Ethnic Politics in Eastern Europe: A Guide to Nationality Policies, Organizations and Parties

A Guide to Nationality Policies, Organizations and Parties

Janusz Bugajski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315287430
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This guide charts national histories and policies, relevant statistics and chronologies, and the identities, programmes, and activities of the full spectrum of ethnically-based parties and organizations in Central and Eastern Europe.

PART I
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Post-Yugoslavia

Ethnicity Multiplied

1
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Bosnia-Herzegovina

POPULATION

Bosnia-Herzegovina was in a unique position among the former Yugoslav republics, in that no single nation or nationality formed an absolute majority of the population.¹ According to the 1991 Yugoslav census, the Muslims, defined as a nation in post-war Yugoslavia, had a relative majority of 43.6 percent with 1,902,954 inhabitants; the Serbs formed 31.4 percent with 1,370,476 people; and the Croats 17.3 percent with 755,071 people. The category of “Yugoslav” had declined over the years, particularly after each republic held its first multi-party elections during 1990; in Bosnia-Herzegovina it stood at 5.5 percent or 240,052 people in 1991. The remainder, 2.2 percent of the population, included Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Hungarians, and Albanians. The Muslim figure had grown in the previous decade, partly as a result of Serbian emigration, the decline of Yugoslav consciousness, the immigration of Muslims from Serbia, and the rise of Muslim identity. In 1981, out of a population of 4,125,000, 39.5 percent declared themselves as Muslim, 32 percent as Serbs, 18.4 percent as Croats, 7.9 percent as Yugoslavs, and 2.2 percent included several smaller nationalities.

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethnic balance was compounded by a complex territorial mix among the three major communities. In the 99 municipalities outside the capital Sarajevo, Muslims formed absolute majorities in only 32, and few of these were territorially contiguous: the biggest concentrations were in northwestern, eastern, and central Bosnia. Serbs constituted absolute majorities in 30 municipalities, most of these in western, northeastern, and southeastern Bosnia. Croats formed absolute majorities in only 14 municipalities, the majority in the western Herzegovina region. In 23 municipalities, no ethnic group possessed a clear majority, and even in districts where one ethnic group predominated there were large minorities of one of the other two nationalities. Sarajevo, with a population of 525,980, included 49.3 percent Muslims, 29.9 percent Serbs, 6.6 percent Croats, 10.7 percent Yugoslavs, and 3.5 percent other groups.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Population (1991)

Ethnic Groups	Number	Percent of Population
Muslims	1,902,954	43.60
Serbs	1,370,476	31.40
Croats	755,071	17.30
Yugoslavs	240,052	5.50
Others	96,021	2.20
Total Minorities	4,364,574	100.00
Total Population	4,364,574	100.00

To add to the complexity, the larger towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina were extremely diversified, although in general Muslims tended to be city dwellers and Serbs were concentrated in the countryside. As a result, even in many municipalities where Muslims formed an absolute majority, Serbs tended to predominate outside the district capitals. Serbs and Muslims shared the largest number of municipalities: in 37 Croats were barely visible, and in 27 more they formed less than 20 percent of the population. Muslims and Croats predominantly shared 6 municipalities: in 14 Serbs were barely visible, and in 29 more they totaled under 20 percent of the population. Muslims were only absent in 7 municipalities, and in a further 19 they formed less than 20 percent of the population. Serbs and Croats jointly predominated in only 6 municipalities.

Following the outbreak of armed hostilities in April 1992, there were massive movements of population within and out of the country. Indeed, one of the purposes of a war launched by Serb guerrillas with the assistance of Yugoslav army forces was to unscramble the ethnic mix and to create large contiguous tracts of “ethnically pure” territory. As a result, Muslim and to a lesser extent Croat populations were killed, imprisoned, brutalized, or expelled from areas Serb gunmen intended to dominate. By the spring of 1993, as Serbian successes became evident and the likelihood of U.N. military intervention to stop the aggression receded, both Croats and Muslims also proceeded to carve out ethnically pure areas, slaughtering or expelling rival ethnic groups. Although precise figures have proved extremely difficult to obtain, as the war continued to rage into the summer of 1993, over two million people were reportedly displaced within the country, more than 150,000 had either been killed or were simply unaccounted for, and over 500,000 sought refuge in neighboring states. The overwhelming majority in each category were Muslims.

Homogenous Serbian areas were established on nearly 70 percent of Bosnian territory, linking up western, northern, and eastern Bosnia. Croats sought to expand their “ethnically pure” areas in western Herzegovina northward and claimed to control nearly 20 percent of Bosnian territory. Muslims were left with two major zones, in central and northwestern Bosnia, in addition to a handful of enclaves surrounded by Serb forces in eastern Bosnia. Some Muslim forces also engaged in “ethnic cleansing” campaigns during the course of the war. The capital Sarajevo remained an ethnically mixed city under Bosnian government control, although the number of residents had declined by the summer of 1993 to some 350,000 people. Bosnia-Herzegovina was approaching partition; the only question remaining was whether any viable Bosnian or Muslim state would be preserved once the hostilities subsided. Serb- and Croat-controlled areas seemed slated for eventual incorporation into Serbia and Croatia, respectively, while the outgunned Muslims would be left with small pockets of territory to which the majority of Muslim refugees had already fled.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Since the early Middle Ages, the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina occupied the dividing line between Byzantine Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.² The majority of Bosnian Slavs, who were not affiliated to either major denomination, upheld their own cohesive regional identity and a separate Bogomil Christian Church as a means of preserving their independence and guarding their distinctiveness. During the fourteenth century, Bosnia emerged as an independent medieval principality. However, from the end of the fifteenth century until the close of the nineteenth century, the fledgling state was occupied by the Ottoman Turks. The majority of Bosnians, particularly the Bogomils, as well as large numbers of Catholics (Croats) and Orthodox (Serbs), converted en masse to the Sunni Islamic faith, often without coercion. By converting to Islam, local nobles were able to retain their feudal privileges, while peasants received land and were freed from feudal obligations. However, Bosnians were not generally turkified and maintained their own language, culture, and customs. As a result, a Bosnian Muslim ethnos was consolidated, built around religious, regional, and cultural foundations, although sharing the same language with neighboring Croats and Serbs who did not convert to Islam.

During the nineteenth century, Christian peasants, mostly Serbs, staged a series of revolts against Turkish overlordship and the local Islamic nobility. The Turks tried to establish a more centralized administration but their control over the western Balkans was increasingly weakened by domestic unrest, administrative decay, and conflicts with the European imperial powers. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the revived Serbian Kingdom and the Austrian Habsburg Empire stepped up their rivalries over the region. Orthodox Serbian groups sought autonomy for Bosnia and eventual incorporation into an enlarged Serbia. The Catholic Croats wanted to reorganize Austria-Hungary on a tripartite basis as a prelude to the absorption of Bosnia-Herzegovina by an autonomous Croatian state.

In 1876, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey in support of a Bosnian insurrection against Ottoman rule, primarily involving Christian peasants and intellectuals. As Turkish rule receded, Muslim Slavs were exposed to repression, forcible conversions, and even extermination primarily perpetrated by radical Orthodox Serbs. Following the defeat of Turkish armies, the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878 provided for the recognition of an autonomous Bosnian government. However, Vienna refused to recognize the legitimacy of the treaty, demonstrating concern about growing Russian influence in the region and the spread of Slavic nationalism within the empire. As a result, in 1878 the Congress of Berlin placed Bosnia under a provisional Austro-Hungarian administration despite substantial local resistance. In 1908, Austria formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and eliminated all remaining vestiges of self-government. International tensions were thereby heightened, and, following the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist in June 1914 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, World War One broke out. During the conflict, Muslim Slavs continued to suffer from persecution as they were perceived to have benefited from centuries of Turkish occupation. Thousands of Muslims were also forced to depopulate several regions of Serbia and Montenegro that they had inhabited for centuries.

With the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, later renamed Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina initially obtained a degree of provincial autonomy. But after the royalist Serbian coup in 1929, Yugoslavia was reorganized into new administrative regions. Bosnia-Herzegovina was partitioned among four such regions, and the Muslim population was slated to become a minority in each region. Serbs were given the dominant position in the central Bosnian areas, while Croats predominated in the southern Herzegovina region. Despite these measures, Muslim leaders tended to support the unified Yugoslav state as it offered some degree of protection from Serb and Croat pressures for outright partition.

During World War Two, the Nazi protectorate of Croatia was given possession of virtually the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some Muslim radicals collaborated with Croatia’s Ustaša fascist regime, although the bulk of the population remained passive while refusing to surrender their distinct identity or convert to Catholicism. The Ustaša murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and attempted forcibly to convert or expel the rest. Meanwhile, Serbian nationalist Četnik forces launched a guerrilla war against the Germans and the Ustaša and massacred tens of thousands of Muslims in eastern Bosnia during their campaigns. About 100,000 Muslims were believed to have perished during the course of World War Two—the highest percentage of deaths in relation to total population among all the Yugoslav nations. Thousands of Muslims fled their homes and sought shelter in the larger cities or emigrated altogether from the country. Meanwhile, the Partizan Communist forces under the leadership of Marshal Josef Broz Tito based their anti-Nazi guerrilla resistance movement in the mountains of Bosnia. The partizani managed to attract members of all three major ethnoreligious communities into their ranks, particularly people who were fleeing repression at the hands of rival extremist forces. German troops proved unable to subdue the guerrilla movement, although thousands of suspected resistance fighters were exterminated. Tito’s forces were increasingly successful against the Nazis, particularly as the Germans began to retreat from the Balkans and the Partizans obtained weapons and supplies from the Allied powers.

Following the Communist takeover at the close of World War Two, Tito’s security forces massacred thousands of nationalist, fascist, monarchist, and democratic activists from all three ethnic groups in order to ensure a Communist monopoly of power. The 1946 Yugoslav constitution established six constituent republics within a federal state, including that of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was formed as an ethnically mixed unit. One of Tito’s objectives was to prevent either Serbia or Croatia from dominating the federation and reviving claims to Bosnian territory; hence the political and economic infrastructure of the republic was substantially expanded. Tito sought to balance Yugoslavia’s various national units and promote the growth of an overarching “Yugoslav” identity as well as a multi-ethnic “Bosnian” consciousness within Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also endeavored to strengthen Muslim identity to counteract Serb and Croat ambitions and helped to forge a distinct Muslim power base in the republic. In the 1961 census, the Communist authorities allowed citizens to register for the first time as “Muslims in the ethnic sense” rather than “Muslims ethnically undeclared.” In the 1971 census, Slavic Muslims were finally elevated to the status of a distinct nation (and not only in Bosnia), equal to that of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, and Macedonians. Further constitutional reforms strengthened the de facto autonomy of each republic. During the 1970s, the government adopted a more tolerant approach toward organized religion, including Islam, and Bosnia’s Muslims experienced a cultural, educational, and religious revival.

Under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, Communist controls were further decentralized to the republics, and various economic reforms were instituted without eliminating one-party rule. In the late 1970s, Belgrade expressed fears about a potential Islamic resurgence in Bosnia, and periodic crackdowns were undertaken against political dissenters professing some form of either Islamic or democratic rule. Muslim leaders dismissed charges of a fundamentalist resurgence and calculated that Belgrade was concerned over closer Muslim-Croatian cooperation following the rise of Croatian nationalism earlier in the decade. Tito’s death in 1980 removed the key bonding agent in the Yugoslav federation. The complex system of presidential and governmental succession did not allow for effective central rule while the republican administrations sought an accelerating devolution of powers. During the 1980s, the disintegration of the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia and growing national and ethnic polarization aggravated the position of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a key contested region between Yugoslavia’s two largest nations—Serbs and Croats. Serious economic problems also fueled inter-republican competition for scarce funds and resources and increased social and ethnic tensions throughout the federation.

Political and economic liberalization was evident in the late 1980s under the government of federal prime minister Ante Marković. But the unraveling of Communist rule also sparked demands for republican autonomy among all recognized nations and for ethnic self-determination among the smaller nationalities. The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina remained especially complicated as no national group (Muslim, Serb, Croat) had an absolute demographic majority in the repu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Nationalism and Ethnic Politics
• Part I. Post-Yugoslavia: Ethnicity Multiplied
• Part II. The Balkans: Nationalism Released
• Part III. Central Europe: Ethnicity Reborn
• Conclusion: Minority Rights and Ethnic Ethics
• Postscript 1995
• Appendix 1A. List of East European Acronyms
• Appendix 1B. List of English Acronyms
• Appendix 2. List of Major Nationalist and Ethnic Organizations (by Country)
• Appendix 3. National Minority Parties and Organizations (by Ethnic Group)
• Index of Names
• Index of Parties and Organizations