Yaqub Selimoski

At that time the International Community's handling Lisbon agreement was

Assembly of the Islamic Association of the Yugoslavia period, thus

The Idea of Balkan Muslim Association

Maintaining Autonomy of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and

Here is the translation of the Manshura:

Ties Between SDA, Islamic Community

In the spring of 1993, in besieged Sarajevo, a group of professors from

Gang of Emissaries in the Field

Charitable Society “Merhamet,” the Association of Muslims for Anti-

Supreme Council, the Rijaset, andthe reisul-ulema to the republican

Mehtic Amuses Observers

amusedwell-informed observers, who began predicting how long he would

asked Halil Brzina (later a general) to intervene in persuading Karalic to take

5.6. Bosnian Islam since 1990: Cultural Identity or Political Ideology?

Yugoslav crisis: religious symbols were primarily used as substitutes for

The Role of the Pan-Islamist Current in the Creation of the SDA

of Yugoslavia (Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Turks, etc.), and some

of Islam allowed pan-Islamist party leaders to involve the ulemas (religious

The Transformations of the SDA during the War

The SDA and the Yugoslav Crisis