Bosnia and Herzegovina

VII

History

The earliest known inhabitants of what is now Bosnia, traceable to the Neolithic period, were the Illyrians, a people of Indo-European stock who are considered ancestors of the modern Albanians. By ad 9, when Rome crushed the last Illyrian resistance in present-day Bosnia, all of Illyria had become part of the Roman Empire. Rome’s most enduring legacy in Bosnia was the division between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian faiths along the border between the western and eastern Roman empires. That border, first drawn around 285, passed through Bosnia.

As Roman power declined, successive waves of nomadic Goths, Alans, Huns, and Avars devastated the land before moving on. In the 6th century Slavic tribes, probably swept along with the Avars, settled in the area and soon absorbed the peoples, languages, and cultures that were already there. A second wave of Slavic tribes, called Serbs and Croats, arrived in the 7th century. The names Croat and Serb probably both derive from the name of an Iranian or Sarmatian tribe that ruled and was absorbed by them on the way.

Bosnia was first mentioned by that name in a surviving document from 958. The area became a remote mountainous borderland between successive competing empires and kingdoms that subjugated or claimed all or parts of it during the early medieval period. Bosnia’s Slavs were generally Christian, either Roman Catholic or Orthodox. In 1180 Ban (“governor” or “viceroy” in Croatian and Hungarian) Kulin created the nucleus of an independent Bosnian state, which was revived, consolidated, and expanded by Ban Stephen Kotromanić (reigned 1322-1353). Kotromanić’s conquest of Hum (later Herzegovina) in 1326 united Bosnia and Herzegovina for the first time. Medieval Bosnia reached its height under Stephen Tvrtko (reigned 1353-1391), who was crowned Tvrtko I, king of Serbia and Bosnia, in 1377. Under his rule, Bosnia briefly became the most powerful and prosperous Slavic Balkan state.

A

Ottoman Rule

Tvrtko’s kingdom gradually disintegrated after his death. In 1448 Stephen Vukčić, lord of Hum, asserted his independence by giving himself the title herceg (duke; from the German Herzog) of Hum, and his land soon came to be called Hercegovina (Herzegovina; the Duchy). The Ottomans quickly conquered most of Bosnia in 1463 and Herzegovina in 1483. Ottoman rule, lasting more than 400 years, introduced two more sizeable religious communities: Jews and Muslims. The Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492, and they became an important part of the cultural and economic life in Sarajevo and other Balkan cities. Immigrants from the Ottoman Empire were among the first Muslims to settle in Bosnia. Later, growing numbers of local converts added to their number.

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Bosnia, along with Albania, was the only part of Ottoman Europe where large numbers of Christians converted to Islam. The most persuasive explanation for this, advanced in recent scholarly studies, is that all Christian faiths in this religious borderland were weak, with few churches and clergy. Current scholars reject the theory that all or most of the Bosnian Christians who embraced Islam had been members of an allegedly heretical (“Bogomil”) Bosnian church. The Bosnian church, essentially Catholic in doctrine, was nearly extinct by the 15th century. In an empire in which Muslims were privileged and a ruling caste, converting to Islam offered advantages. The result, unique in Ottoman Europe, was a landholding and military nobility of native Muslim Slavs ruling over a mostly Christian peasantry.

By the 19th century the Muslim Slav nobility, like the local ruling elite in several other Ottoman possessions, was virtually independent of crumbling Ottoman central authority. The Bosnian nobility was determined to prevent the Ottomans from reasserting authority and implementing modernizing reforms, collectively known as the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat threatened the Bosnian nobility’s power and exploitation of an increasingly impoverished and rebellious peasantry. The last decades of Ottoman Bosnia were marked by repeated rebellions of two kinds: by the Muslim elite against the Ottoman authorities, and by the mostly Christian peasants against that elite.

B

Austro-Hungarian Rule

In 1875 a peasant uprising took root in Bosnia and spread to Bulgaria in 1876, prompting a major international crisis. In 1877 Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Russian armies advanced to the gates of İstanbul, the Ottoman capital, in 1878. The Congress of Berlin, meeting that year to resolve the crisis and prevent a wider war, decided that Austria-Hungary should occupy and administer Bosnia. Austro-Hungarian occupation met with serious armed resistance, primarily Muslim but also Orthodox Christian; it took 82,000 troops and four months to subdue that resistance. But Muslim fears for their religion and privileges, which led many to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire, proved unwarranted. The Austro-Hungarian regime did not interfere with existing social and landholding relations, focusing instead, and with some success, on economic development.

In 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia, partly to end Serb nationalist dreams of eventually incorporating it into the Kingdom of Serbia. The province had become a prime target of Croat as well as Serb nationalist propaganda and schemes, with Croat nationalists agitating for its union with Croatia, then a part of Hungary. Serbs claimed that the Bosnian Muslims were Islamicized Serbs; Croats claimed that they were Muslim Croats. The idea of a single nation whose people would be defined by their common ethnicity, not their religion, was promoted by Benjamin Kállay, the Austro-Hungarian official in charge of Bosnia from 1882 to 1903. He wanted to counter both Serb and Croat ambitions, but his idea emerged too late to win any except a few Muslim adherents. However, a group of Croats who in the 1830s began advocating the union of all South Slavs, which included Serbs and Croats, was more successful. According to the Yugoslav idea, the South Slavs were one nation or kindred nations who should be unified within a single state of their own (Yugoslavia means “Land of the South Slavs”). The Yugoslav idea appealed to a number of primarily younger Bosnians from the ethnic Muslim, Croat, and Serb communities.

On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb who professed to be a “Yugoslav,” shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later, igniting World War I. During the war, most Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims remained loyal to Austria-Hungary.

C

Integration into Yugoslavia

At the end of the war in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. Bosnia became part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929). Serbia’s Karadjordjević dynasty and a Serb-dominated government and administration ruled the new state. The kingdom’s political parties, suppressed under a royal dictatorship from 1929 to 1934, were all ethnic nationalist parties except for a pan-Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned and went underground in 1921. The main Bosnian Muslim party, supported by nearly all Muslims, was the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (YMO), founded in February 1919 and led by Mehmet Spaho until his death in 1939. Spaho skillfully maneuvered himself and the YMO into a balancing position among other parties that ensured that the YMO and Muslim interests would be represented in most Yugoslav governments and policies. Spaho died two months before the Yugoslav government made a major concession to Croat national aspirations and created an autonomous Banovina (Province) of Croatia that included parts of Bosnia with large Croat populations.

When Nazi Germany and its Axis allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941, during World War II, Bosnia was divided into German and Italian occupation zones. It was made part of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH in Bosnian). The NDH was an Axis puppet state run by the Ustaše, a Croat fascist and terrorist organization whose wartime attempt to exterminate the NDH’s nearly 2 million Serbs was modeled on Hitler’s genocide of Europe’s Jews. Bosnian Serbs fled to the forests to join two violently competing resistance movements. These were the Serb royalist Četniks, under Draža Mihailović, and the Partisans, a Communist-led multiethnic “Army of National Liberation” organized and headed by Josip Broz Tito, the Croat head of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

Bosnia became the Partisans’ principal zone of operations in two overlapping wars. In one war the Partisans battled the Axis armies of occupation. In the other they fought a parallel civil war against both the Četniks and the Ustaše. The fighting was particularly fierce between the Partisans and the Četniks. The Četniks’ anti-Communism and determination to restore a Serb-dominated monarchy led them to join first Italian and then German operations against the Partisans. In November 1943 Tito convened a Partisan congress in Jajce, a medieval Bosnian capital. The congress proclaimed a new federal Yugoslavia of equal South Slav peoples, naming Tito marshal and prime minister. The congress included the Muslims as one of the South Slav peoples. Bosnian Muslims and Croats joined the Partisans in growing numbers.

D

Tito’s Yugoslavia

By the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, the Partisans had won both of their wars and recreated Yugoslavia, under firm Communist control, as a federal state of six republics. Five were to be semi-autonomous 'homelands' for Yugoslavia’s Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. The sixth, Bosnia, was to be the joint homeland of its intermingled Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. When a new, totally Communist government was installed in November 1945 after strictly controlled elections, Tito headed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (known after 1952 as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, or LCY), the government, and the armed forces.

For the next 45 years, Bosnia was part of Tito’s Yugoslavia. That state was at first a faithful copy of the authoritarian, rigidly Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Joseph Stalin. After Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia underwent a gradual process of relaxation and decentralization, in which greater power was given to the republics, including Bosnia, and their own Communist leaderships. Economic experiments with “market socialism” and “socialist self-management” were introduced. The political changes included a strict apportioning of party and state positions among Bosnia’s three constituent peoples. Bosnia’s branch of the LCY continued to be more repressive and opposed to reforms of the Communist system than party branches in most of the other republics. In 1968 the Muslims were fully recognized as Yugoslavia’s sixth official national group.

Tito’s death in 1980 coincided with the onset of an enduring economic crisis in Yugoslavia, during which production levels and living standards declined significantly. Tito’s successors, the leaders of republics with conflicting economic interests and national aspirations, could not agree on effective remedies. Acceptance of the institutions and eventually even the structure of Tito’s Yugoslavia declined everywhere, especially in Slovenia and Croatia. This trend accelerated among non-Serbs in reaction to Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s militant assertion of Serb nationalism and his aggressive campaign to restore central party and state control under Serb domination. Tensions and disputes among the republics and among the ethnic groups in the republics multiplied.

The disintegration of the LCY in January 1990 paved the way for multiparty parliamentary elections in all six republics by the end of the year. The elections in all the republics produced absolute or relative majorities for nationalist parties. In Bosnia’s elections, the three winning nationalist parties, one for each of the major ethnic groups, garnered 76 percent of the popular vote and 202 of the parliament’s 240 seats. The principal party of the Bosnian Muslims, the Party of Democratic Action (PDA), led by Alija Izetbegović, won 87 seats, or 34 percent. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), led by Radovan Karadžić, took 72 seats, or 30 percent. Forty-four seats, or 18 percent, went to the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CDU-BH), the Bosnian branch of the party that had won Croatia’s elections in spring 1990. That party was led by Croatian president Franjo Tudjman. Izetbegović became president of Bosnia’s seven-member trinational presidency. By pre-electoral agreement, the three parties formed a fragile coalition government. It fell apart as Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991.

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