How to Conceptualize the Tragedy of Bosnia
Dzemal Sokolovic

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For ordinary, everyday opinion everything is usually abundantly clear. Mass media, politicians and pseudo-scholars know all about what occurred in Bosnia. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of articles, as well as dozens, maybe hundreds of books, have recently emerged defining and explaining what was going on over there. They have something in common with each other: they are convinced that they know what happened. Have you noticed that among the authors of the numerous books, and among nearly all of the authors of the articles, there are no serious scientists daring to provide an in-depth analysis? Apparently, for the scientists, it is still not quite clear, in contrast to politicians (the exceptions are possible – Dutch minister of foreign affairs Hans van den Broek, for instance – and welcome), journalists (the exceptions are also possible – Roy Gutman – and welcome) and their pseudo colleagues (there are no
  *Address correspondence to: Professor Dzemal Sokolovic, University of Bergen – Department of Comparative Politics, Christiesgt. 15 – N-5007 Bergen, Norway, Tel: +47 58 20 07, Fax: +47 55 58 94 25.
 
  Email: Dzemal.Sokolovic@isp.uib.no
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exceptions and none are possible), how to define or conceptualize this tragic event.
In Bosnia, I submit, something occurred that we may not identify or even compare with anything else already seen in history, a “jamais vu,” even though it reminds us of some events from the recent past. Perhaps the difficulty arises because observers, being only able to consider the issue at the level of the
phenomenal (the appearance), define the Bosnian tragedy as either civil, ethnic, or religious war. However, that is exactly how it is also defined by those having an interest to define it as such, and by those having an interest to not define the exact nature of this tragedy. They, the former unable to know and the latter knowing but anxious that the truth should not be found out, are actually enabling each other, supporting each other, endorsing each other. Being unable to grasp what came about in Bosnia, or unwilling to admit it, on the one hand, and knowing what was occurring, but intentionally trying to conceal it, on the other hand, are distinct phenomena from separate political camps. And yet, nobody can deny that they, both the former and the latter, nurture each other, fuel each other, and therefore bear each others’ accountability.
Do we, in truth, know what was really coming about in Bosnia – civil, ethnic, religious war, or an entirely new phenomenon which cannot be explained by the existing conceptualizations, and thus must be conceptualized in a quite new, innovative manner?
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Before I try to offer such a conceptualization on the basis of the Bosnian tragedy, let me compare the case of Bosnia with two historical instances from the same century: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, and World War II. Why was the war in Spain civil, but not ethnic or religious, which are otherwise a quite correct definitions, and why was the World War II simply a war, war as such, the paradigm of war, and not, let us say, civil war, the definition of which is also absolutely accurate?
It is possible to recognize many features in the Spanish Civil War that enable us to define it as an ethnic or religious war. The Catalans were fighting on the side of the Republic because of, among other reasons, hopes for ethnic autonomy. On Franco’s side were the Muslims from Morocco, with fezzes on their heads, and with open religious expectations and motivations. As a matter of fact, Franco began his rebellion in 1936 with Arabs from the then Spanish Morocco, and they were the bravest and the most faithful fighters. And yet, no one says today that it was either an ethnic or religious war. It was the conflict between two political philosophies, two ideologies, two different social and political concepts of society, and that is what determines and defines this conflict as civil war.
On the other hand, in World War II, the Germans were fighting against the British, or the Germans were fighting against the French, accordingly entirely ethnically distinctive foes; despite this fact we do not speak about it as ethnic strife. This horrible war was also the conflict between the
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Protestant Germans and the Catholic French; in spite of this nobody even mentions that World War II might have been a religious conflict. Ultimately, this war was the collision between the German national‐socialists and the Russian communists, who held two contending and uncompromising political outlooks; and again, nobody would say today, and rightly so, that World War II was a civil war. Nobody today even defines World War II as primarily a crime against humanity, albeit one of the most horrible crimes having ever occurred was committed in the course of it. World War II was all of this, as the participants were both ethnically and religiously and ideologically recognizable and distinctive, having different political attitudes and having committed war crimes, most likely on all sides, but its defining characteristic still is that it was a war, a specific form of social conflict accomplished and carried out according to certain defined, partly written rules, and even within the international legal norms of our century. Despite the fact it involved genocide as a consequence of the war, World War II was a war which even started in a civilized manner – by the declaration of war against Poland.
One can also recognize in the Bosnian conflict some elements of civil, ethnic, and even religious conflict. But, the question that now arises is whether any of these features are central enough to define the conflict as either civil, ethnic, or religious.
The tragedy of Bosnia was by no means civil war, as it is most often defined. How is it possible to speak about civil war between (among) groups who were coalition partners,
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having formed a common government in 1991, and were also election partners, having acted along with each other against a common political opponent? Even if one can argue that one party has fundamentally changed its political ideas and political aims in the meantime, this change is only the consequence, not the cause, of the conflict. The causes of this conflict are by no means ideological or political, and thus its definition has to be of some other kind.
Furthermore, the tragedy of Bosnia was by no means an ethnic war. How is it possible to consider it as an ethnic war between, for instance, the Bosniaks and the Serbs, if hundreds of the Serbs were losing their lives on the “Bosniak” side? Thousands of the Serbs fought bravely in Bosnian uniforms, under Bosnian symbols. Two hundred thousand Serbs, despite existential or survival difficulties and obstacles which were sometimes unacceptable for the Bosniaks themselves, remained in their homes under the control of Bosnian government authority. In addition, dozens of the Serbs refused to shoot the “Bosniaks,” or shelled them with unexploding grenades with the written message, “This is all I can do for you!” or “We are not all the same!” or “I wish to come back on your side!” Thousands of the Serbs deserted and refused to fight, and hundreds of thousands of the Serbs left the territory under their “own” authority and went all over the world. How was it possible to speak about ethnic war if on the territory (15%) which commonly was always under control of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the course of conflict, there were proportionally more Serbs than in the part of Bosnia and
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Herzegovina (70%) which was occupied and controlled by the authorities of the then would-be Republika Srpska?
Perhaps the most crucial question facing those defining or having defined the tragedy in Bosnia as an ethnic war is why the Bosnians (of any kind) were not hating, ethnically cleansing, or killing each other prior to the tragedy, since the ethnic distinctions were present all the time. Why did we not wage ethnic war permanently? Would those who use this definition claim, as Seselj and others do, that not only Montenegrins, but the Croats and the Bosniaks as well, stem from the Serbs? Would they claim that Bosnians, prior to the tragedy, abandoned ethnic identities? Or perhaps the ethnic feature of the Balkans is a Slav identity as such? Of course not. They are not racists, even when they speak about the Balkan tribal war; they are not nationalists, even when they support Balkanization; they are not jingoists, even though having overtly taken the side of one or another religious group in the conflict; they are not even Euro-centrists, even though they do not recognize Bosnia as part of Europe.
The cause we seek must lie somewhere else, not in ethnic identity. This conflict must be conceptualized in some other fashion, but not as an ethnic one. The parties confronting each other in the Bosnian conflict were becoming more and more nationally recognizable and homogenous, it must be admitted, in the course of the conflict, but then that is about something totally different. Even such a simple, and therefore obvious, fact that the participants regarded themselves as the Serbs, the Croats and
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the Bosniaks, was a consequence of the conflict, not a cause, and a phenomenon cannot be defined by its consequences.
The tragedy of Bosnia is not a religious war either. The most obvious fact is that there were many former communists on all three sides. Of course, that is not the only reason for saying that it was not religious war. As a matter of fact, many among them have in the meantime become very religious. They exhibit their religiosity in the way they once displayed their communist rituals. There were and are now many would-be men of faith in Bosnia just as there were many would-be communists when it was lucrative to be communist. Religion, just an ideology before, played then, and still plays now, an amazingly controversial role in the conflict. What outsiders may wonder is whether people in Bosnia are used and abused by both ideologies and religions or if ideologies and religions are used and abused by the Serbs, the Croats, and the Bosniaks. For Bosnians, there is no wondering. There is a saying in Bosnia illustrating such a mutual game of hypocrisy, which goes: “I do not mind if you lie to me, but I do mind if you think I believe you.” In Bosnia, people were overtly communist, more red than in any other part of former Yugoslavia (though communists got only 5% of the vote while in Slovenia, the most liberal Yugoslav republic, communists garnered 17%); they are now also overtly religious. As Bosnian communists were not so red, but just pink, so today, for example, Bosnian Muslims are not so much green as simply blue-yellow (corresponding to the newest Bosnian blue-yellow banner granted by the
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EU, although, the Europeans should know, the green inevi‐ tably ensues from the mixture of the blue and the yellow).
My approach to this issue does not allow me to proclaim religion, even entire churches, responsible or the causal and determining factor of this tragedy. Religion has just become more used and more abused. Nobody became truly more religious and closer to God. Those having destroyed either mosques or churches on behalf of God are not religious. Those who know even a little bit about the theological ties between these two great religions, Islam and Christianity, including Catholicism and Orthodoxy, must grasp that the destruction of temples belonging to others is not in accordance with any of these religions. Those who did it, albeit on behalf of their own religion, know little about either their own religion or about its connection to the other one. Those who wrecked 800 mosques cannot be regarded as the sons of Jesus Christ, not even from the view of Koran. They are children of Evil even from the view of the New Testament.
Therefore, in Bosnia there was neither civil, nor ethnic, nor religious war. In fact, the true problem is not which type of war provides the best definition for the tragedy of Bosnia. The true problem is whether the tragedy of Bosnia can be defined as a war at all. According to my knowledge of the theory of war, it cannot. Consider the definitions of war proposed by Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Karl von Klausewitz. Aristotle maintains that all phenomena are defined by their purpose. So, the same applies to war. Aristotle defines war in terms of its purpose: as the purpose
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of work is leisure, so the purpose of war is peace. The purpose of the conflict in Bosnia, even including some of the political solutions and options currently offered, apparently was not peace. Therefore, the Bosnian tragedy, as such, can not be defined as war in the Aristotelian sense. From Montesquieu, who compares war with trade, one can learn that the purpose of war is conquering in order to gain, just as the purpose of trade is earning. In Bosnia, however, no one was conquering in order to gain but to destroy – both their own, admittedly to a lesser extent, and what belonged to others. Consequently, according to Montesquieu as well, one cannot speak about war in Bosnia. If, according to Karl von Klausewitz, war is the continuation of politics but by other means, then it particularly precludes the event in Bosnia being defined as war. The decisive question now arising from von Klausewitz, which might also have been raised before the conflict, is whether there is any political goal, which had been in the game, unattainable without the usage of “other means,” i.e. war? And consequently, are any of the current “political solutions,” achieved by the “war,” stable, sustainable and just enough to impede the emergence of a new clash, i.e., to insure peace or, to use more precise words, to extend the current state of a break between two battles into a real peace based on justice and punishment of those who are guilty and responsible? To tell the truth, but to take the risk of not being very academic, I have to say: neither do any of the current political “solutions” in Bosnia pledge a viable peace there, nor did those who began such a blood
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letting and destruction view their current political projects as the final purpose of it.
Considering the von Klausewitz definition in greater detail: What political aim, unattainable by other means, could have motivated those who decided to wage war?
Let us assume it was a political formation known as Great or Greater Serbia. In order to find out what has really happened in Bosnia it is imperative to know whether such a political project was the purpose, and whether the realization of Great Serbia, no matter what the degree of its legitimacy, was probable. If the architects of this political goal truly sought to achieve it by war, I am convinced that they, owing to their absolute military advantage at the very beginning, could have achieved it. However, I emphasize: by war. The Bosniaks and the Croats would honestly resist, they would undoubtedly fight, there would be deaths even, but political necessity would have been accepted at the end, perhaps in a month or so. Hundreds of thousands would not have died. However, the goal of the ideologists of Great Serbia was not only a political formation of this kind, but genocide itself (or as their intentional or unintentional friends throughout Europe prefer to say – ethnic cleansing or purification). They did not want to achieve their political aim by war, accepting and behaving by the appropriate international rules and norms by which a war is supposed to be waged. The very first day, after paramilitary troops from Serbia crossed the Drina river, partly a natural boundary between Bosnia and Serbia, they took off the trousers of men in order to find out if they were Muslims (Muslims, like
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Jews, practice a ritual of circumcision), and then went on to kill them if it turned out they were. If the Serbian troops’ intention had been a territorial political goal at the beginning, then they would have waged war against a few (or not a few, it does not matter at this point) Bosniak or Croat resisters, and would not have been taking off their pants. If the Serbian troops aimed to establish simply a Great Serbia, i.e. a political formation, people would have, though involuntarily, accepted it. After several Bosnian towns had been conquered, there would have been no more war, only the political creation they wished. However, this beginning demonstrates that a simple political formation was not the goal. War does not begin in such a way.
The Bosnian tragedy, then, cannot be defined as war. Instead, it should be conceptualized as a crime par excellence. The crime did not occur here as the consequence of war; the crime was the cause of everything that happened afterward; it was the cause of that into which it later was transformed; and, one inevitably must add, even the current “peace” and the “political solution” resting on it, is partly the aftermath of this crime. It was actually the crime on the level of the project. The idea itself was criminal. Dr. Karadzic announced genocide in the Bosnian Parliament six months before the Bosnian tragedy was launched: “One entire people will disappear from these soils...!” The Bosniaks have not had a chance to “change their mind,” to accept “their” new political attitude. The genocide was the ultimate goal and occurred as an immediate step, not as an outcome of war.
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The crime, rather than the war, is the determining and defining feature of everything that happened later on.
Moreover, if a discourse on the war in Bosnia is possible now, then it is only about war as the consequence of crime. The Bosnian war is the consequence of the genocide! Therefore, all current political proposals or “solutions,” including those coming from the outside, civilized, may I say democratic, international “community,” which do not eliminate the cause of the war, i.e. the fact that two million people were driven out from their homes and not enabled (being allowed is not enough and sounds hypocritical) to return, are actually participating in what was the stated purpose from the beginning – a soil, called Republika Srpska, without non-Serbs. The fact that refugees from the territories were “cleansed” in such a dirty way, by genocide, are allowed to vote from New Zealand, Scotland, or Canada, will not hide the crime but will definitely make the international community accountable for it. The longer refugees wait to return to their homes, the more the international community becomes responsible, overtaking the responsibility from those truly accountable for the genocide. All political solutions which do not remove the results of the genocidal project will themselves become accountable for the crime.
To the extent that one can speak about the elements of civil and ethnic and religious war, it is also a consequence of the crime. Even if one party in the conflict, unlike the others, has changed its political attitude, and has oriented itself towards a democratic, civil, and integral Bosnia, instead of the prior pro-nation-state attitude, we are still not able to
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define the conflict as a civil war. After all, the opposition party does not show any signs of willingness to abandon the monstrous plan of the extermination of an entire people. It is also not quite clear that one party involved has definitely abandoned the criminal genocide plans it was trying to realize. I am not talking only about the secret agreement about partitioning Bosnia. The genocide against the Bosniaks continued even in the wake of the end of war. The silent disappearance of this European people is on-going. It continues in a demographic sense by continuing emigration, in particular by brain-drain, from the country; in the terms of Bosniak ethnic identity by the unavoidable assimilation wherever we live now and however we are welcomed; in the physical sense by the higher death-rate whether we are in Bosnia or abroad.
That a group, religious, ethnic, or racial, may continue to vanish even when the immediate extermination of it or the part of it has ceased raises a theoretical challenge, and it is perhaps time to reconsider the notion of genocide itself.
The crime in Bosnia perhaps cannot be compared, by its dimensions, to the genocides against the Jews or Armenians. Six or one million are really numbers thirty or five times bigger than 200,000 dead Bosniaks. But, if the phenomenon of genocide, as the crime of highest degree, is considered from its qualitative side as well, then one can assume that the genocide against the Bosniaks has exceeded all previous ones. The crime in Bosnia advanced and touched the peak of evil through the systematic use of rape. All wars have brought rape, mass rape as well. What the
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crime in Bosnia makes exceptional and how it differs from other cruel ones is that the idea of mass rape of women in Bosnia and its realization had the clear purpose of keeping women pregnant. This is an entirely new sort of crime, a perfect synthesis of monstrous instinct and the idea of evil, and therefore needs to be defined and conceptualized by science. I cannot term it simply as a war crime or crime against humanity, or anything of the kind. I cannot also term it as a genocide if we are to remain consistent to the commonly accepted definitions of genocide which focus on the permanent expulsion of all or a considerable part of a religious, ethnic, or racial group. Until we reconceptualize the notion of genocide as such we have to consider what happened in Bosnia as a specific case because the phenomenon is beyond mass death. My definition of it is as follows. It is a crime against life itself. It is not a crime against one or a thousand individual lives; that could be achieved by “ordinary” executions. It is a crime the intention of which was not the humiliation of women as human beings, since that can also be achieved by “ordinary” rape. The intention was to produce in woman, as the source of life, hatred against life in her own womb, hatred towards herself as the assumption of life, to deprive her of the noblest pleasure one can achieve, the pleasure of having a child. And yet, I am deeply convinced, with regard to women’s ethical stability and social persistence, that the love of woman, not Bosnian woman, but mother-woman, the love toward life, will be stronger than the crime against life. I believe and hope that these children, the fruit of such an evil conception by their
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fathers but also the fruit of such an immaculate conception by their mothers, will have the happiness of receiving their mothers’ love and so become able, unlike their fathers, to make another kind of love with other women. On behalf of that, on behalf of upcoming loves, their sons’ loves, I beg Bosnian women not to throw off their children but offer them their mother’s love. On behalf of future life.
Nothing has happened in Bosnia in the manner defined by politicians, media and pseudo scientists – not civil, nor ethnic, nor religious war. It is just a crime, but organized crime, a crime brought to perfection. It is hard to imagine it will ever be overcome.
Why is it important to conceptualize the tragedy of Bosnia and its people? Why is it important to give exact names to these things?
Recently, trials have been conducted simultaneously in The Hague and Sabac (Serbia) to prosecute marginal criminals for the commission of war crimes in Bosnia. Crime is certainly crime as well as a tribunal is a tribunal. However, in this particular case, the crime with “war” as an adjective sounds like a sophisticated crime. A crime committed in war circumstances is a crime performed in extraordinary circum‐ stances. War implies circumstances which justify crime to some extent. The crime brought about in Bosnia, however, is by no means war crime; as such, it cannot reckon on the extenuating circumstances. It is not an ordinary, but an extraordinary crime.
If humankind wants to protect itself from criminals of this kind, they should not be brought before the inadequate
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tribunals. Only adequate tribunals are able to find them adequately guilty. They deserve that.

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