Special Report: Bosnia and Herzegovina

▪ 1994

       Bosnia and Herzegovina in Historical Perspective BY IAN D. ARMOUR

 The roots of the "Bosnian question" as a Balkan and European problem go back at least 150 years, when the competing claims of Serb and Croat nationalists to either the whole or parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina emerged. Insofar as, for much of this period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was subsumed within supranational states such as the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and the successive versions of Yugoslavia, the most extreme "solution" to the problem—civil war leading to partition—had been averted. Nor was it necessary, until recently, for the Muslim population to define itself as anything other than one of three communities or to seek its own separate territory. Paradoxically, the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina was no sooner proclaimed, in early 1992, than its constituent nationalities (for vicinity of major ethnic groups, see Map—>) started tearing it to pieces.

      Since the Slavs first arrived in the Balkan Peninsula, settling in the river valleys south of the Danube only in the early 7th century, there had been conflicting claims as to who settled where first. It is probable that the first wave of Slavs was a mass of undifferentiated tribes; only later did the arrival of additional peoples, whose names were recorded, give to the lands they occupied specific names. Two such peoples, invited to settle within Byzantine territory by the Emperor Heraclius (reigned 610-641), were the Croats and the Serbs. Because the earliest recorded Croat and Serb territories were never wholly contiguous, it is possible that the core of what later became known as Bosnia, a territory centring on the headwaters of the River Bosna, was originally settled by that first, undifferentiated wave of Slavs. All claims, therefore, are conjectural. In view of the persistence with which Croat and Serb nationalists claim Bosnia and Herzegovina as "theirs," however, and refer to the present-day Muslims as mere "Islamicized" Croats and Serbs, it is worth pointing out that while the vast majority of Bosnia and Herzegovina's population is undoubtedly of Slav origin, no one group can claim undisputed seniority.

      For centuries there was nothing in the area corresponding to a modern "state." Individual tribes maintained their hold over local territory, and gradually some tribes won control over neighbouring areas, usually by fighting for it. The first identifiable principalities, all of whose origins are obscure, were Croatia, between the Sava and Drava rivers; Bosnia to the southeast; Hum (Herzegovina), south of Bosnia; Zeta, corresponding roughly to modern Montenegro; and Raska, centred on the town of Ras in what is now the Sandzak of Novi Pazar and the core of the later Serbia.

      All these medieval principalities underwent drastic and usually short-lived expansion and contraction. Medieval Croatia, at its greatest extent in the late 11th century, extended as far south as the Vrbas River in west-central Bosnia. Raska, for a time, controlled much of Hum and parts of Bosnia. Each claimed suzerainty over its neighbours, a situation complicated by the interest of Hungary in both Croatia (which it ruled after 1102) and Bosnia. Greatest of all of these principalities, but for a very brief period, was the Serbian empire of Stephen Dusan (reigned 1331-55), which stretched from Herzegovina to northern Greece and the Aegean.

      After emerging as a distinct principality in the 12th century, Bosnia too enjoyed a strong dynasty under King Tvrtko I (1353-91), who established his dominion over the Dalmatian littoral. But medieval Bosnia had no sooner reached its apogee than it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in the 1460s. Herzegovina, which had broken away from Bosnian rule, was conquered by 1482.

      In contrast to most of the other Christian populations taken over by the Ottoman Empire, many of the Bosnian Slavs, and especially the landowners, converted to Islam since under Ottoman law only Muslims could own property. Those who remained Christian either emigrated or were relegated to peasant status, free to exercise their religion but in all other respects a subject people. As the Ottoman Empire declined in the 18th and 19th centuries, this Christian underclass suffered increasingly from the exactions of their landlords and the misrule of local despots. The fact that the peasantry was also Serb or Croat, in addition to being Orthodox or Catholic, assumed even greater importance in an age of nationalism.

      By the 1860s nationalists in both the autonomous Principality of Serbia (still officially subject to the sultan) and the Kingdom of Croatia (part of Hungary, within the Habsburg Empire) regarded Bosnia and Herzegovina as rightfully theirs. Not only were these claims mutually exclusive, but both Croats and Serbs also assumed that the large Muslim element, being originally Slav, could be reclaimed for either Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

      The waters were further muddied by the involvement of the Habsburg monarchy. The imperial Foreign Ministry in Vienna was adamant that Bosnia and Herzegovina was never to be abandoned to Serbia; this would have created a large South Slav state on the monarchy's southern frontier, which could have exerted an attractive power over Austria-Hungary's own South Slavs. After 1867, when Hungary achieved home rule within the monarchy, Hungarian politicians for several years pursued the opposite goal. By encouraging the Serbian government to think that it could, with Hungarian assistance, acquire at least part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Hungarians hoped to win Serbia over for close economic and political ties to the monarchy. This improbable project was abandoned in 1871, but not before it had reinforced suspicion on both sides.

      Count Gyula Andrassy, the principal promoter of this scheme, became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871 and thereafter pursued the old policy of keeping Serbia out of Bosnia. Thus, when the Christians first of Herzegovina and then of Bosnia rose in revolt in 1875, provoking a prolonged international crisis, it was Austria-Hungary and not Serbia that occupied the provinces.

      The Austro-Hungarian takeover of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was administered by the Habsburgs until 1918, gave mortal offense to Serb nationalists everywhere. Despite bringing law and order to a previously anarchic part of the Balkans and developing the infrastructure and industry, Habsburg rule (entrusted largely to Hungarians) left much else unchanged. The exploitative relationship between Muslim landowners and Christian peasants remained, and political organization was not permitted until 1908, when Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia from the Ottomans. Above all, the Serbian population, in 1910 still the largest ethnic group, was marginalized as potentially treasonable, while Catholic Croats tended to be favoured. In this climate of simmering nationalist tension, it is not surprising that it was a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, an act that provided the occasion for war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and, by extension, World War I.

      The war proved the Habsburg monarchy's undoing, and when, in 1918, it collapsed and was dismembered, Bosnia and Herzegovina was taken over by a triumphant Serbia in the name of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Upon the withdrawal of Habsburg authority, communal violence at once flared up in Bosnia, with the Muslim landowners especially targeted. One of the most important changes of the post-1918 period was the gradual expropriation of Muslim estates, with land being parceled out to the peasants. The result was a concentration of the Muslim population in the urban centres.

      The problem with the new Yugoslav state was that it was in reality a Greater Serbia, with a centralist constitution that ensured that all important decisions were taken by a government in Belgrade dominated by Serbs. Bosnia's position in this respect was neither better nor worse than that of the other provinces, but in 1929 King Alexander, having established a royal dictatorship, redrew the internal administrative boundaries on purely geographic lines. The state was also renamed Yugoslavia in a vain attempt to minimize nationalist antagonisms and build loyalty to a supranational ideal. Within a decade the attempt foundered on the rocks of continuing Serb domination and Croat separatism. An agreement in 1939 redrew the map yet again, this time assigning most of Herzegovina and southeastern Bosnia to Croatia, with the rest subsumed in Serbia. No account was taken of the Muslim population.

      Two years later Yugoslavia was invaded and partitioned by the Axis powers. Bosnia and Herzegovina went to the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia, and in the civil war that ensued, the three ethnic communities were pitted against one another as never before. The worst offenses were undoubtedly perpetrated against the Serb Orthodox population by the Croat Ustase regime, often aided by Muslims, but reprisals were carried out with similar savagery first by the royalist Serb Chetniks, then by Josip Broz Tito's communist Partisans. Half a century later the memory of these horrors lives on and is used by all sides as justification for fresh atrocities. Chetnik and Ustase have resurfaced as abusive terms for Serb and Croat, respectively.

      The postwar communist dictatorship solved the problems of Bosnia and Herzegovina temporarily by driving them underground. For the first time, Bosnia and Herzegovina existed as one of six equal federated republics. Nationalist divisions were explicitly ignored as incompatible with socialism. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974, however, which devolved considerable autonomy to the republics, in the end made matters worse because the republics increasingly adopted nationalist policies. Only in Bosnia and Herzegovina was this a contradiction in terms. Instead, the situation there was complicated by the recognition, enshrined in the 1974 constitution, of the Muslims as a separate nationality. Henceforth, in the maelstrom of competing nationalism that Yugoslavia became after Tito's death in 1980, some sort of ethnic conflict looked more and more likely. This was confirmed when in the first free elections, held in November 1990, the three communities split along firm ethnic lines. Even this, however, though ominous, might not necessarily have proved unworkable. It was the decision of the government in Sarajevo to proclaim independence from Yugoslavia that, by unleashing the full hysteria of Serb nationalism, rendered war inevitable.

      Ian D. Armour is a freelance researcher and writer. He is coauthor, with Ian Porter, of Imperial Germany 1890-1918 (London: Longman, 1991).

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