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At a time when sexed-up reports and Paris advocacy for the Islamic world are
commonplace concepts, Charles R. Shrader's book about the Muslim-Croat
conflict in Bosnia may be extremely well timed. Even though the book was
written much before the recent Iraq crisis, his conclusions suggest that
both notions, however recent, are applicable in explaining this highly
controversial war-within-a-war that took place a decade ago in Europe's own
back yard.
Formerly a US Army logistics officer, Shrader is now a noted military
historian and instructor at the US military academies. In this book he
works mainly from the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) trial
transcripts in Blaskic, Kordic, and other central Bosnia cases, and
concludes quite explicitly that anyone who knows anything about military
issues (and evidence) could never surmise that Croats initiated the conflict
in central Bosnia. Moreover, there was no grand scheme to ethnically cleanse
the Muslims from the area, as the ICTY incorrectly found. Quite the
contrary, says Shrader.
He makes a case that Sarajevo made an early strategic decision, in Fall
1992, to fight the Croats because they were weaker than the Serbs; because
it wanted to resettle the Muslim refugees from eastern Bosnia and Posavina
into the Lasva Valley; and, because it wanted to seize the military
production facilities under Croat control in Busovaca, Vitez and Novi
Travnik.
Gen. Sefer Halilovic, the first Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ABiH) chief
operations officer wrote along the same lines in his book the "Cunning
Strategy". ("Lukava Strategija," S. Halilovic, Marsal, Sarajevo, 1997.)
The key element of that strategy was to seize military plants in Gorazde,
Konjic, Bugojno, and Novi Travnik. The last three were under the control of
the Croatian Defense Council (HVO).
To add, what is striking in the Halilovic book is the underlining theme that
the Croats were, from the outset, as dangerous to the future of the BiH
state as were the Serbs, and thus, equally a target. Tellingly, as
Belgrade-trained officer, he often referred to the Croats with derogatory
term Ustashe. Halilovic also wrote about close relations between Izetbegovic
associates and Milosevic envoys throughout 1992-93, including discussions
about territorial swaps and the division of BiH between the two.
Similarly, a senior Muslim official told this reviewer in Spring 1993 that
the Muslims would not seek negotiations with the Croats because the thinking
in Sarajevo was that they can be defeated. The going logic was, he said,
that the Croats were much weaker than the Serbs; that Croatia would not help
them much because it had its own problems; that BiH Croats are settled in
the most economically viable parts of the country, in the Lasva and Neretva
valleys; that they control the access to the sea; and, that eventually,
there will be a big war between Serbia and Croatia, where the HVO would be
forced to retreat south, and to the flanks, to help the Croatian Army (HV)
around Dubrovnik in the east and Knin in the west, thus making it even
easier for the Muslims to push southward.
Back in December 1992, at the Extraordinary Session of the Organization of
Islamic Conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this reviewer participated in a
meeting between the Croatian Foreign Minister Zdenko Skrabalo and Alija
Izetbegovic, where Skrabalo appealed to Izetbegovic to accept Franjo
Tudjman's offer to form joint military headquarters, either in Zagreb or
Bugojno, and take on the Serb extremists together. Skrabalo brought with him
the Zagreb Mufti Sefko Omerbasic, who argued that the Tudjman offer was
genuine, and consistent with Zagreb's assistance in arming of the ABiH. But
Izetbegovic refused, saying that such an alliance would further antagonize
the Serbs. However, it is more likely that Izetbegovic said no because the
Halilovic strategy was already well in place.
Shrader says that in January 1993, the ABiH carried out what he calls in
military jargon a probing attack, to gauge the HVO defenses, and in April
1993, the first major attack. The Croats were largely surprised by the
probing attack, but not by the main attack. After January 1993 they began
gathering intelligence on the ABiH, and rightly anticipated that the main
attack would come on April 15th. Central Bosnia HVO commander Tihomir
Blaskic prepared and practiced, what Shrader calls "active defense," a
common NATO pre-emptive tactic. This first ABiH operation to fragment the
Lasva Valley into isolated pockets failed, but was repeated two more times
in the Fall. He adds that the Lasva Valley would have been overtaken if it
were not for the early 1994 Washington Accords, as the Croats were
substantially under-manned, under-gunned, and completely encircled.
The situation of the Croat community in central Bosnia is likened to the
misfortune of the French Union camp at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Like the
French troops that were in great tactical and numerical disadvantage sitting
in the Nam Yum valley against Vietminh soldiers on the surrounding hills,
the Croat community was squeezed into an even smaller area in the lowlands
of Lasva valley against the Muslim forces on the mountainside. Unlike the
Union troops, the Croats managed to survive until the Washington Accords due
to Blaskic's active defense strategy.
Shrader writes that there is not slightest of evidence that HV troops or
advisers operated in central Bosnia. He does add in a footnote that there
is evidence of HV troops in the Gornji Vakuf area, to the south, in Dec
1993-Jan 1994, but that they were not active in the fighting in central
Bosnia. In February 1994, the Security Council used the reports about these
troop movements as evidence of Croatia's interference in BiH.
The massing of HV troops in Gornji Vakuf in December 1993 is consistent with
other reports that the troops were moved in because Zagreb feared that Lasva
Valley would fall, and wanted to manage the resultant refugee flows that
would have destabilized Dalmatia, as well as to prevent further ABiH
advances south that could have isolated Dubrovnik once again.
Shrader relies extensively on UNPROFOR and the European Community Monitoring
Mission (ECMM) reports on the events in Lasva Valley, and concludes that
UNPROFOR was largely balanced in its reporting. It became better after
being initially surprised by the developments in central Bosnia. But he
goes on and says that ECMM monitors were consistently misinterpreting events
to the detriment of Croats and downplaying atrocities against the Croats
(which appear to have been more numerous and widespread).
In the "Sources" section at the end of the book he goes on and points a
finger at the French head of the ECMM, Jean-Pierre Thebault, as the reason
for such ECMM reporting. Shrader speculates that Thebault was acting under
national instructions, consistent with the Paris policy to advocate Arab
interests in the West. To add to this point of view, Shrader notes that
ECMM reporting improved once Sir Martin Garrod took over the mission in
October 1993.
Another reason for Thebault's biased reporting may have been the EC plan for
BiH at the time, which looked to assign 33% of BiH territory to the
Muslim-majority republic. The EC lead negotiator Lord Owen wanted to achieve
this percentage by assigning the largest part of the Lasva Valley to the
Muslim-majority republic. As a Brussels civil servant, Thebault would have
understood his role as needing to craft his reports to advance the policy
goals of the negotiators, i.e., to support the ABiH offensive. In turn, Sir
Martin would have been motivated to change the reporting direction when
Brussels and Lord Owen began pressuring the Muslim side to accept the
three-republic Owen-Stoltenberg plan in Fall 1993, after the Croats accepted
it in the Summer.
Taking cue from the Iraq crisis, one simply cannot overlook the concept of
sexing up. But Thebault clearly went to the extreme. In fact, he was not
sexing up, but perverting down. As a result, the mainstream view of this
conflict is so convoluted and yet, as such, embedded in stone. Thus, it
compelled the Blaskic defense to, in effect, accept the main premise of the
ICTY Prosecution about the Croat grand scheme to ethnically cleanse the
Muslims, and argue naively that Blaskic, despite being the chief military
officer in the area, was innocent because he personally did not partake in
such a campaign.
Thus, in some way, the book comes too late for the central Bosnia cases at
the ICTY, but its outstanding research and current concepts in international
relations, might make it a powerful document in the future. It is the first
work on this conflict in any language. Blaskic and others just may be able
to introduce it eventually as new evidence in national courts in the
countries where they will be serving their unjust sentences.
The author was Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the E.U. and NATO
in 1998-2000. He occasionally comments on Balkan affairs in the Wall Street
Journal Europe and other media. |
