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Dusan
T. Batakovic
BOSNIA
& HERZEGOVINA FROM BERLIN TO DAYTON:
THE SYSTEM
OF ALLIANCES
Paper delivered at the 29th National Convention
of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Seattle,
November 23, 1997.
The current ethnic strife in Bosnia &
Herzegovina cannot be understood without taking into account
a phenomenon which remained, it seems, until now unoticed.
Within three major ethnic, religious and finally national
groups, there was ussually double alliances of two groups
against the third one. This phenomen shaped the political
mentality of Bosnia & Herzegovina throughout the
centuries, while during periods of turmoil and political
crises, its outsbursts caused insurrections, massacres and
civil wars. It is a typical case of "longue duree",
applied on the dominant current in the political culture.
Since the Ottoman conquest,
religiously-based coalitions emerged as major practice in
local Bosnian politics. Both the Christian groups, Orthodox
and Roman Catholic were engaged in a series of revolts
against Ottoman authority, from the late sixteenth century,
that is, from the period of the decline of Ottoman order in
the Balkans. These primarly agrarian revolts of socially and
politically discriminated Christian communities, faced with
political disorder and heavy taxation, lasted from the late
sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century, up to the Eastern Crisis
of 1875-1878. Although these Christian coalitions were, due
to constant rivalry on religious jurisdiction, very fragile,
and limited only to short periods of revolts, the religiously
based ethnic alliance, when directed against local Bosnian
Muslim landlords, functioned in almost perfect solidarity.
The stable Christian coalition of Orthodox
Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats lasted until the first year
of the Eastern Crisis. In 1876, the rebel Serbs considering
themselves the sole "legitimate representative of the
Serbian land of Bosnia, who after waiting so long without any
aid and hope, now proclaim the break of all the ties with
unchristen government in Constantinople and pledge themselves
to a common future with Serbia whatever it might be."
The insurgents in Herzegovina sent a delegation of domestic
representatives to the court of Montenegro to ask Prince
Nikola Petrovic-Njegos to accept the title of the sovereign
of Herzegovina.
The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by
Austria Hungary in 1878 completely changed the political
landscape. The Croato-Slavonian diet (Sabor) in Zagreb
raised the question of annexing Bosnia and Hercegovina to
Croatia-Slavonia, but the Emperor silenced them by threatning
to dissolve even this limited political body. The Roman
Catholic population, led by Franciscan friars, welcomed the
Habsburg army, while Bosnian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs
tried, in vain, to form a provisional military coalition to
resist the Austro-Hungarian troops. For the Muslims, the new
Christian authority meant that they would loose their
religious and feudal privileges, including the domination of
the local government, while for the Orthodox Serbs, the
occupation put an end to their war aims, proclaimed in 1876,
of unification of Bosnia with Serbia and Herzegovina with
Montenegro. The Roman Catholics as the Habsburgtreu
population in the occupied provinces, backed by Zagreb,
became the privileged layer of the local population, with
growing political aspirations. Although Roman Catholic Croats
were only 18,1 percent of the overall population, the
teachers and bureaucrats became predominantly those of
Croatian descent, while the Croat dialect was imposed in the
school system. The French consul in Sarajevo stressed in 1883
that the "desire to dispose of Bosnia to advantage of
the Croatian idea is not a new conception….We know of
certain plans related to the forming of a new state (Bosnia
& Heryegovina and Croatia-Slavonia under Habsburg
sceptre) which would extend to the southeast…but the
fact should not be ignored that so long as there is one Serb,
the combination will not be realized."
Therefore, the first decades of
Austro-Hungarian occupation were marked by Orthodox Serbian
and Bosnian Muslim alliance which lasted until their common
struggle for religious and school autonomy diverged in early
twentieth century. The enormous energy that governor Benjamin
fon Kallay invested to impose a common identity on all the
ethnic/religious groups in an officialy proclaimed
"Bosnian nation" and a separate "Bosnian
language" failed : the Serbs obtained their religious
and cultural autonomy in 1905 while the Muslims got their own
in 1907.
The Serbian-Muslim alliance lasted until
1910, when due to the unresolved agrarian question followed
by the revolt of the Serbian serfs, the government of now
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina formed a new Muslim-Croat
alliance. The growing prestige of neighboring Serbia only
temporarily cheked by the annexation crisis in 1908-1909,
made this alliance viable. From the Sarajevo assasination in
1914 up to the end of the First World War, the Croat-Muslim
alliance produced a series of massacres and persecution of
the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Serbs.
Within the newly established Kingdom of
Serbs Croats and Slovenes in 1918, the Muslim political
leaders, faced with a Croat separatist movement, opted for
collaboration with Belgrade. In return, the leading Muslim
landlords were exempted from agrarian refom. With the growing
demands of the Croatian national movement, the Muslims made a
stable coalition with the court and government in Belgrade,
which lasted until 1939, when Banovina Hrvatska as a corpus
separatum within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was
established. While the Bosnian Serbs opted for a common
federal unit with Serbia, blaming the governement for leaving
several Serbian areas in Bosnia under Croatian authority, the
Bosnian Muslims for the first time raised the question of
autonomy for Bosnia within its pre-1918 frontiers.
The Second World War provoked a
reestablishemnt of the Croat-Muslim alliance against the
Orthodox Serbs. In the Nazi-sponsored Independent State of
Croatia which encompassed the whole of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the Serbs faced a genocide perpetrated by Croat
and Muslim Ustashas. In the final phase of the inter-ethnic
war which also had a strong religious dimension, the Orthodox
Serbs were victims of the special 13th SS Waffen Handjar
Division made exclusivly of Bosnian Muslims. Serbian
vengeance and retaliation, especially in eastern Bosnia, only
made the spiraling violence worse. The Muslim autonomists
proposed to the Fuhrer the formation of a separate Muslim
Bosnia, without Croat and Serb dominated areas in the west
and the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Facing possible
extermination, the nationalist chetnik leaders of Eastern
Bosnia made plans to annex the 17 districts of the
Independent state of Croatia, including Srarajevo and Tuzla,
to occupied Serbia under a German protectorate.
After the Red Army gave decisive support to
the establishment of the communist regime in Yugoslavia,
Bosnia & Herzegovina was, according to pre-war Comintern
plans, adopted by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, became a
federal unit within the communist federation. In order to
escape responsibility for the Ustashas crimes, most of the
Bosnian Muslims opted for alliance with the Serbs who emerged
as the dominant element in the communist resistance.
Therefore, the majority of the Muslim intelligetsia declared
themselves Serbs, to bypass the war period and find a place
within the new communist society. The imposition of
"brotherhood and unity" made direct alliances
impossible until the centralist period was over in 1966. The
Bosnian Muslims were declared a separate nation in 1968, in
order to promote a new concept of federalisation - the
national communism invented by Edvard Kardelj. National
communism, shaped by constitutuional amendments from 1968 to
1971, found its final expression in the 1974 Constitution.
National communism made the republican nomenklatura of the
majority national group the bearer of the national
sovereignty in each of six republics. In ethnically mixed
Bosnia & Herzegovina this model gave way to the creation
of the Bosnian Muslims, allied again with the Croats against
the Serbs, into a dominant national group, and the Bosnian
Muslim nomenklatura into a bearer of the Bosnian sovereignty.
The leading communist theoretician of a
separate Muslim Nation, Muhamed Filipovic, accused Serbian
writers originating from Bosnia of national separatism.
Already in 1967, Muhamed Filipovic wrote: "the
literature that has developed in Bosnia over the past
hundered years has diveded Bosnia more than all those armies
marching across it… If (Serbian) literature emerged in
the 1870s it reached its full height in the early 20th
century in connection with the rising national movements
which were inspired by such writers as (Petar) Kocic,
(Svetozar) Corovic and so forth, culminating in the greatest
representative (of Serbian literature) with Ivo Andric."
This comment was a kind of beys approach towards their former
serfs, now from the communist perspective.
National communism meant also the
discrimination of minority national groups within the
republics: in Bosnia the coalition of the Muslim-Croat ruling
oligarchy first made Serbian literature dangereous and
gradually made Serbs a discriminated minority in all fields
of political and social life. That policy provoked Bosnian
Serbs to move to Serbia, while Muslims from Sandjak started
to settle in Bosnia, considered the "mother
republic", or "mother state" of all the Slav
Muslims in Yugoslavia. To a somewhat lesser extent, this
process of establishing Bosnia as a Muslim "mother
state" provoked migrations of Bosnian Croats towards
Croatia.
The stable Muslim-Croat alliance in Bosnia,
incarnated in the long dictatorship of the Mikulic and
Pozderac families, survived the death of Tito in 1980, and
was strengthened after the sudden rise to power of Slobodan
Milosevic in Serbia. The Kosovo problem made the precarious
balance within the federation imposed by 1974 Constitution
impossible, while Serbia opted for the establishement of
national-communism in the whole of Serbia, including both
provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina. The domino effect of ethnic
moblization launched by the Kosovo Albanian revolt in 1981,
proved the 1974 Constitution system non-viable without the
iron authority of Josip Broz Tito. In Bosnia &
Herzegovina the growing national mobilization made
ethnic-religious divisions deeper.
The 1990 elections in Bosnia gave a sharp picture of furtrer division
along national lines. Bosnia & Herzegovina was a Yugoslavia in miniature,
and it could not survive the destruction of the multhiethnic Yugoslav
federation. The Croato-Muslim alliance led directly to civil war, and
it was considered by the Serbs as a repetition of two previous Muslim-Croat
alliances during the world wars. The Bosnia & Herzegovina was revived
by the Dayton agreement, which formally approved the partition according
to ethnic-religious lines, accepting the Croat-Muslim alliance as the
only stable factor in face of Serbian rejection of a common Bosnian-state.
Formally favoring partition, the Dayton agreement stopped the war, but
IFOR and SFOR forces are still facing problems inherited from the past.
If there are two national groups against a third, Bosnia will not be a
viable state, and the only hope to make this possible is a formal protectorate
by the international community which will last at least several decades.
If not, the Croat-Muslim alliance, although deeply divided and kept together
by force, could join arms in an effort to cleanse Bosnia & Herzegovina
of Serbs.
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