Territoriality and Plausible Deniability: Serbian Paramilitaries in the Bosnian War

Abstract

During the first months of the 1992 Bosnian civil war, ethnic Serb paramilitaries played a key role in forcibly displacing Bosnian Muslims and Croats from their homes, using classic death squad methods such as killing, torture, theft, and rape. Although socialist Yugoslavia’s increasingly Serb-led Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) aided the Bosnian Serb military effort during the initial round of fighting, some of the most intense violence was done by ethnic Serb irregulars hailing both from Bosnia and from Serbia proper.1 This chapter will offer one explanation for this excessive reliance on irregular paramilitary forces during the first months of the Bosnian war. Conventional wisdom in the Western press suggests that brutal paramilitaries are inherent to “Balkan” or “Serbian” culture. Instead, I will argue that the paramilitaries’ centrality stemmed from local and international norms prohibiting Serbian military action beyond Serbia’s official borders. These limitations prompted Serbian officials to enter into a subcontracting relationship with semiprivate groups in both Bosnia and Serbia proper, which were able to use violence without directly incriminating the Belgrade regime.2