Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War

Abstract

Post-communist post-Yugoslav historiography of the Second World War is in awkward transition. As it emerges from the heroics of the all-Yugoslav Peoples' Liberation Struggle, it turns to divided national anti-communist interpretations. Enver Redžić (b. 1915) is a communist and partisan veteran of that war, who has had political, editorial and party research functions, and who has published widely. The present book is a poorly edited translation of the original Serbo-Croat-language edition of 1998. Official terms from that language and from German are rendered in total ignorance of what they mean and what they could be in English. Misspelt proper nouns, non sequiturs, strange grammatical uses, invented words and meaningless sentences reflect unprofessional translating and editing—not that the original itself is all that clearly written. Its style is typical of many such studies produced in the formerly Yugoslav states. Simply separating the flow of events in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the wider contexts can be artificial. The early chapters, the ones that deal with the Axis occupiers, the ustasha ‘Independent State of Croatia’ and the chetniks, suffer most; they generally follow the expected pattern. But the last two chapters, dealing with Bosnian Muslim politics and the partisans respectively, are a real contribution to a more complex understanding of the Second World War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Here the author's long years of study of Yugoslav (and German) historiography and sources come into their own. At a distance of half a century they support a more nuanced vision that is no longer heroically communist and that has not become nationally Bosniak. The pre-war Muslim religious and political establishment was divided, but it generally thought that it was best not to align itself with any of the warring factions. Different tendencies supported various armed groups whose aim was to protect the Muslim population, by manoeuvring, negotiating, appealing and seeking protection. They vied with the partisans as an important source of political activity until 1944, when they were eventually overtaken by the process of disintegration of the Independent State of Croatia that had originally been their strength. But their strength also lay in the fact that, contrary to the author's assertion, the Muslims did not suffer ‘the greatest number of victims, comparatively speaking’ (p. 192). In fact, among the various communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in terms of victims as a percentage of their 1941 populations, with 75,000 dead or 8.6 per cent they came after Serbs (16.7%) and Croats (12.8%), not to mention Jews and Gypsies. Although Tito's Bosnian Serb partisans became the basis from which to conquer all Yugoslavia, in 1941 the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was not a force to reckon with in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Convinced that an imminent Soviet victory against fascism called for an immediate social revolution, the party leadership could not control the anti-Croat and anti-Muslim prejudices of victimised Serb peasant insurgents. It found it difficult to attract Muslim and Croat support. It put off all peasants by the war that it waged against class enemies. Even after it had set itself up in a broad band of partisan-controlled territory and overcome its ‘leftist bias’, it still found it difficult to overcome plunder, arson and murder in conquered towns and villages, and it long remained ineffective in eastern Bosnia and in Herzegovina. A majority of the population alternated loyalties. Real opportunities only came after Italy dropped out of the war, and after the partisans had won the support of Britain and the United States. Even so, in order to encourage defections from the Croatian state's regular armed forces, the partisan command had to guarantee safety and rank, and assign defecting units to their home region. Some of the Muslim militias were initially kept as such under their own commanders. As for the chetniks, they had to be encouraged by more drastic action, such as expelling their families from villages and destroying homes. The advantage of the Communist Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina was that it eventually decided in favour of the integrity of the territory, to become one of the units of the Yugoslav federation. The relative political and ideological homogeneity of the Yugoslav partisan movement in the region acted as a corrective to its predominantly Serb structure. The corrective, however, was for long compromised by its ‘leftist bias’, and those contradictions were to haunt the party there for a long time.