Mass Atrocities and the Police

A New History of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Christian Axboe Nielsen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350204577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Between April 1992 and December 1995, more than 100, 000 people were killed in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The terrible atrocities committed in this period have been much discussed and studied and many prosecuted as acts of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. But so far, the academic scholarship has focused on the role of the military in these events. This has come at the expense of considering the police's role, which Nielsen here demonstrates as crucial. Nielsen traces the origins of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the police and associated paramilitary groups. Nielsen makes this ground-breaking case by drawing on a host of confidential archival sources, academic research and practical experience as a widely cited expert witness in the most notorious of the war crimes tribunals. His innovative new history sheds light on wider issues regarding the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Balkan wars and the region today.

Chapter 1

FROM ELECTIONS TO WAR: THE POLICE AND THE PURPOSEFUL DESTRUCTION OF BOSNIA (NOVEMBER 1990–MARCH 1992)

A proper understanding of the importance of policing for the breakup of Yugoslavia requires first taking into account the centrality of policing for communist rule. For most of the period from 1945 until the beginning of 1990, Socialist Yugoslavia was a party-state in which the League of Communists (originally known as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia) enjoyed a political monopoly. The death of president for life Josip Broz Tito in May 1980 combined with a protracted economic crisis and rioting in Kosovo to raise serious questions about the country’s viability, but during the following decade the communists showed no sign of voluntarily relinquishing power. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the rapid toppling of communist party-states throughout Eastern Europe, all but the most conservative Yugoslav communists began to realize that change was in the air.

Structured federally, socialist Yugoslavia encompassed six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. In five of the six republics, a clear connection existed between the largest ethnicity and the republic: between Slovenia and Slovenes, Croatia and Croats, Serbia and Serbs, and so forth. Bosnia and Herzegovina with its ethnic patchwork dominated by Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats, was hence unique. To use the words of the later leader of the reformed Bosnian communists, Nijaz Duraković, ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a Yugoslavia in miniature, was always a kind of a seismograph for all pressing questions in the field of inter-ethnic relations in our country’.¹ In part owing to past episodes of ethnically motivated mass violence – above all during the Second World War, when Bosnia had been a part of the fascist so-called Independent State of Croatia – and in part because of the never completely extinguished irredentist aspirations of politicians in Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia’s communist leadership also had a well-earned reputation for being the most conservative and staid in the country.

Policing in Yugoslavia

As in other communist party-states in Eastern Europe, the party – known since November 1952 as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ) – legally and constitutionally controlled the state. From the very outset of communist rule, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in whose purview policing was located, served as a linchpin of state power.² Together with the military, the police constituted the second element of the state’s monopoly on armed force. Yet on a daily basis the average citizen of the country was much more likely to encounter members of the ‘People’s Police’ (Narodna milicija) than soldiers. In this sense, police officers personified the state’s power both to maintain order and to repress anti-state action if necessary. And the ‘secret police’ in the form of the Yugoslav State Security Service, also part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, symbolized the invisible but (allegedly) omnipresent and omniscient eye of the party-state.³

For the first twenty years of the country’s existence, the federal authorities very strictly controlled all matters pertaining to policing. The key person responsible for this structure was Aleksandar Ranković, one of Tito’s closest associates and the first head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in socialist Yugoslavia. In 1966, however, Ranković was purged for allegedly trying to use the state security service to usurp power.⁴ Thereafter, the SKJ cautiously accelerated the decentralization of the Yugoslav state.

A further milestone, in the history of both the socialist Yugoslav state and the police, was the promulgation in 1974 of what turned out to be the final federal constitution. The republics as well as the two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, received very considerable powers and, in many fields, could act quite autonomously of the federal Yugoslav state. Only defence and foreign policy remained almost exclusively in the purview of the federal authorities. While communists in Slovenia and Croatia in particular hailed the 1974 constitution as a progressive step in the right direction, many in Serbia regarded the constitution as an emasculation of state power and as a further attack on Serbia’s role in the Yugoslav state.

In practice, the decentralization meant that the six republics and two autonomous provinces had broad discretion in devising and implementing policing policies. Notwithstanding the criticism emanating from Serb communists, there was relatively little detectable policy divergence, not least because the 1974 constitution, like all previous Yugoslav constitutions, made it clear that the SKJ was the sole holder of power. Behind the scenes, the republican and provincial leagues of communists wielded significant power because they controlled personnel decisions.

As long as Tito acted as the ultimate arbiter of all decisions in the state, the system functioned quite well, but immortality proved elusive even for the great leader. After his death in May 1980, the slogan ‘after Tito, Tito’ (posle/poslije Tita, Tito) expressed the principled desire to continue to steer his course, including upholding the official ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’.⁵ Yet such a slogan had more to do with political necrophilia than any constructive agenda, and in the years ahead various Yugoslav communist functionaries proved perfectly capable of adopting mutually contradictory positions while claiming to wear the Titoist mantle.

Particularly in the ethnically diverse context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the personnel question would come to occupy a central place in the discussions leading to the breakup of the country. It is important to remember that ethnicity had always been a prominent factor regarding personnel decisions in socialist Yugoslavia, particularly so in Bosnia. Practically speaking, this resulted in the ‘key’ (ključ) system which aspired to manage and maintain staffing in the police proportional to the country’s ethnic demography. For reasons going back to the communist-led uprisings against the fascist Croat regime occupying Bosnia during the Second World War, Serbs had historically been overrepresented in military and police structures in Bosnia, as well as in the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Savez komunista Bosne i Hercegovine, SKBiH).⁶

Neven Anđelić usefully notes that the apportioning of posts in socialist Bosnia along ethnic lines should not be conflated with the notion that a Bosnian Croat represented only Bosnian Croat interests, a Bosnian Muslim represented only Bosnian Muslim interests, etc. Anđelić describes a delicately maintained system in which ‘unwritten rules … were always respected’, and where those appointed on an ethnic basis pledged to govern and work in the spirit of ‘brotherhood and unity’ and Bosnia as a whole, being cognizant of but transcending particularistic ethnic interests.⁷ This system, which proved difficult to sustain after the death of Tito, faced total demise once multi-party democracy came to Bosnia.

The collapse of communism and the November 1990 elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina

During the decade following the death of Tito, amidst a chronic economic crisis informed by Yugoslavia’s bankruptcy, mounting inflation and unemployment, the SKBiH remained stubbornly conservative and resistant to reforms.⁸ However, in September 1987 a young communist named Slobodan Milošević carried out an internal putsch in the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia.⁹ Although initially regarded by some as a relatively liberal and reformist politician, Milošević by late 1988 revealed his plans to undo central tenets of the 1974 constitution by recentralizing power in Belgrade.

Milošević increasingly seemed to be positioning himself as the new Tito. But while Milošević had initially like all other communists parroted the virtues of the great leader, Marxism–Leninism and ‘brotherhood and unity’, there were signs that he could proffer himself as first and foremost a leader of Serbs. Indeed, Milošević literally stumbled over the power of nationalism on a visit to Kosovo in April 1987 when he famously proclaimed that he would protect local Serbs.¹⁰

As a product of the SKJ, Milošević knew very well that the key to power resided in personnel questions. Therefore, this quintessential apparatchik devised a clever strategy to expand Serbia’s – and by extension his own – power. By organizing ‘antibureaucratic revolutions’, Milošević had the ability to purge those who opposed him and to stack party committees with his own supporters, all in the name of progress and reforms. The first ‘antibureaucratic revolution’ was carried out in the summer of 1988 in Vojvodina.¹¹ The so-called Yoghurt Revolution, which earned its moniker because of the cups of yoghurt thrown at Vojvodina’s communists, ended with the resignation of the province’s communist leadership in October 1988. They were replaced with loyal allies of Milošević. The strategy was repeated in Montenegro, where the old leadership resigned in January 1989. In Kosovo, Azem Vllasi, the ethnic Albanian communist leader, was jailed the following month. Milošević’s willingness to opportunistically wrap himself in the cloak of Serbian nationalism became evident when he in June 1989 organized a gigantic jubilee celebration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo at Gazimestan. These two elements – the opportunistic appropriation and nationalism and the recalibration of party-state politics for a post-communist period – would soon also be evident in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Meanwhile, in March 1989, Serbia annulled Kosovo and Vojvodina’s autonomy. Many Serbs who despised the 1974 constitution greeted this step euphorically. With this move, Milošević through his allies now controlled the votes of Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro in the rotating Yugoslav Presidency, nearly a majority. This development greatly alarmed the republican leaderships in Slovenia and Croatia, which feared that the next logical step in Milošević’s campaign would be to strengthen the federal authorities, recentralizing Yugoslavia with Serb communists occupying key positions and with all of the most important decisions being taken in Belgrade. Seen from the vantage point of Ljubljana and Zagreb, this potentially implied a return to the rigid authoritarian centralism that had existed from 1945 until the purge of Ranković in 1966. And although Ranković had kept a very low profile since his ouster, massive crowds attended his funeral in 1983, signalling an uncritical and factually problematic rehabilitation of him as a paragon of Serbian nationalism.¹²

The combination of Milošević’s power grab and his embrace of nationalism provoked a counterreaction in the two northwestern republics. By the end of 1989, the authorities in Slovenia were blocking pro-Milošević ‘meetings for the truth’ and Serbia countered with a boycott against Slovenian products. At the 14th SKJ Congress in January 1990 in Belgrade, the Slovenian communists attempted to resist Milošević’s centralization attempts. When this failed, the delegations from both Slovenia and Croatia left the meeting, an act that symbolized the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia. In any case, any increased tension between Croatia and Serbia was also bound to have enormous ramifications for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the course of 1990, the first multi-party elections since the Second World War were held, first in Croatia and Slovenia in the spring, in Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in November, and finally in Serbia and Montenegro in December. In the months before the Bosnian elections, new political parties began to crystallize. Initially, a ban on ethnically defined political parties remained in effect, with the result that what would become the dominant Bosnian Muslim party was established as the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije, SDA). However, nationalists challenged this ban, and on 11 June 1990, the SRBiH Constitutional Court ruled against it.¹³ As a result, the Bosnian Serbs in the following month formed the Serb Democratic Party (SDS BiH) as a sister party of the eponymous main party of the Croatian Serbs. Likewise, the Bosnian Croats established the Croat Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine, HDZ BiH) as a sister party of the HDZ in Croatia. These three nationalist parties crafted a coalition against the erstwhile communists who were split between the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the pan-Yugoslav Federation of Reform Forces of Yugoslavia (Savez reformskih snaga Jugoslavije). The slogan of the nationalist coalition was ‘in our Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Yugoslavia, we were and will remain together’.¹⁴

In light of the catastrophic enmity among the three parties and the later armed conflict, it is perhaps not surprising that many in Bosnia, including most present-day nationalists, have essentially wilfully erased most memories of the mutually existing comity that caused these parties to campaign together in 1990 against the reformed communists. Bosnians today of all ethnicities are for example often shocked to hear that the leader of the SDA, Alija Izetbegović, was a guest of honour at the founding assembly of the SDS in July 1990.¹⁵ Bosnian Serbs, in particular, are much fonder of recounting Izetbegović’s role as a defendant in a 1983 Sarajevo show trial in which he was accused of Muslim nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.¹⁶ At this stage, as evidenced by the SDS’s statute, the parties emphasized coexistence and mutual respect for others even as they also reserved the right to advance the interests of their own respective ethnic community.¹⁷

The first Bosnian multi-party elections proved to be a resounding success for the nationalist coalition. Of the 240 places in the two houses of the Bosnian Assembly (parliament), the nationalists took 202. In the elections, the SDS won absolute victories in thirty-seven municipalities and shared power in many others.¹⁸ Henceforth, the SDA, the SDS and the HDZ increased their voluble and regular proclamations to be the exclusive legitimate voices of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats, respectively.

The political annihilation of the reformed communists and the massive victory of the nationalists ensured that all political conflicts and energy would now be focused on the division of power among the victors. And in this co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 From Elections to War: The Police and the Purposeful Destruction of Bosnia (November 1990–March 1992)
• Chapter 2 The Police and the Forcible Seizure of Power (April and May 1992)
• Chapter 3 Search, Detain, Destroy: Ethnic Cleansing, Expulsions and Police Concentration Camps (April–December 1992)
• Chapter 4 Of Red Berets and Plausible Deniability: Serbia’s Support for the RS MUP
• Chapter 5 The Bosnian Serb Police, Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Srebrenica, 1993–5
• Epilogue and Conclusion The Bosnian Serb Police and Negative Peace in Dayton Bosnia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint