ex-YUGOSLAVIA The forced cantonization of Bosnia-Herzegovina ACCORDING to an official provisional estimate published on May 10, 1,320 people have now died since the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BH), while another 6,700 have been wounded. Croatia's President Tudjman and his Serbian counterpart Milosevic want to partition the republic, and since they cannot achieve this aim by peaceful means, they are using soldiers and volunteer militia. The European Community's support for the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic cantons has done nothing to stem the violence - quite the contrary.
grade came onto the streets to demand democratization, Milosevic decided to up the stakes. Top priority was now given to the "salvation" of the Serb communities in Croatia and thereafter in BH. However the war with Croatia did not quieten down the protests in Serbia, where the regime remains under the permanent and increasing pressure of the Serb nationalist leaders in Croatia and BH and the federal army.
In order to keep all these forces together, Milosevic is now going for the whole Great Serb programme, which is presented to the world as the "Third Yugoslavia", in which territories torn away from Croatia and BH will be added onto Serbia and Montenegro. In fact, the plan envisaged the whole of BH entering into the new state, but since the Muslims and Croats there can hinder this, the idea is to carve as large a slice out of the territory as possible using the federal army and the battle-hardened volunteers from the Croatian campaign.
Special interests of federal army
The federal army has its own particular interests to pursue in Bosnia-Herzegovina, although these coincide to a considerable extent with those of Milosevic. The army has lost important spheres of operation in Slovenia and Croatia. If it were to lose BH as well, where 100,000 men, about half of its whole manpower, are stationed, its current size would be thrown into question. In the former Yugoslavia, furthermore, BH was the armoury of the military - two thirds of Yugoslavia's military production being concentrated there.
The army brass must hold on to BH as their last bastion outside Serbia - which is bankrupt and cannot hope to finance an army of this size. The army is also fighting to retain its source of supplies, and some of the fighting with Muslim and Croat territorial units in Mostar can be put down to this. On the other hand, it also pretends on occasion to be playing the role of referee, as during the bloodbath in the border town of Zvornik.
Franjo Tudjman has officially recognized BH's independence. At the same time he has offered BH's Croat citizens dual nationality and released members of the Croatian National Guard from BH to take part in the struggles in their homeland. It is clear that the Croat government, just like the Serbian, has been providing money and arms supplies to Croat paramilitaries in BH since the start of this year. It * This article, dated April 16, 1992, first appeared in the May 1, 1992 issue of Die Linke, the journal of the SOAL, the Austrian section of the Fourth International.
CHRISTIAN PROMITZER* T HE antiwar demonstration of tens of thousands on April 6, 1992 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was the last attempt to stem the slide to war. The peace movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the strongest in the former Yugoslavia, and it was clear from the start that any war there would be very bloody. None of the three ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats and Muslims, has an absolute majority. No influential political force supported the demonstrators, on the march one could see old Yugoslav flags with the red star, flags of the Yugoslav League of Communists, dissolved in 1990 and even portraits of Tito. No less symbolic was the end of the demonstration, when the marchers were shot at through the windows of the Holiday Inn by Serb guards. This was the nerve centre of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), under its leader Radovan Karadzic. Afterwards some of the demonstrators occupied the parliament building, initiated a "People's parliament" whose proceedings were televised and set up a 25 person strong Committee of National Salvation, but that was the end of their activities. The following day the demonstrators went home as the war broke out all around them. Since the struggle broke out in Croatia and the self-appointed leaders of the Serb enclaves there declared the "Autonomous Serbian Republic of Krajina", corresponding aspirations have been expressed for the Serb-populated areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The SDS' strategy is to push for12 into ethnic cantons. The Croatian Devia- ward the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina cratic Association (HDZ), an offshoot of Tudjman's ruling party, is pursuing a similar goal with respect to the Croat areas in Western Herzegovina.
### Secret talks
The background to these efforts lies in the dependence on the various nationalist elites on their "fatherlands". Already, in the middle of last year, secret talks took place between the Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and his Serb counterpart Slobodan Milosevic concerning agreement on the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina; the cantonization plan would be merely a first step towards partition. The recent negotiations under EC auspices did not come out of the blue.
The Serbs were demanding 70% of the territory and the Croats 35%, leaving the Muslims, who started off opposing both partition and the cantonization plan, with less than nothing. The Muslims ended up supporting the cantonization plan because the EC made such support a condition for the recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina -thus apparently providing some resistance to the "worse evil" of partition. However there are hardly any ethnically homogeneous regions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, posing a problem when it comes to dividing it up into ethnic cantons. The only means to overcome this is by big exoduses or forced assimilation of entire communities. The Serbian regime provoked the destruction of Yugoslavia by its years of playing the nationalist card. When in March last year the regime's critics in Bel-
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May 25, 1992
is also known that units of the Croatian Defence Forces (HOS), the military wing of the fascist party of Dobroslav Paragas, have been operating in Western Herzegovina. In the eventuality of BH breaking up, the Zagreb regime might try to annex this region. The struggle for Kupres, which is just outside the Croat region, and represents one of the most important strategic positions for all parties, is to do with marking out the Croatian zone of influence.
Given the external influences, can one talk of BH having a political life of its own? Some insight into this can be gained from the first free elections in 1990, in which the reform Communists suffered a defeat heavier than in any other of Yugoslavia's constituent republics. One of the reasons for this was the "Agrokomerc" financial and corruption scandal, Yugoslavia's biggest, which resulted in thousands of lost jobs. The rewards were reaped by anti-Communist, nationalist parties based on the three ethnic groups.
The largest number of parliamentary seats fell to the Muslim Party of Democratic Action of Alija Izetbegovic, the prime minister. In second place was the Serbian SDS and then the Croat HDZ. Since no party had an absolute majority, the three formed a grand coalition, operating a proportional system of power sharing.
But national aspirations dominated the political discussion and burning economic and social questions went unaddressed. The Croat and went unaddressed. The Croat and Serb parties remained faithful to the interests of their external sponsors. Since the Muslim party had none, Izetbegovic sought contacts in the Muslim world, from where he also received money. Nevertheless, the Bosnian Muslims have been left essentially to their own devices.
The notion of "Muslim" as an ethnic category is a product of Tito's desire to create a buffer nation between the Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. There has also been an unmistakable renaissance of Islamic feeling which has not as yet taken a fundamentalist direction. Izetbegovic stood in the elections under the slogan "Tradition and Tolerance" and seemed in favour of a multi-ethnic bourgeois republic.
The rebirth of Serb and Croat nationalism has to be seen in connection with events in the "mother" republics. At the same time, the legacy of the Croat fascist state of 1941-45, which occupied BH, has never been critically appraised and the negative mutual labelling of Croats and Serbs has now revived.
The ideological vacuum and the profound economic crisis have also made the ground fertile for nationalism.
ex-YUGOSLAVIA
Shaky economic situation
The break-up of Yugoslavia and the obstacles to trade created by the war have left BH, which is dependent on Croatia and Serbia for food, in a very precarious economic situation. In March this year, inflation reached 45%, wages slumped and unemployment reached 30%. The internal political fragmentation means that Bosnia has no real political direction. The attitude of the Bosnian government, and especially of the Muslim party, as to whether to prefer federation, confederation or independence, was first of all dependent on that changing constellation of forces in the Yugoslav arena.
After Slovenia and Croatia had withdrawn from Yugoslavia, BH had to reach a decision. Slovenia had successfully resis-
'ederal army Serb army [S. MILOSEVIC ted the military intervention and in Croatia there was war. BH, and in particular the Muslim party, tried to remain neutral. For Izetbegovic, confederation was seen as the only way to keep BH out of the whirlpool of national conflicts. Given the removal of Croatia as the only real counterweight to Serbia, however, there were only two remaining options for BH: entry into a Serb dominated Yugoslav Federation, with a corresponding rise of the influence of the Serb nationalist party in BH, or independence.
This meant accepting the cantonization demanded by the EC, which had been called in to mediate. From this point on it becomes difficult to follow the motives of the various political forces and personalities - there are too many variables at work.
If Izetbegovic were to choose independence, he could look to the HDZ as a possible, if somewhat unreliable, coalition partner. This, however, would be a provocation to the SDS. Already on January 9, 1992, the SDS floated the idea of a "Serb Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina" as its riposte to the Bosnian parliament's sove-
- reignty declaration, which it voted against. The Muslim leader was hoping at that time to rein in the SDS through the weight of the referendum on independence and EC recognition. However in fact all that happened was a confirmation of the status quo: Muslims and Croats voted for independence, while the Serbs hardly voted at all. Only through a loss of face could Izetbegovic or Karadzic back off.
On April 7, 1992, just after the referendum, the Republic of the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina was proclaimed on territory controlled by Serb militia from Croatia and Serb units of the Bosnian territorial defence force.
A day later the government of Croats and Muslims, which was rapidly losing control of more and more territory, announced a state of emergency and took control of the Bosnian territorial defence force which will form the core of a new regular Bosnian army. As in Croatia, so in BH; the EC and United Nations have become protagonists of the carnage. The EC's enthusiasm for cantonization shows their incomprehension of the situation. Cantonization is now taking place through war, massacre, pillage and the mass flight of hundreds of thousands. A symptomatic blunder by the EC was the choice by the foreign ministers conference of April 6 to announce the recognition of BH. It was on the morning of April 6, 1941 that Hitler's troops occupied Yugoslavia; nor could anyone believe, knowing what had happened in Croatia, that the ceasefire called for April 13 would last more than a few minutes.
The priorities of the UN are also quite clear. The American elections are not going to be won in the Balkans, when Libya beckons. Nonetheless, in recent days a change in the US attitude to Yugoslavia can be detected. As always the suffering people in BH await relief from UN troops.
And they will indeed arrive, since the first step has already been accomplished: at the time of writing the UNPRO-ForTroops are now positioned in Croat Krajina and Slavonia with their logistical centre in Sarajevo. However, the UN troops will do nothing until after the cantonization" of BH is complete.
Then - tens of thousands of lives later - it will move in to ensure the security of Serb and Croat zones of influence and the establishment of a Muslim state in whatever remains. The peace movement has hardly been able to respond; it seems as if the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina will become another part of the everyday reality of 1 3 our times. *
USA