5) How Bosnia Armed by Marko Attila Hoare

I’ve read lots of “big picture” books and essays on Bosnia-Herzegovina (heck, I’ve helped write one or two of them myself) but there are surprisingly few micro-studies of particular aspects of the conflict other than the horrors of particular atrocities. So this book is a real breath of fresh air in some ways; the author has looked only at the army of one faction in the conflict, the Muslims aka Bosniaks, and concentrates on the army’s organisational and political history rather than its performance in battle.

Indeed, one of the points that comes out is just how few battles there actually were in the three and a half years of war. The consequent stalemate left plenty of time for politicking between state and officers and for disputes within the system; parts of the Sarajevo corps were controlled by local gangesters; the viciousness of the Srebrenica group towards its local Serb antagonists was ultimately, and horribly, more than repaid; the Bihac command was the only consistent area of success, facing down an internal rebellion and making gains off the Serbs.

This is really only a book for the Bosnia-Herzegovina enthusiast, as demonstrated by the fact that there are no maps – OK for those of us who know the country but no good for the neophyte. It did explain one or two things for me that I had been wondering about – the micro-history of the patchwork of Croat and Muslim areas of control in central Bosnia, and the previous history of the sinister Munir Alibabic. Although the writer takes a pro-Bosnian perspective it doesn’t much cloud his judgement, really because he is telling the inside story of the people with whom he sympathises rather than their opponents.

There are three points where I think his account is lacking. One is his repeated dismissal of rebel Muslim Fikret Abdic as a mere “traitor” or “agent of Belgrade”. Abdic’s story, from fraudulent agri-businessman to local warlord, is much more interesting than that – indeed, in terms of democratic legitimacy he outpolled all others in the 1990 elections, so a clearer explanation is needed of who was betraying whom. It would be interesting for someone some day to explore Abdic’s story in more detail. He won’t come out of it well, but it will be a more rounded picture than is found here.

The second is the man to whom (for reasons never properly explained) Abdic handed the leadership of Bosnia in 1990, Alija Izetbegovic. It is apparent at frequent points in the text that Izetbegovic was very nearly worse than useless as a leader, and that he repeatedly made disastrous decisions about military and political strategy. It would have been good to see an overall assessment to this effect, as well as some explanation of why despite his manifest deficiencies he held onto leadership of his party and his part of the country until 2000.

The third is actually the question raised by the title of the book. How did Bosnia arm? The supply of arms from Iran in 1994-95, sanctioned by the Clinton administration, is mentioned only briefly in passing. How many arms were supplied? What difference did it make to the outcome of the war? Likewise the rumour I have heard about the unusually success of the Bosnians in Bihac being helped by UN peacekeepers “donating” them significant amounts of military materiel. It may well not be true, but it would have been interesting to investigate.

There’s a brief afterthought about the influence of Bin Laden and the Mujahedin on the Bosnians, which shades into the author’s more recent and highly entertaining and effective demolition of the leftish conspiracy theories about the Yugoslav wars (I’m glad someone is doing it as well as Hoare does). A good book for the expert, not one for the beginner.

When I first went to Bosnia in 1997 I moved into an apartment in Banja Luka that I was told had recently been vacated by the previous tenant, an Englishman generally known as “Mr Attila”. I guess the odds are high that he and the author of this book are one and the same. It’s a small world, especially in the Balkans.