Bosnia: A Short History.

• Author: Zimmermann, Warren

AS IS WELL KNOWN, Bosnia is a largely artificial creation, the product of a long history of Turkish oppression and ancient ethnic hatreds. Yugoslav communism, whatever its other contributions, did manage to exert a valuable discipline over these seething enmities, until the break-up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia unleashed them anew. The Bosnian war that followed was an inevitable consequence of these factors; it is thus a classical civil war, deriving its dynamic from elements within Bosnia. While the Serbs bear considerable responsibility for the numerous atrocities, the Croats and especially the Muslims deserve a large share of the guilt. Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, through a policy of population growth and Islamic fundamentalism, has tried to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state. His declaration of independence in the spring of 1992 was the first major attempt to challenge the Bosnian status quo, stranding Serbs and Croats alike in a hostile, oppressive environment and leaving them no recourse except force.

The above observations, several of which have been made by such statesmen as John Major, Lord Carrington, and Bill Clinton, have one thing in common. They are all totally wrong. Noel Malcolm, in his extraordinary book--the best available in English on the background of the Bosnian war--nails every one of them, and dozens of other shibboleths besides. One must hope that Malcolm subjects himself to the rigors of the talk shows. This can only generate more light, if not less heat, in the American debate on Bosnia.

The charge made by Serbs, Croats, and even Western "experts" that Bosnia is an artificial creation with "administrative borders" (whatever those are) is the first to fall to Malcolm's incisive analysis. He finds a twelfth century chronicler who refers to the Drina River as the frontier between Bosnia and Serbia. The Drina, it will be recalled, is the river crossed by Serb irregulars in April 1992 to "reclaim" villages populated largely by Muslims. That same twelfth-century chronicler had this to say about the Bosnian people: "Bosnia does not obey the Grand Zupan of the Serbs; it is a neighboring people with its own customs and government." As for Bosnia as a whole, its borders go back as far as the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

The Turkish occupation, which in Bosnia ran from 1463 to 1878, was hardly tender. Still, it was not the decadent, oppressive yoke denigrated in Serbian song and story. (In the 1960s, when I was a young diplomat in Belgrade, there was a Serbian black joke that ran as follows: "No wonder the Turks are so decadent. You would be too if you had to spend five hundred years oppressing the Serbs.") The Ottomans were surprisingly tolerant of other religions and races. There were few forced conversions; in fact, Malcolm shows that Christianity was very weak before the Turks arrived. It was not until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century that the Muslims became a majority in Bosnia.

Interestingly, despite the historical fulminations of the current Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the Orthodox Serbs seem to have fared better under Turkish rule than the Catholic Croats. Even the Jews were welcomed; a large number settled in Sarajevo after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Nor were there major economic strictures against non-Muslims, although there were some. Malcolm claims that it wasn't necessary to be a Muslim to become rich. As for the "ancient hatreds" among Bosnia's three peoples, Bosnia from the Turkish conquest on was more at peace than at war. It compares favorably with England, which went through the Wars of the Roses and the Civil Wars, and with France, which endured the Religious Wars and the Revolution. Malcolm draws the important conclusion that most of the dangers visited on Bosnia through the centuries came not from internal tensions but from the ambitions of larger powers and neighboring states--a point...