Bosnia and Herzegovina has been misunderstood for too long

Jasmin Mujanović author of the recent book The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide in which he writes on how in the 1990s the struggle for recognition and equality within Bosnia and Herzegovina would prompt the most significant round of extermination and expulsion against the Bosniak community in its history. Photo courtesy of Jasmin Mujanović

The book begins in March 1992 when Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – with an overwhelming majority within Bosnia voting in favour. The result was condemned, however, by Bosnian Serbs. Their then leader, Radovan Karadžić (currently serving a life sentence in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity) tried, but failed, to carve out a “Greater Serbia” from the former communist federal state.

Complicated beginnings

Mujanović was then five years old and living in the Bosnian capital. He was born into a non-practicing Bosnian Muslim family. His parents, a doctor and an engineer, were part of Sarajevo’s secular educated middle class, who came of age during Tito’s Yugoslavia.

“We fled Sarajevo in April 1992,” he recalls to me. “First, my family and I were in refugee centres in Croatia, then we went on to Slovenia, then Germany, but by the time the war was winding down in 1995, my parents did not want to return to Bosnia,” adds Mujanović. He is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Newlines Institute, a nonpartisan strategy and policy think tank in Washington DC.

“They believed in the socialist slogans – like brotherhood and unity – that the old Yugoslavia stood for, and they struggled with its dissolution, so we emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, and I later moved to Los Angeles.”

It was in the United States that Bosnia’s political future was decided. During the Clinton administration, the Dayton Peace Accords were brokered in late November 1995 by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The Accords were signed by the respective leaders of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia on December 14th 1995 – marking the beginning of the end of the Bosnian War (1992-95), which resulted in 100,000 deaths and the displacement of more than two million people. Mujanović, who is also the author of the 2018 book Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans, claims the Clinton administration could have been tougher on the Bosnian War’s main sponsor and aggressor. This was namely Serbia, led by its then President Slobodan Milošević. 

“Concern for the Milošević regime was greater than any sense of justice for the liberation of Bosnia,” says Mujanović. “Even after the fall of Srebrenica – the single greatest atrocity committed in Europe since the Holocaust – the US actively protected the strategic interests of Serbia.”

During the frantic last-minute negotiations at Dayton, Milošević, along with the then president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, and the West, effectively engineered the de facto internal partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like all peace agreements, compromise and realpolitik were necessary to save lives and keep the peace. Still, the results were imperfect. So, too, was the complicated Bosnian constitution that emerged in the wake of Dayton.  

Downward trajectory

Supporters of the Bosnia and Herzegovina government, which included Bosniaks and Bosnian-oriented Serbs and Croats, were able to preserve the country as a sovereign state. In exchange, they agreed to significant internal administrative divisions of the Bosnian state and the introduction of expansive ethnic provisos and quotas within its governance. The Croat nationalist camp, after giving up their breakaway “Herceg-Bosnia” territory, already on the verge of collapse after 1994, received a high degree of self-rule in the newly minted Federation entity. The Serb nationalist camp gave up their Greater Serbia secessionist project. In return, they were granted the majority Serb Orthodox-populated Republika Srpska (RS) entity, which was formally incorporated into the constitutional regime of the post-war Bosnian state.

Today, in the Global Perceptions Corruption Index, Bosnia and Herzegovina is ranked in 108th place. Mujanović believes issues of corruption must be addressed internally if the country is to prosper economically and socially. But that is not happening. The unemployment rate in Bosnia and Herzegovina stands at roughly 13 per cent. The country also has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world, estimated to be nearly 40 per cent. “Bosnia and Herzegovina may not yet be a failed state per se, but it is clearly on a downward trajectory,” he says.

 Meaningful reform of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s contemporary politics, however, requires a thorough liberalization of its constitution, the political scientist insists: “Bosnia and Herzegovina needs a constitutional regime in line with the European Convention on Human Rights.” Last August, the EHCR agreed. The Strasbourg court ruled in favour of a complaint by Slaven Kovačević, an adviser to Željko Komšić, the Croat member of the tripartite presidency, who complained to the body about being constitutionally barred from taking part in the vote concerning the Serb part of the presidency.

According to the current Bosnian constitution, a Bosniak and a Croat must be elected presidents in the Bosniak-Croat federation and a Serb must be voted in as president of Republika Srpska. This legal provision prevents members of any other ethnic or religious groups from running for office in those positions. Also, Bosniaks and Croats residing in Republika Srpska or Serbs residing in the Bosniak-Croat federation cannot run for office or vote in their respective place of residence. The ruling that emerged from the “Kovačević v. Bosnia and Herzegovina” case in the ECHR “essentially said that it is not permissible for ethnicity to be at the centre of a political and constitutional regime,” Mujanović says.

Yet ethnicity is impossible to avoid when addressing the tumultuous, bloody history of the Western Balkans – a point Mujanović reiterates in his latest book. The title alone says it all really: The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide. In the opening pages, the author poses a pertinent question: who are the Bosniaks?

“I define the Bosniak community as those who support Bosnia and Herzegovina as a distinct sovereign polity and maintain the existence of an accompanying distinct Bosnian cultural and linguistic identity,” the author explains. “[Bosniaks] though predominantly (culturally) Muslim, maintain claims to a pre-Islamic and pre-Christian past, which is also cited as conceptual proof of their ancestral belonging in the historic Bosnian lands.”

Broader historical context

Mujanović claims that the West does not appreciate this complex history and has typically viewed the Bosniak community exclusively through the prism of religiosity, which creates its own problems. “If you were reading western newspapers when the Bosnian War and the Bosnian genocide happened in the 1990s, it was always presented as this conflict between Serbs, Croats and Muslims,” Mujanović tells me. “This [Muslim label] has skewed some of the debates and conversations about contemporary Bosnian politics, which led me to write a book that explores the complex layers of Bosniak identity.”

This is all linked to the multi-ethnic history of the region. Mujanović points out that 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia was still a quasi-feudal regime. By 1831 the political and social position of the Bosniaks and other indigenous Muslim-majority communities in the Balkans was precarious. The Ottoman Empire was weakening, as was its hold on the region, and rising in its midst were new, virulently sectarian Christian nationalist movements which sought to expel both the Ottomans and local Muslims alike.

A sea change in the Western Balkans occurred when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Officially, that happened in 1922 but its demise began much earlier. Out of its wreckage came the creation of new nation states and a new form of aggressive sectarian identity. From the collapse of the Ottoman administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 to the end of the Second World War, “the Bosniak community experienced a period of sustained, then rapid, collective political marginalization, accompanied by successive rounds of targeted violence by Serb nationalists,” Mujanović explains.

The author also points to the broader historical context. The three decades between 1918 and 1945 were marked by the establishment of the first Yugoslav state, which saw Bosnia and Herzegovina go through four successive partitions, and finally the brutality of fascist occupation. This saw the Bosniak community “reduced to the status of a marginal political factor in their own homeland”. Yet, like most history in the Western Balkans, nothing is straightforward and without contradictions and paradoxes.

The Yugoslav communist period (1945-1989), for instance, saw socio-economic improvement for Bosnia and Bosniaks. “But those ethnic tensions within Yugoslavia never really went away,” says Mujanović. “Even though the Bosniaks were becoming the majority community within Bosnia and Herzegovina, they were massively underrepresented as a whole.”

This brings Mujanović to discuss the third and final theme of his book. This is namely how by the 1990s that same struggle for recognition and equality within Bosnia and Herzegovina would prompt the most significant round of extermination and expulsion against the Bosniak community in its history: “The Bosnian Genocide cannot be divorced from the political conditions within the second Yugoslav state that ultimately facilitated its orchestration and enactment. It must be recognized as a state and government-directed campaign of mass murder, expulsion and torture of Bosniak civilians by the then Belgrade regime.”

Stuck in a political straitjacket

Srebrenica is the only episode of the Bosnian War to be legally defined as genocide. It happened in July 1995 when forces of the army of Republika Srpska invaded a small town, Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, Bosnian Serb forces first abused, tortured, and then executed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men, throwing their bodies into mass graves.

“It was not a one-off, freak event but part of a larger genocidal project to create “Greater Serbia” via ethnic cleansing and extermination,” Mujanović claims. “It’s preposterous to believe that, between 1992 and 1995, during the Bosnian War, genocide only occurred in one enclave, in one small town, in Bosnia,” he says. “That is like saying a genocide only happened in Auschwitz, but not in Buchenwald [during the Holocaust]. We can quibble about the [legal] phrasing. But the totality of Milošević’s project in Bosnia and Herzegovina was genocidal and not merely confined to the events in Srebrenica in July 1995.”

“It’s obvious to everyone that Serbia and Croatia both invaded Bosnia and engaged in wars of occupation and conquest, but this was never really publicly acknowledged,” Mujanović adds.  “By the time you get to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was set up in [the Hague] in 1993, the international community had really mixed feelings about how it wanted to think, talk about and characterize this conflict.”

Mujanović may be exaggerating this point somewhat. The international tribunal encountered numerous challenges. Still, the court eventually indicted 161 individuals for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. It successfully tried two Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, and the former president of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, for war crimes too.

Still, those convictions notwithstanding, Mujanović believes that the West has essentially given Serbia and Croatia the power to punish Bosnia over the last three decades. Although it was not always so. In the early 2000s in Croatia there was a period of so-called “de-Tuđmanization”. During this period, particularly during the tenure of then President Stjepan Mesić, Croatia’s relations with Bosnia improved significantly, especially with regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s wider ambitions for more self-autonomy. But then things changed. This first occurred after Croatia’s accession to the EU in 2013 and then in 2016, when Andrej Plenković took over the leadership of the Croatian Democratic Union party (HDZ).

“From this moment onwards Zagreb’s position towards Bosnia became visibly less tolerant and more aggressive, as politics in the country shifted to the right,” Mujanović claims. “Today, Croatia has virtually no foreign policy interests outside of its continuous and systematic interference in Bosnia and Herzegovina domestic affairs.”

In Serbia, meanwhile, the restoration of nationalist rule in the country since 2012 and the rise of the populist authoritarian strongman Aleksandar Vučić have facilitated and encouraged “Republika Srpska (RS) to re-emerge as the proverbial spearhead in a grander Serb nationalist agenda in the Western Balkans,” says Mujanović.

“If we could have a period of, say, five years, where Serbia and Croatia were not involved and interfering in Bosnia’s domestic politics, Bosnia and Herzegovina could make huge improvements, very quickly,” Mujanović concludes. “But that is unworkable in a political regime that is divided along ethnic lines. The Dayton constitution is a political straitjacket and a continuation of the politics of sectarian aggression which animated the Bosnian War and Bosnian Genocide.”

JP O’ Malley is a freelance journalist and critic.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav wars