Analysis of the Protests in Bosnia, by a participant

Please see this excellent blog post about the situation in Bosnia.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [9]

Chapter 7: Winter
The opening sentence of this chapter is something of a shock:

"I returned to Sarajevo in January 1993 after a six-month absence and was astonished at how wretched a place it had become."

All of the earlier scenes of struggle and survival, the reader is reminded, were from the earliest months of the war. At that point, Sarajevo had yet to experience the deprivations of winter. In this chapter, we see how the grinding, relentless struggle to survive in a city under siege was wearing people down, and eroding the sense of community in the process. Society wasn't fracturing on ethnic lines, but rather atomizing into a collection of  families and households, each able to do little more than look after their own.

The cold, the darkness, the lack of adequate food, the constant work involved merely in acquiring water, the loneliness, the isolation...the nobility and spirit of Sarajevo was being reduced to grim day to day scramble for firewood, rations, shelter from sniper and mortar fire, favorable relations with the inconsistent UN officials who were the only conduit to the outside world.

Ivo and Gordana's son lost his only friend, an older neighbor boy who shared his love of hard rock, when that neighbor--serving as a soldier in the army--was killed. On average, Oslobodjenje gave over a quarter of each issue to obituaries, which now served not only ceremonial purpose but also informational, as people around the city often had no other way to learn of the fate of family members, coworkers, and acquaintances around the city.

The Cyrus-Vance plan legitimized the ethnic division of the country, scoring a victory for Bosnian Serb propaganda and triggering the Muslim-Croat civil war of 1993. The war in Bosnia took a step closer to being a self-fulfilling prophecy, the three-way war between "nations" that Karadzic and company always claimed it to be.

Gordana was able to travel to New York City for a few days to receive an award. The guilt at her temporary escape coexisted with the sense that if she allowed herself to get used to the comforts of life in a city not at war, her return to Sarajevo would be unbearable. And indeed, when she returns, she finds that the cold was worse than anyone expected; her bathroom shelves are gone, having been used as firewood.

It is only January.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [8]

[Sorry it's been such a long break--almost two full months--between posts. I couldn't give much free time to anything but graduate school.]

Chapter 6: Fighting Together, Falling Apart
Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan, multicultural city that was a bridge between different worlds--the East and the West; the capitalist world and the communist; Christianity and Islam; Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The population was mixed, and during the Yugoslav period the city had a very high percentage of mixed marriages between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The demographics of the city were very mixed. Therefore, the fact of Sarajevo presented a challenge to the Serb nationalists which was both pragmatic and existential. They wanted to divide this thoroughly mixed Sarajevo on ethnic lines for military reasons; they needed to divide the people of Sarajevo against each other in order to validate their own ideology.

Therefore, the siege of Sarajevo had a dimension beyond the military, because the Bosnian Serb Army wasn't merely trying to conquer the city but to destroy its social fabric. And as the war dragged on, the bonds which connected people across ethnic lines were tested frequently. Many thousands of Serbs stayed loyal to Bosnia and suffered along with their fellow Bosnians--and one absolutely cannot assume that a decision by all Serbs was a sign of support for the nationalist cause. Many, Ljiljana Smajlovic, had complex feelings about their Serb identity but did not join the nationalist cause. And human nature being what it is, many simply took advantage of the opportunity to escape. And some, it must be said, probably left because life as a Serb in besieged Sarajevo was not easy.

It was not easy for anyone, of course. But for Serbs who stayed, it was hard to escape suspicion, as some of their fellow Serbs had indeed betrayed friends, family, and neighbors to join the forces tormenting their own hometown. Senka Kurtovic wrote a piece for Oslobodjenje, an open letter to her ex-boyfriend turned Serb nationalist Dragan Aloric, which touched a nerve because so many in Sarajevo had felt the same betrayal. At the same time, in the early days of the war the militias which defended the city never shed their origins in the criminal underworld, and it was much easier to justify preying on "suspicious" Serbs when the inclination to loot and otherwise "acquire" goods took hold.

Many resisted the temptation to give in to sectarian fear and hostility. But as the siege dragged on, old loyalties continued to wither in the face of paranoia and suspicion fueled by nationalist propaganda and accentuated by every sniper's bullet, every mortar shell.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [7]

Chapter 5: Hatred

Hatred of the other has to be learned. And even once learned, it needs constant reinforcement. Hatred is a powerful motivating tool if you are willing to accept the consequences, or remain blind to them.

The leadership of the Bosnian Serb separatists desperately needed the outside world to believe that Bosnia was a land riven with ancient, immutable hatreds. To believe so made the war seem inevitable and beyond the scope of international concern. It also legitimized ethnic partition. Many in the international community were willing to oblige; none more enthusiastically than Lewis MacKenzie, who mocked any possibility of a peaceful solution and seems to have arrived in Bosnia with his mind already made up. It is worth noting that Gjelten makes note of the fact that MacKenzie was offered financial compensation by the American advocacy group SerbNet to give two speeches propagating such views to the American public. This book was published in 1995. The only people who ever took MacKenzie at his word on Bosnia in the years since he was there were people who were clearly not paying attention.

The Bosnian government, and the Muslim plurality, just as desperately needed the world to believe that there was a long tradition of coexistence and tolerance in Bosnia. Not a strife-free, utopian paradise like MacKenzie so contemptuously accused those who differed with his "they all hate each other" condemnations, but a land of long-standing intermixing and cultural sharing. It was an argument grounded in both history, and demographic facts--particularly in Sarajevo. It was a compelling argument, and an inspiring one. It should have carried more weight with the Western democracies. But the Bosnian Serbs had tanks, and heavy artillery, and an overwhelming military advantage. If they couldn't find hatred already existing, they would will it into existence with propaganda and violence.

Because they didn't just need to convince the outside world. They needed to convince the people of Bosnia, Serbs and non-Serbs alike. It wasn't enough to win territory; the Muslims needed to leave and never come back. The culture of this new Bosnia--a Bosnia devoid of that special ethnic and religious mix which made the country what it was--needed to be cleansed just as thoroughly as the demographic map needed to be. Mosques needed to be dynamited and bulldozed from memory. Orthodox priests needed to sanctify racial violence and ethnic segregation. Bosnia's Nobel-Prize winning author Ivo Andric needed to be remembered for the violence he wrote about, but not the historical continuities which framed that violence. Remember the hatreds he described, but forget that the Bridge over the Drina was, indeed, a bridge that connected people to each other.

Keep teaching that hatred, because otherwise ordinary Serbs might forget it and make the unforgivable error of thinking that they can trust their neighbors and stand by their fellow Bosnians. Oslobodjenje was targeting because it was a symbol of the cosmopolitan tolerance which Sarajevo represented; both needed to be destroyed. The Serbs who stayed in Sarajevo, the Serb reporters who continued writing for its beloved newspaper, were obviously failed Serbs. How could they be otherwise? They had failed to learn to hate.

Perhaps the Bosnian Serb leadership got to them too late. That mistake was not repeated with at least one 12 year-old Serb boy in the newly-cleansed town of Hadzici. Echoing the same sentiments of thousands of Bosnian Serbs who had learned how to hate, he told a reporter "I do not miss my Muslim classmates one bit. It has been explained to me that while we were playing together, they were actually plotting behind my back."

Gjelten lets that boy have the last word in this chapter on "Hatred." And so shall I.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [28]

Epilogue 1996 [concluded]

Glenny devotes six of the final ten pages of his book to "Operation Storm", the military operation in which Croatian forces retook the Krajina region and through a mixture of direct action and failure to provide security managed to expel virtually the entire Serbian population of the region. I have no real quarrel with his account, although he does seem to be using it to support his implicit case that Tudjman and the Croats bear an equal share of the blame for the Yugoslav wars.

This leaves four pages for the "end game" in which the United States and NATO used bombing to force the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. Being that Glenny had always argued that using force against the Serbs would backfire, he employs some verbal gymnastics arguing that what actually happened was more complicated and a matter of timing than simple causation. There's some merit in that view, but he pushes it a little too hard and a little too inflexibly. In Glenny's world, he's the only person who always understood the root of the matter. He is right about much of what he says here--it's true that the US was not interested in actually defeating the Bosnian Serbs, and that the Contact Group plan they were pushing for amounted to institutionalizing ethnic partition. But it seems strange, and a little disingenuous, for him to harp on this now when throughout the book he was adamant that intervention was pointless and that the war had its own logic which must be allowed to play out. Glenny grants none of the wars actors--particularly the Serbs--any agency whatsoever. Everything they did was in Newtonian reaction to historic and international forces. 

And so this updated edition ends--with Glenny somberly lecturing the Western world and the international community that although it is too late for the Yugoslavs, we must learn the lessons of this war. What those lessons are--I don't know if Glenny really expects us to draw any. He certainly doesn't waste any ink spelling them out.

I have no final thoughts on this book--I've said my piece throughout this 28 part review, and others have already eloquently pointed out Glenny's failings. He is an excellent reporter, with a great eye for detail and human interest. And I think he is an essentially humane man who genuinely loathed the suffering he saw. But his analytic abilities were overtaxed, and his grasp of history and politics was simply inadequate. He knew the details and the facts, but could not recognize his own biases interpretive framework, and in the end that conceptual limitation undermines the usefulness of this book. 

Sorry to end with a whimper rather than a bang, but it's past time to move on.

Misguided Op-Ed on Balkan Partitioning

My thanks to Yakima Gulag for this catch (from her Friday, Sept. 30 post).

This week, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute published an article advocating for ethnic partitioning of Bosnia and Kosova, in the apparently not ironically titled The Dangers of Rejecting Balkan Partitions.

Yakima Gulag states the obvious first objection--that doing as Carpenter suggested would be a reward for genocide (I believe this would be less overtly true in Kosova than in Bosnia, but the point stands). But more to the point, Carpenter makes a very fundamental error when he makes a false equivelency between the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation into its constituent units--which were, as noted in this blog many times--historically legitimate and geographically defined geopolitical entities--with the artbitrary division of these polities along demographic lines. When one considers that these demographic divisions have been accomplished by violence and terror, and that this would be a "solution" which would merely atomize the same problem--since no ethnic division can be perfect or "clean"--it becomes even more clear that this is a proposal from a context-free alternative universe; one in which taking an ahistorical view of political conflict and regarding ethnic violence as somehow a static, natural order of things substitutes for nuanced analysis.

But then again--this is the Cato Institute we're talking about. Libertarian foreign policy wonks don't generally do nuance or context.

"Nationalism and Ethnic Violence" by Greenhaven Press [8]

Chapter 4: Should Nations Intervene in Ethnic Conflicts? [continued]

Nations Should Not Intervene in the Balkans

There are only three essays in this section. The second is actually the transcript of Senator John McCain being interviewed by reporter Major Garrett. The general tone of McCain's argument--and his superficial knowledge of the situation--can be garnered from his answer to the very first question:

"Garrett: You oppose limited U.S. military involvement in the Balkan civil war. Tell us what you hope will be the result of following the policy you support. What do you hope U.S. action or inaction will have accomplished?

McCain: I hope the result would be the civil conflict in what was Yugoslavia that has been going on for at least 700 years will be at a very low point, that the boundaries will have been stabilized, and that sanctions, embargoes and other measures will bring about a dramatic reduction in the slaughter. That's what I hope would happen. I am by no means convinced that that would be the case."

Well, what is there to say? "700 years" Senator McCain? Really? That's your "analysis" of the situation.

But in fairness to McCain, we all know that this line of "ancient hatreds" was the excuse of first resort for so many Western policy makers during the Balkan wars. It was just sad that so many in the media swallowed this line without complaint. 700 years, of course, is the maximum time one could say that Islam has been in the Balkans, so one wonders if the implication is that the Bosniaks brought their troubles onto themselves by becoming the 'other'. Were Croats and Serbs getting along famously before then? And who were the Bosniaks prior to conversion anyway, Senator McCain?

These are rhetorical questions of course, because I presume all regular readers of this blog not only have answers, they also have some understanding of how problematic the premise is--who were "those people" seven centuries ago? These are lazy assumptions, easily dismantled, and it's depressing that for the most part, the media allowed politicians and military "experts" to use such facile reasoning as an excuse to duck our moral and international legal obligations.

The third essay is by Misha Glenny, and is entitled "Foreign Military Intervention Would Fail." While his tone is fairly reasonable through most of the essay, and he approach to the issue is to consider the political and military realities as they existed in May of 1993 (I can't blame him for not being able to see ahead in time to the forced Croat-Bosnian Government alliance, so his claims that the logistics of actually arming the Muslims cannot be dismissed as a cop out), it is hard to shake the nagging sensation that he is simply playing Whack-a-Mole with any possible scenario. He never once suggests a possible remedy for any of the complications he has cobbled together. Nor does he suggest any alternate to military intervention; his only "solution" is to write in favor of the UN "safe areas" which he freely acknowledges is hardly a noble or just solution. But, he seems to say, absolutely nothing can be done; Clinton does not have a coherent policy for intervention, so why try and formulate one? It's hopeless! The neighboring countries are worried about wider instability? It's hopeless! And my favorite--the Serbs are not cowards just because they've been waging war against unarmed civilians with heavy artillery. No, no--they're extremely tough and fearless killing machines; you don't want to mess with those guys!

Which leads up back the first essay, a truly loathsome work of paleoconservative libertarianism from Murray N. Rothbard, in a piece ("Don Non Intervene Against the Serbs") that is not nearly as clever or insightful--or anywhere near as amusing--as the self-regarding author seems to think it is. It is, however, a dandy example of how inadequate Libertarianism is as a guide to foreign policy, and a helpful reminder that paleoconservatism is, at heart, anti-democratic and racist. To the core.

Rothbard is not subtle; he begins his critique of intervention by claiming that modest steps--such as bombing--won't work, so therefore it will only be a matter of time before Clinton nukes Belgrade. If case you're wondering how somebody this dense gets published, I should point out that Mr. Rothbard writes for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report. Why the editors chose to include this piece of drivel is beyond me.

Why will any Western military intervention fail? Because:

"...the Serbs are a magnificently gutsy people, a "primitive" folk who don't give a tinker's dam for "world opinion," the "respect of the international community," and all the rest of the pretentious can that so impresses readers of the New York Times."

With friends like these, the ten million-plus individual human beings in this world who happen to be Serb don't need enemies.

At any rate, one of the things Rothbard admires so much about these mythical primitives he fantasizes about is their disdain for "world opinion." Which is another way of saying they are the farthest thing from being a cosmopolitan people. Which, in Rothbard's dingy little world is a great compliment.

His rant about the situation in Bosnia--and the actions of the "pro-war Left" (the fact that humanitarian liberalism was liberal makes it a de facto evil in the paleoconservative world)--is little more than incoherent rambling laced with a healthy degree of ignorance. I won't insult the readers intelligence by dealing with the specifics, but suffice it to say that the old "Bosnia is an artificial country/Bosniaks are not a real nationality" is front and center.

But Rothbard at least has integrity--he explicitly states that the Greater Serbia project is "perfectly reasonable." And he assures the reader that "ethnic cleansing" just sounds bad in translation--after all, the Serbs don't want to kill the Muslims and other non-Serbs on the land they're taking, they just insist that they leave and never come back--what could be more "perfectly reasonable" than that.

Rothbard also dismisses the atrocities of mass rape by noting that "..I don't want to disillusion any tender souls, but almost all victorious troops through history commit systemic rapin' and lootin' of the vanquished." Yes, the apostrophes are in the original. I guess that's his way of making a "tough point." The systemic nature of the rape camps in Bosnia means nothing to him.

Also, forget trying to understand this situation, fellow Americans:

"American meddling is made even more futile by the fact that it is impossible for Americans to understand, not only those fierce rivalries, but the tremendous sense of history they all possess. How can Americans, who have no historical memory whatever and scarcely remember when Ronald Reagan was president, possibly understand these peoples of the Balkans, to whom the great 15th century battle against the invading Turks is as real, nay more real, than yesterday's dinner?"

One feels dirty just reading this anti-humanist sludge. I feel civilization shaking under my feet when I read such collectivist, tribalist, racist nonsense. And it gets even worse--Rothbard not only repeats the discredited belief that the Bosniaks are descended from the Bogomils, he even claims that the Bogomils were truly evil heretics and--and we're getting into "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" territory here:

"...there is much evidence that the Muslims still practice their Bogomil rites in secret, engraving its symbols on their tombstones."

What, no blood of Christian babies in their cevapcici?

Throw in the usual canards about the Serbs failing to be good Nazis, unlike the Croats and the Bosniaks in World War II, and that about wraps up this despicable piece of proto-fascism. Rothbard concludes by gloating, with bloodthirsty relish:

"Frankly, in any kind of fair fight, my nickel is on the Serbs. Every time. And, by the way, if you were caught in an ambush, wouldn't you love to have a few Serbs on your side?"

Serbs--the Rottweilers of the human race, brought to you by Murray Rothbard.

Shame of the editors of this volume for bringing this piece of filth to a wider audience. Shame on Greenhaven for lending legitimacy to such an obviously hate-filled windup. This was not an essay, it was a provocation, and a poorly written and woefully uninformed one at that.

"Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict" from Greenhaven Press [7]

Chapter 4: Should Nations Intervene in Ethnic Conflicts? [continued]

There are four essays in the 'pro' section ("Nations Should Intervene in the Balkans"). The first essay, "NATO Should Intervene in the Balkans", by Paul C. Warnke, gets it right; NATO has the ability to intervene and should do so, by taking firm military measures to force the aggressors to stop. The third essay, "The United States and NATO Should Intervene in Kosovo" by Bujar Bukoshi, also hits the mark, and I give the editors some credit for including this essay in 1994, a half decade before the Kosovo War when most casual Western observers didn't understand the connection. Had the author's words been heeded, the KLA might never have come into being and Kosova might not be saddled with the baggage that organization brought with it. The fourth essay, "Limited Military Intervention in Bosnia May Be Necessary" by John Roach might seem timid and halfhearted, but it is worth noting that the author was the archbishop of Minneapolis and was speaking in agreement with the official Vatican line. His argument is that intervention in Bosnia would have met the "just war" criteria the Church believes in, and that is actually a very strong argument in favor of intervention.

However, the second essay is problematic. Entitled "Use Military Force to Partition Bosnia", the authors John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape take an approach that was depressingly familiar at the time--they accept the logic of Serb nationalism while deploring its tactics. Their sympathies are with the Muslim plurality, but their solution is simply to dismember Bosnia as the Serb nationalists wanted to, only on different terms. Their plan would have "awarded" the Muslims 35% of Bosnia, and the Serbs 45%. This, the reader is assured, is perfectly reasonable.

In a short section entitled "Interest in Partition", the authors actually admit that this option is exactly what the Serb nationalists want, only with territorial concessions, while opining that "a multiethnic Bosnia must now have little appeal" for Muslims, after admitting that they have steadfastly argued in favor of a multiethnic state.

What is more remarkable is that while their plan would have restored easten Bosnia to Muslim control--an area which was mostly Muslim-majority prior to ethnic cleansing--it would give the Bihac region--another area of overwhelmingly Muslim majority--to the Serbs, and force the Muslims there to move to the Muslim ministate in the east. With friends like these, the Muslims of Bosnia did not need enemies.

The rest of this essay is concerned with the military and logistical details of this plan. To be fair to the authors, they do acknowledge the moral shortcomings of this plan. They also acknowledge that the rump Bosnian Muslim state would be much weaker than its neighbors, particularly Serbia, and they argue that in order for this plan to be viable NATO must take this vulnerable state under its wings. They also do not engage in false equivalencies, and it is clear that their sympathies are with the Muslims and that their plan is guided by political realities (i.e, what Western countries are willing to actually do). I don't want to smear them unfairly.

Perhaps this article, then, can best serve as an example of how the inaction of the West had made such a morally reprehensible policy proposal--using Western force to complete the work of third-rate Balkan fascists--into a reasonably argued least-worst scenario.

The Flawed Logic and Amoral Rationale for Partition

A few days ago, I was randomly searching for recent blog posts and articles on Bosnia, when I came across this opinion piece by Ivan Eland, at the "LA Progressive" website.

Entitled "Warning From Bosnia For Iraq", the short article presents a rather weak argument in favor of partitioning Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines, and proposes Bosnia as a case study of the dangers of failing to do so. Interestingly, it is not the wars of the 1990s which Mr. Eland points to so much as the current constitutional crisis and the ongoing political battle between entity leaders. Dodik is not mentioned by name, which is not surprising because it is painfully clear that for all his credentials, Eland does not do nuance, nor is he a detail-oriented man.

It should be noted that Eland has a new book Partitioning For Peace coming out; this is an argument he has given a great deal of time and effort to. I have not yet read the book, although as it turns out I have glanced at at least one of his other works, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, a work of Libertarian historical revisionism which might indeed be quite provocative--I haven't read it so I cannot make any judgment. However, some reviews and excerpts I have read suggest the general tone; Eland apparently argues that Lincoln deserves to be remembered as a terrible President because he used armed force to put down the Confederate rebellion, expanded the power of the Federal Government, and of course his infamous (if often overblown) suspension of habeas corpus. According to the references I have read, Eland argues that the proper course of action would have been to allow the Confederacy to leave, and then to have liberated slaves as they escaped across the border.

The flaws in this argument are obvious--the sovereignty of a nation and its government become meaningless if a regional political elite are allowed to simply dissolve the political bonds that bind them, for example. More to the point, the idea that simply freeing slaves as they escaped would have been the moral and reasonable thing to do seems to imply that denying habeas corpus to a handful of white Americans was a far greater crime than fighting what ended up being a war of liberation to free millions of black Americans from chattel slavery. When one chooses to argue that history should have happened differently, one must acknowledge what actually happened.

What is most striking about this book is the timing--it is just now coming out. Whatever one thinks of the merits of Eland's arguments, they might have carried more weight a few years ago when sectarian violence was a genuine threat to Iraqi stability. Yet now, the new state seems to be establishing some genuine legitimacy and the forces of division and segregation seem to be cowed. I cannot but help wonder if Eland is proposing a solution to a problem he sees, or is simply peddling a theory in search of real-world applications.

However, it is unfair of me to make accusations about a book I haven't read. There are many positive reviews of all his books listed on the "Independent Institute" website, and some of them are from names I respect.

On the other hand, Eland has published more than one article on the formerly pro-Serbian nationalist-turned-anti-Western site "AntiWar.org" (I prefer not to link to them unless to a specific article under consideration) including this one. Freelance writers are free to publish wherever they want, and should not necessarily be linked to the editorial preferences of the venue they choose. Eland has published in both left-leaning and right-leaning websites and periodicals, so it would be unfair to assume he shares the ideological agenda of that disingenuous site. Still, the association deserves notice.

The reason I am casting such a cynical and doubting eye on Eland's associations and his agenda is not only because I so strongly disagree with the theme of this short article, but because of this passage:

"Critics have alleged that the confederation has reinforced ethno-sectarian divides rather than patching them up. Some are trying to change the Bosnian Constitution to strengthen the central government. The critics dream of a multi-ethnic nirvana where all ethno-sectarian identities are sublimated and everyone sings cum by yah."

As we have seen from the writings of Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, and other Bosnian revisionists, one red flag of their rhetorical dishonesty is the jarring reliance on strawman arguments. The language of this cavalier--and completely unsubstantiated (there are precisely zero sources or quotes for any of his assertions)--dismissal of any and all critics of the Dayton constitution is sarcastic and caustic and devoid of nuance or genuine insight.

Furthermore, Eland accepts the monolithic nature of group identities as a given--he asserts that a stronger central state would simply give "them" something more to fight over; it never occurs to him that a dramatic shift in the constitutional order might undermine the primacy of ethnic group identifications which the Dayton constitution and the entities reinforce and support. It is not clear whether this is because Eland is unaware of the recent political history in Bosnia, or whether he has little faith in civil democracy, or whether he simply accepts the "tribal" nature of Bosnians as an unquestionable fact of life.

It is also telling that constitutional reform, for him, simply means making the central government stronger--while this would, and should, certainly happen, the real issue is the cumbersome and centrifugal nature of the entity division of the country.

In short--Eland just might be someone I need to keep an eye on. The aforementioned bit of childish sarcasm might not be the red flag I took it for; a support for secession and a contempt for any and all strong central governments appears to be part and parcel with his general ideology. He might not be any kind of Serb nationalist apologist; merely a doctrinaire Libertarian ideologue who looks upon the world with dispassionate disinterest in the flesh-and-blood realities he seeks to fit into neat, analytical categories.

************

As an aside, I had submitted a rather lengthy rebuttal to the "LA Progressive" website on his article. Interestingly, the comment was originally approved and published; then, after a day or two, it disappeared. I wrote to them asking why it was removed; I have not yet received an answer. I submitted a second, briefer response. We shall see if they will allow it to stand.


******

UPDATE: In fairness to the editors of LA Progressive, they have restored my previous comment, as well as published the second one--along with a explanation that they are having technical difficulties. I appreciate their response, and I want to commend them for publicly addressing the issue. I apologize for any implied criticism of their editorial policies.

"Divide and Quit?" by Radha Kumar--Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND QUIT

"Though the European Union Action Plan appeared to mark the lowest point of European policy towards Bosnia, in which the divide and rule aims of Milosevic and Tudjman were accepted despite the terrible war of attrition each had waged to achieve them, 1994, in fact, constituted a turning point in Western policy which was marked by a gradual shift from divide and rule to divide and quit policies: that is, it marked a move away from letting domestic actors set the terms of negotiation and a move towards enlarging the role of European institutions in establishing a peace based on partition."

This opening section neatly summarizes the gist of Kumar's analysis of Western intervention in Bosnia from the winter of 1994 through to the Dayton Agreement. This review has dragged out longer than I had hoped; since the book has turned out to be more of a history of events within a framework (namely, her "divide and rule" versus "divide and quit" colonialist pattern of ethnic partition), and since I have been terribly short of time recently, I am not going to review this chapter in any detail. I make this decision only because I assume most readers of this blog are already familiar with the military and diplomatic events in Bosnia from 1994 through to the Dayton Agreement, and I see little need to postpone the other projects I have planned any further just for the sake of running us all through a familiar narrative one more time.

In other words, I am assuming that anyone reading this review already knows about US diplomacy to end the Muslim-Croat war by establishing the Federation; of the continued fighting in and around Bihac; of the growing military prowess of the Croatian armed foreces; of Milosevic's gradual distancing of his government first from the Krajina Serbs and then the Bosnian Serb leadership as well; of Bosnian Serb duplicity and UN hostage-taking; the genocide at Srebrenica and Zepa; and so on.

I am not making this decision because I find fault with this book, or because I find it lacking; Kumar's grasp of events and her knowledge of facts are impressive, and I am enjoying the book so far. But I have already discussed the framework within which she is considering events; if I had the luxury of more time I might very well take the time to demonstrate how she continues to develop her thesis in more detail, but I would very much like to keep the time frame on this review as brief as possible.

I hope the reader will understand, and I hope that I have done Ms. Kumar's work some measure of due credit to this point.

"Divide or Fall?" by Radha Kumar--Chapter Two

Chapter Two is a comprehensive summary of all the partition plans proposed for Bosnia during the 1990s, from the infamous agreement between Tudjman and Milosevic to various schemes dreamed up by Karadzic and Boban (including their support for Abdic's breakaway Muslim republic in Bihac), and of course all of the various plans proposed by the "international community". The political events of the prewar period are also summarized, and Kumar understands the connection between events in Croatia and the outbreak of war in Bosnia. She also recognizes the role the JNA played, and has no illusions about Milosevic's role.

For anyone already familiar with the history of the Bosnian war, this is well-traveled territory; in the interests of moving this review along I won't rehash old news for my readers. Suffice it to say that while Kumar keeps the focus on the various partition schemes, she makes it very clear that she understands the human cost on the ground. This book is not a polemic, and her tone is mostly dispassionate and pragmatic, but that is not to say she is entirely neutral. Unlike many Western observers, she recognizes the fact that international diplomacy with the three main parties in Bosnia essentially raised two rebel political factions to parity with the legitimate government of the republic. .

Her account does not spend much time discussing the grassroots of partition sentiment, but she does note that communal/confessional identities and cleavages became stronger as the war went on. Along with a few other comments (she notes that the ethnic-based voting patterns in Bosnia were not as strong or as universal and many outsiders have come to believe; she also points out that there was often intimidation to vote with one's "own kind"), one can quite confidently assume that Kumar has little use for any of the "ancient hatreds" justifications for partition.

This chapter takes us the end of 1993. Up until then, Kumar argues, the general thrust of international diplomacy had been to, essentially, allow domestic actors and the "facts on the ground" dictate the terms of partition; i.e., to try and find a way to carve Bosnia up in a matter that all three parties could be coaxed into accepting. The next chapter begins in 1994, when increasingly the international community, for a variety of reasons, began thinking more in terms of imposing a partition plan on the country--in order to satisfy the greater aim of ending the war and getting out.

"Divide or Fall?" by Radha Kumar--Chapter One

Well, the "few days" between posts is now over a week. I will make every effort to pick up the pace.

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CHAPTER ONE: A LESSER EVIL

In many ways, this chapter is an extended consideration of the same themes and examples from the paper (by the same author) I considered a few posts ago; Kumar considers the colonial and post-colonial development of the "divide and rule" and then "divide and quit" British policy in Cyprus, Palestine, Ireland, and the Indian subcontinent, and then compares and contrasts those situations to contemporary Bosnia. In order to avoid redundancy, it would be easiest to redirect readers to this post where I summarized Kumar's arguments.

However, regular reader Owen was correct to question some of the views I incorrectly ascribed to Kumar (who I also, to my great embarrassment, identified as a "he" for reasons I don't understand--my sincere apologies for the confusion). My review was rushed and sloppy, and therefore did not accurately convey some of the nuances of her analysis.

To be more specific, I either implied or directly stated that it is Kumar's thesis that partition causes war, specifically in the case of India/Pakistan. Owen was correct to question this reading, and he was right--and I need to set the record straight right now. Kumar clearly knows the chronology far better than I do; her thesis is that ethnic partition fails to prevent war, and in fact makes the outbreak of violence all the more likely. Conversely, she does not argue that communal conflict necessarily leads to partition--Owen noted that partition in India had been discussed as far back as at least 1940, and had been largely agreed to by the leading Muslim and Hindu parties, respectively. This is also true, and Kumar goes into more detail on this history in the first chapter.

The colonialist heritage of ethnic partition is crucial to understanding Kumar's argument, and I hope I at least managed to convey that much. I must admit I have done her views, and the first chapter of her book as well as the previously considered paper, a disservice so far. I will try to redeem myself in the next post, which I will try to write before another nine-day gap has passed.

"Divide and Fall? Bosnia in The Annals of Partition" by Radha Kumar--Preface

Earlier this month, I approvingly considered Radha Kumar's anti-ethnic partition arguments when I reviewed her paper "Settling Partition Hostilities". I would like to continue my examination of ethnic partition as it relates to Bosnia. The logical next step is through an extended examination of his book Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition. A note of apology--while this is not a long book, I am currently pretty busy in my personal and professional life; do not be surprised if there are delays of several days between each post. I will try not to drag this out too long.

PREFACE

Kumar puts her cards on the table in the very first sentence:

"This book is intended to counter the recently revived idea that partition can be a solution to ethnic conflict."

Kumar notes that partition was originally a colonial formula, and that after WWII two distinct forms of partition emerged:

"...ethnic partition, which was accepted as a compromise formula for decolonization, and ideological partition, which was primarily a means of distinguishing Cold War spheres of influence."

Kumar goes on to note that the reemergence of ethnic partition is oddly anachronistic, since the end of Cold War has delegitimized ideological partition (the continued division of Korea aside). She also notes that the "structures of ethnonational negotiation" were developed under colonialism; when "divide and rule" switched to "divide and quit." She goes on to point out that in Bosnia, the "divide and rulers" were not the same parties as the "divide and quitters." Milosevic, Karadzic, and Tudjman wanted to divide and rule; the West and the "international community" wanted to divide and quit.

Kumar closes by claiming that her book will demonstrate that the reversion to ethnic partition as an acceptable strategy will not last, and will ultimately be deemed a failure. It will be very interesting to see how she develops this argument over the following 168 pages.