British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Marko Attila Hoare

Hitler’s Bosnian Enemies

The resistance movement in the former Yugoslavia of 1941-45, led by Communists and directed against the Axis occupation, was the most successful in occupied Europe. Along with the interlinked resistance movement in neighbouring Albania, it amounted to the second and last successful Communist revolution in European history. The epicentre of this movement, known as the ‘People’s Liberation Struggle’ or, more commonly, as the ‘Partisans’, was in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighbouring Croatia. It was in Bosnia-Herzegovina that the Partisan leadership under Josip Broz Tito was based for the best part of the war and where the new, federal Yugoslavia was founded by the Partisans in November 1943.

The roots of the Bosnian Partisan phenomenon can be found in Bosnia’s peculiar national composition, in the socio-economic developments of the three quarters of a century before World War II, and in the policies of the Axis occupiers. When Germany and Italy invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 they established the puppet ‘Independent State of Croatia’, run by the fascist Ustashas and comprising all of Bosnia and most of Croatia. The Ustashas embarked on a policy of genocidal persecution of the Serb population of Croatia and Bosnia, which responded with an armed rebellion. The urban-based Communists were able to assume leadership of this predominantly peasant uprising thanks to the economic and social factors linking the towns with the villages. Yet the Communist leadership of the uprising did not go unchallenged: the Serb-nationalist Chetniks sought to divert the uprising along a specifically anti-Muslim and anti-Croat path, while seeking to collaborate with – rather than to resist – the German and Italian occupiers.

The Communists sought to counter the Chetnik threat, and to mobilise the Bosnian population, by appealing to a specifically multinational Bosnian patriotism – stressing the equality of Serbs, Croats and Muslims and the right of Bosnia to govern itself. This Bosnian-patriotic Communist propaganda allowed the Communists to broaden the base of the Partisan movement, transforming it from an essentially Serb rebellion into a multinational revolutionary force. This eventually found expression in the foundation of a Bosnian republic within a six-member Yugoslav federation. Yet aspects of the national question in Bosnia remained unresolved by the Partisan victory, laying the foundations for the violence of the 1990s.

Marko Attila Hoare received his BA from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and his PhD from Yale University in 2000. He has been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia full-time for seven years, involving three years of fieldwork and writing in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia as well as seven months of work as a research officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. His book How Bosnia Armed, a history of the Bosnian Army during the recent war, is due to be published by Saqi Books in the spring of 2004. He is currently working on a history of the Bosnian Partisan movement.