Džemal Bijedić: Politička biografija by Husnija Kamberović (review)

The tragic death of Džemal Bijedić in an airplane crash on a cold January morning in 1977 epitomized for many the end of an era. In death his stature rose, and anniversaries of the tragic crash even now, nearly forty years later, are covered on the evening news in Bosnia. From humble beginnings in the southern Herzegovinian town of Mostar, Bijedić rose to become one of Josip Broz Tito’s closest lieutenants and the highest-ranking Muslim official in Tito’s Yugoslavia. After stints in the Communist party and government administration, Bijedić emerged as the compromise candidate for the position of Yugoslav prime minister in 1971. He was Tito’s choice for a second term and retained the job until his death in 1977.

Bosnian historian Husnija Kamberović’s political biography of Bijedić is the most serious work to date about the life and politics of this Communist official. Kamberović conducted impressive archival research in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia and has analyzed primary and secondary sources pertaining to the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. He depicts Bijedić as a politician with a popular touch, a dedicated Communist, and one of the most important political figures in Bosnia in the twentieth century. The book credits Bijedić with reintegrating western Herzegovina into the mainstream after the region was ostracized in early postwar Yugoslavia because of its fascist past. Bijedić worked on setting up factories in Herzegovina and played a key role in providing reconstruction assistance to the western Krajina region of Bosnia after a major earthquake in 1969. As a Bosnian cadre for the federal Yugoslav position of prime minister, he successfully lobbied for a greater share of federal funds for the less-developed parts of Yugoslavia. Bosnia’s economic development benefitted from his voice at the federal level. As a high-ranking Bosnian Muslim Communist official in the 1970s, Bijedić firmly rejected the attempted imposition of Serb or Croat national labels on Slavic Muslims in Yugoslavia and secured the introduction of a national category for “Muslims.” The censuses held thereafter recorded that the vast majority of Slavic Muslims chose the “Muslim” national label (in previous censuses many had chosen the “undecided” category meaning that they were nationally neither Serbs nor Croats).

In foreign policy, Bijedić at the peak of his career was received by President Gerald Ford, by Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, and by the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. Despite Tito’s stewardship of Yugoslav foreign policy, Bijedić played a significant complementary role in diversifying Yugoslavia’s foreign policy choices. In relations with the nonaligned countries, Bijedić focused on improving economic cooperation. His Muslim (though Communist) identity may have helped, and certainly did not hinder, his success in relations with the nonaligned countries.

The circumstances of Bijedić’s death spurred conspiracy theories. To this day, claims abound that his death was not merely an accident and that Tito’s failing health and increasingly tenuous hold on power opened the way for a succession struggle. Kamberović cites at length the official inquiries into the tragedy and concludes that despite inconsistencies in the reports, they turned up no evidence of a conspiracy. He nevertheless emphasizes that an archive in the Sarajevo Prosecutor’s Office has yet to be opened and could potentially shed further light on this issue.

Kamberović has done a commendable job of piecing together a narrative based on serious archival work. However, his book is based for the most part on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav regional sources. In his research, he did not use international media reports or archives (including published volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series) to show what impression Bijedić left outside Yugoslavia, both publicly and privately. For instance, how did the U.S. media cover Bijedić’s 1975 meeting with President Ford, and how did Ford himself perceive the visit? Kamberović also omits several scholarly works on Yugoslavia in English language. The use of these sources could have provided a view of how Bijedić’s political career was assessed by...