srdjan vucetic

Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup. The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention.

Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1999.

Burg and Shoup, both experienced former Yugoslavia scholars, have consulted an impressive range of literatures and documents in several languages to produce a book that can be regarded as authoritative, comprehensive, and ambitious. As far as the accounts of the Bosnian war go, this book is better than most.

The first half of the study deals with Bosnia prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The authors provide several useful things: a modern Bosnian political history, various maps (32 in total), and data on the rural and urban distribution of the ethnic communities (the book desperately needs a chronology of events). And relative to the previous literature, the book offers four important take-home points: first, the ethno-national identities in Bosnia developed “from the ‘outside in’” (p. 17) and a distinct multinational tradition was given only a limited chance. Of the three main ethnic identities, Bosniak or Bosnian Muslim was the last to emerge as a separate political force.

Second, in the late 1980s, the authors contend, “over half of the population…had a close relative of a different nationality” (p. 42; in my opinion: maybe. Besides, under what conditions does family trump ethnicity?). Third, the ethno-national conflict in the republic intensified as a result of the victory of three “ethnic, and de facto nationalist, parties” in the first democratic elections in 1990 as well as in response to the broader ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia (e.g. war in the neighbouring Croatia). Both events extremely polarized the society along the ethnic lines and, eventually, led to ethnic warfare in March and April 1992. The chapter on the “war on the ground” looks at all 43 months of the conflict and describes is some detail the crises in Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Gorazde and Bihac (places which later in the war became the infamous ‘UN safe havens’). Fourth, Burg and Shoup make clear that the war in Bosnia had a “distinctly local character” in which paramilitaries and criminals ruled supreme and in which “one side would sell arms to the other” (p. 138).

The Serb shelling of a breadline in Sarajevo on May 27, 1992 stands an entry point for direct international involvement in Bosnia. Thus, three days later, economic sanctions were imposed on Milosevic’s Serbia and Montenegro. French President Mitterand’s “dramatic and improbable” landing in the besieged Sarajevo opened the way for peacekeepers, food and medicines, and, importantly, Western journalists. The authors strongly argue that intense media coverage chose the “story of Muslim victimization” as its favourite (p. 162, 133). The other two large-scale massacres in Sarajevo – on February 5, 1994 and on August 28, 1995 – galvanized the public and elite opinion in West. The authors leave the question of culpability for these crimes widely open and claim that “incidents in which the Muslim fired on their own people did occur” (p. 165). The other sensitive questions – the number of killed, genocide, Serbo-Croat aggression (esp. the role of the Yugoslav National Army) – are also, to varying degrees (and to my great disappointment), left unresolved.

The analyses in the preceding chapters provide the background for the second part of the book, which deals with the international intervention to resolve the conflict. This part shows both the strength and the weakness of the book. The authors brilliantly dissect all major peace plans for Bosnia and their numerous modifications and provide superb accounts of the diplomatic exchanges. On the debit side, they spend far less time analyzing the positions of the local participants, particularly the politics between the leaders of Bosnian Serb and Croat on one hand and the “kin” governments in Serbia and Croatia (this would have required a much closer look at the press in Belgrade and Zagreb). The authors conclude with an overview of Dayton’s shortcomings and assert that only an establishment of strong civil society will allow Bosnia to escape war and/or international trusteeship. The authors maintain that international responses to the war in Bosnia can best be explained in terms of great power politics (p. 189) and that it was the US that did what was necessary to stop the war: it added the use of force (NATO air strikes) to diplomacy and then imposed a peace settlement. The Dayton Agreement finalized a gradual move towards partition made in earlier “European” plans.

Could the outbreak of hostilities been prevented? Not without the resolution of the conflict in Croatia and not without Dayton-like partition, it seems. The authors hint that had Bosnia stayed with Serbia, the conflict could have been avoided (p. 45). More systematically, they demonstrate that the issue of international recognition or early intervention were secondary to that of nationalism. Thus, there is a prior, key question: was a multiethnic Bosnia possible? Shoup and Berg correctly suggest that “only an alliance between the antinationalist opposition and moderates in the nationalists parties…could have saved Bosnia” (p. 13). But the authors seem to be undecided on what turned nationalism into organized violence: aggression, fear, or both.

Three comments. First, Burg and Shoup provide what can be seen as a combination of ‘ethnic’ (defined in terms of power and interests, not “ancient hatreds) and ‘international’ accounts of the war in Bosnia. While they venture into other political, economic, and moral discussions, the first two predominate. In terms of these two accounts, the author argue ethnic leaders and international actors subscribed to wholly different perceptions of the crisis which resulted in a deep “reality gap” (p. 11). It is this gap that stymied the repeated efforts to reach a resolution and it thwarts the current peacebuilding process (p. 416). The window of opportunity for preventive engagement, if any, was small: from January 1990, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia fell apart, to June 1991, when the first war of broke out.

Second, this book is a joint venture and it shows. Take the ‘who’s to blame?’ question, for example. It turns out that “one of the authors” (the authors apparently want to make it a mystery) believes that the Serbs were “demonized” in the West (p. 12) and that the issue of genocide in Bosnia is “highly politicized” (p. 14). The other author, then, disagrees. If this is true, then the earlier statement that “We view the conflict in Bosnia in the same light” (p. 4) is somewhat puzzling. And when it comes to moral considerations, there seems no easy way for the authors to differentiate between ‘balance,’ which is desirable, and ‘moral equivalence,’ which is not. It is my subjective impression that the book is rather charitable to the Bosnian Serb leadership and I feel that the author interested in “un-demonizing the Serbs” prevailed most of the time.

Third, the Burg-Shoup volume is not a definitive history of the war in Bosnia. The list of sources is impressive, but only quantitatively speaking. The book, in short, relies too heavily on English-language journalistic accounts of war, esp. The New York Times and The Washington Post. To their credit, the authors are frank about this issue: “[we are] prepared to reassess our positions, not only on questions of fact, but also on the broader and more highly charged moral issues surrounding the war” (p. 15). Regrettably, however, Burg and Shoup never explain why they ignore a number reputable scholarly works on the topic which were available at the time of writing, including those that directly criticize and/or refute some of their cited sources (e.g., the Boyd article on the Markale massacre, and responses by Malcolm, Reiff, Odom and Cigar, in Foreign Affairs).