How Bosnia Armed (review)

Hundreds of books and articles have been written on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but most accounts of the war are political, cultural, or diplomatic. Other than the CIA volumes on the war, there is surprisingly little in English on military operations during the conflict and even less on the contending armed forces. Edgar O'Ballance's Civil War in Bosnia, 1992–94 (London: St. Martin's Press, 1995) is now dated and depends heavily on sources in English, and Charles Shrader's The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History, 1992–1994 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003) deals with only one phase of the war. So Marko Hoare's contribution is a welcome addition to the literature. He has consulted sources in the local languages, including official publications, memoirs, newspapers, and magazines. He has also lived in the region and is familiar with its peoples and its history.

Hoare's intention is to explain how the Bosnian government cobbled together an army able to hold, and, with a little help from its Croatian ally, eventually beat a better armed Serbian force. He describes how police units from the Ministry of the Interior joined Territorial Defense forces and two party armies (the Croatian Defense Council and the Patriotic League) to become the Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ARBH), and he explains how a multinational army evolved into a predominantly Muslim force, an evolution he attributes to the refusal of both Serbs and Croats to serve in its ranks. But he also acknowledges that the Bosnian government included Muslim nationalists like Hasan Cengi´c, who influenced the ARBH's development, and he describes the creation of the Patriotic League (PL) by Alija Izetbegovi´c's Party of Democratic Action (PDA) in December 1990, a year and a half before Serbian forces began their attack on Muslim and Croatian areas in Bosnia. It will surprise those who believe that the Muslims were caught completely flat-footed that by December 1991, the PL's commander, Sefer Halilovi´c, was planning to defend Bosnia's Muslims, but not its Croats, against a Serbian attack. However, as Hoare notes, Izetbegovi´c hamstrung Halilovi´c because he sought to placate Serbian military and civilian leaders, even though he refused to believe that they would do to Bosnia-Herzegovina what they had done to Croatia. After the conflict began, a lack of coordination and intense rivalry among the components of the fledgling Bosnian army further hampered efforts to mount a viable defense. While secular and fundamentalist Muslims fought for control of an increasingly Muslim army, Bosnia's Croats distanced themselves, withdrawing into their own military units, which nonetheless continued to operate as part of the ARBH until early 1993.

Hoare is less concerned with military operations than with the internal dynamics of the ARBH and the effect of external events and agents on its development. For example, he concludes that rather than promote peace, the Vance-Owen Plan of January 1993 "undoubtedly encouraged both Bosnian Croatian irredentism and Muslim separatism," and he concludes that the PDA used the ARBH to create a "Muslim parastate" in reaction to Serbian and Croatian efforts to extend their territories. But if Serbian and Croatian designs on Bosnia-Herzegovina pushed the PDA to react in kind, Hoare notes that the Bosnian army became the agent of Muslim nationalism, not of Muslim fundamentalism. This is a distinction that some will question, but he perceives a basic difference between the two phenomena, and he includes an appendix on the role of mujahedin in Central Bosnia, arguing that they were a minor irritant, not a major player.

Hoare's study will upset both Serbian and Croatian partisans, and it will discomfort others as well. He suggests that Srebrenica fell because the ARBH declined to defend it, and he argues that Bosnian and Croatian ground forces, not NATO aircraft, forced the Serbs to the bargaining table in 1995. Indeed, Hoare implies that the ARBH would...