Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (BH edition)

As part of the Mobile University project, our goal was to offer Sarajevo’s citizens a sense of normality in abnormal circumstances. With the help of American professors, we published a book and invited its authors to serve as guest lecturers, presenting it to a professional audience. The book could be taken home, while the lecture itself restored the audience’s role as viewers and listeners, thanks to the authors’ insightful academic reflections on the identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This is the first book to explore the rich historical tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in light of the conflict that erupted in 1992. The authors explain the origins of the country’s major ethno-national groups through religious conversions in the medieval period and under Ottoman rule, setting the stage for the transformation of these religious communities into 20th-century national identities. The book vividly presents the roles of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in key events that shaped the Yugoslav peoples throughout the 20th century, particularly during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Donia and Fine begin by questioning the widespread perception of Bosnian history as one of constant violence and tribal hatred among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Contrary to this common view, they highlight a long-established tradition of diversity, pluralism, and tolerance that flourished here until recently. In everyday life, this tradition was reflected in coalition-based politics through the building and living of pragmatic compromise. Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed reveals how the forces of extreme nationalism led to the betrayal of Bosnia’s multiethnic heritage, first during World War II and later in the current conflict.

Additional context

INTRODUCTION from the BOOK

On April 6, 1992, a crowd of demonstrators estimated to be over 50,000 gathered in front of the Bosnian Parliament building in Sarajevo to protest for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The demonstrators were members of all three of Bosnia's largest nationalities: Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. Directly across the street, from the upper floors of the ultra-modern Holiday Inn built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, heavily-armed Serbian militiamen fired randomly into the crowd, killing and wounding dozens of peace demonstrators. This cavalier killing spree quickly dispersed the crowd and marked the demise of the few remaining hopes that moderation and compromise might prevail in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Sarajevo massacre of April 6 contained many elements that would recur in the Bosnian War in subsequent weeks and months. The victims were unarmed civilians who hoped for the preservation of a multiethnic Bosnian society, which had roots and traditions dating back many centuries. The perpetrators were nationalist extremists, organised and heavily armed by political and paramilitary leaders intent on destroying Bosnia's multiethnic society and replacing it with the national supremacy of a single ethnic group, in this case, the Serbs. Symbolically, the Sarajevo massacre stilled the voices of peace and mutual tolerance; the shrill shouts of ethnic hatred and national divisiveness triumphed by force of arms.

The war that began in Bosnia in 1992 encompassed death, atrocities, and terror on a scale unknown in Europe since World War II. The perpetrators of the Bosnian war seemed to know no bounds in the cruelty, brutality, and havoc they wrought on their adversaries and the innocent inhabitants of the land. Television cameras captured some of the killings and brutality, and daily newscasts revealed the awesome depravity of the conflict. Viewers around the world saw starving prisoners, victims of systematic rape, mutilated corpses, calculated destruction of homes and cultural monuments, mortally wounded victims of random shelling, and the results of ethnic cleansing. The daily images of warfare, coupled with the reality of United Nations troops in the area and the prospect of deepening involvement by NATO and the United States, were hauntingly reminiscent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

Bosnia, however, is no Vietnam: it is not a far-away land about which we, collectively, know nothing. The argument for "collective ignorance," so persuasively advanced by both critics and supporters of US intervention in Vietnam, is simply not valid for the lands of the former Yugoslavia. Inspired by Cold War fervour, the US Congress appropriated many millions of dollars in the decades after World War II to fund research centres and exchange programs, so that Americans could gain a deeper understanding of the lands where Communism held sway.

Yugoslavia, with its open borders and accessibility to outsiders, became the destination of choice for hundreds of Western students and scholars who studied all aspects of Balkan history and civilisation. Some of the best studies of Yugoslav and Bosnian society and history have been prepared by Western specialists and published in English. Many leading scholars and political leaders of the former Yugoslav lands have studied and taught at American universities. At the height of the Vietnam War, with 600,000 US troops engaged, the number of Southeast Asian specialists in the United States did not begin to approach the number of knowledgeable scholars in the 1990s who are familiar with the history and culture of Southeast Europe.

Despite a substantial reservoir of Western knowledge about Bosnia and Southeast Europe, public debate about policy options in the former Yugoslavia appears to us to be deeply mired in false dichotomies, flawed analogies, gross historical exaggerations, and well-worn shibboleths with little foundation in historical reality. Many of these myths are the product of nationalist propaganda spread by Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Muslim publicists. Still, they have been endorsed and repeated by those who mould or influence policy. Propaganda, historical precedent, and superficial analogies have been harnessed to justify a particular policy action or inaction. To those who oppose Western intervention, the analogies advanced are Vietnam, Beirut, and Northern Ireland. Bosnia is another "Vietnam quagmire," a hopelessly insoluble problem with no conceivable favourable "endgame" for the United States and the West. For others, principally those favouring a more assertive Western role, the relevant analogy is Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich having deceived himself and others into believing that appeasement would bring lasting peace.

Bosnia lends itself to few simple analogies and no easy answers. Even so, one need not despair of understanding the roots of the conflict or of evaluating prospective policy alternatives to American and European involvement in Balkan affairs. In the search for understanding the complex situation and arriving at guideposts for action, an examination of historical traditions and past behaviour provides insights into the sources of current events and illuminates potential solutions. At the very least, it should help dispel falsehoods spread by propagandists and enable policy-makers to avoid foolhardy missteps.

Our intent in this volume is to explore the historical roots of Bosnian society from the arrival of Slavic tribes in the 6th and 7th centuries AD to the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia, and to identify the traditions and patterns of social and ethnic relations that have characterised Bosnian society throughout its history. We describe the major historical processes that account for the present-day ethnic composition of Bosnia: religious conversions in the medieval and early Ottoman periods; the subsequent evolution of distinct ethnoreligious communities; and the rise of political nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. We also trace the origins of the present conflict in Bosnia and provide an overview of the course of the Bosnian War.

The history of Bosnia and its inhabitants intersects and sometimes blends with that of other South Slavs, so some of our inquiry leads us to treat Bosnia's relations with its neighbours. In the twentieth century, the development of a South Slav state, Yugoslavia, and its subsequent disintegration have profoundly influenced the lives of all inhabitants of Bosnia. Some of our accounts necessarily centre on Yugoslavia, for Bosnia's experience over the past seventy years is incomprehensible without an appreciation for its Yugoslav context.

As two historians who have studied the history of Bosnia and who lived in Sarajevo at different times in the 1960s and 1970s, we have drawn upon our personal observations and experiences from that time as well as our historical research into the area. We are specialists in the medieval (John Fine) and modern (Robert Donia) periods of Bosnian history. Our account, although historical in approach and broadly chronological in organisation, frequently reaches back and forth in time to draw comparisons and identify long-standing historical traditions. Chapters 1-4, which primarily deal with the medieval and Ottoman periods, were written by John Fine; chapters 5-11, which treat the modern era (1875-1994), were written by Robert Donia.

This is not a conventional history. We have sought to discern patterns rather than merely describe events, to characterise developments rather than chronicle episodes, and to identify the long-term traditions that transcend a single historical era. Furthermore, while we have not set out to provide a detailed history of the war, our account is intended to shed light on the sources of the Bosnian conflict that began in early 1992. We fervently hope that the war, which continues at the time of writing (April 1994), will end in peace for Bosnians of all ethnic groups.

Authors
ROBERT J. DONIA received his MA and PhD in Balkan history from the University of Michigan and was a Fulbright research scholar in Sarajevo from 1974 to 1975. He is the author of Islam under the Double Eagle: The Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1878-1914 and has taught at universities in the United States.

JOHN V.A. FINE, Jr., received his MA and PhD from Harvard University and has both studied and taught at the University of Sarajevo. He is a Professor of Balkan and Byzantine History at the University of Michigan and the author of a two-volume history of the medieval Balkans and a monographic study of the Bosnian Church.

Publisher (BiH edition): FAMA, Sarajevo, 1995.

Publisher (English language edition): Columbia University Press, New York, 1994.

Note:
All of these projects have since demonstrated that this method is essential for documenting events if we want our efforts to serve as a valuable contribution to the interpretation and understanding of the 1991–1999 period in the former Yugoslavia, for both local and global education. This project has already proven and continues to prove its worth as a contribution to the process of truth and reconciliation, as well as to the democratisation of post-war society. Sarajevo, 1995.