Why There’s No ‘Truth’ About the Bosnian War

Civil war or aggression, religious war or tragic conflict – these are just some of the many different descriptions of the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during which around 100,000 people lost their lives.

Twenty-two years after the start of the fighting, this is still a highly-disputed issue in the country, and is often used by politicians to stir up ethnic instability. Because of this, historians suggest, a common definition of the character of the war is unlikely in Bosnia any time soon.

Representatives of Croat, Serb and Bosniak victims’ associations have entirely different views of the conflict. But they all believe the war was a defensive one, which began after they were attacked by others.

These clashing perceptions, according to sociologist Miodrag Zivanovic, demonstrate that there are now five different ‘truths’ about the war – the Bosniak, Serb and Croat versions, the view of those displaced during the war, and the one preferred by the international community.

“These truths are placed in an area between two poles – the thesis about aggression and the thesis about a civil war. This is why it is difficult to form a uniform definition of the character of the war,” said Zivanovic.

Self-defence or aggression?

Nedeljko Mitrovic, the president of the Union of Bosnian Serb Civilian Victims and Missing Persons, said that defining what kind of war the Bosnian conflict was is a “political issue”.

“In this war, there is no common definition of its causes or character – except that it was a tragic conflict. I believe that the war was about whether the former Yugoslav state would remain or dissolve and the decision to outvote Serbs [in the 1992 referendum for independence from Yugoslavia, which Bosnian Serbs opposed],” Mitrovic said.

“Others will have other descriptions, but we need experts, historians and researchers to prove with facts what happened,” he said – although he also suggested that it was possibly still too early to find a commonly-agreed definition.

Representatives of Bosniak and Croat victims’ associations strongly disagree, however.

“The conflict can be characterised as an act of aggression, with some characteristics of a civil war,” said president of the Association of Genocide Survivors and Witnesses, Murat Tahirovic.
“I believe there will never be a consensus, because the Dayton peace accords [which ended the war in 1995] divided the country along ethnic lines,” he said.

Andjelko Kvesic, a Bosnian Croat former detention camp prisoner, also blamed others’ aggression for sparking the conflict.

“The war, from my position, was a defensive war. I had my home and my [defensive] line and I defended my home. I went nowhere. Those who attacked me, if they did as I did, then we would not have had this war,” Kvesic said.

Sociologist Miodrag Zivanovic said that such differing interpretations are natural, considering the vast divide between Bosnia’s ethnic groups as a result of the ethnic cleansing campaigns during the war.

“This was a war where ethnic cleansing was a basic goal, on all sides. Some sides did it more brutally and some less brutally. Ethnic cleansing was not an instrument of war, but the goal of the war,” Zivanovic explained. An international conflict?
Verdicts in war crimes trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague and at the Bosnian state court have defined the war however as an ‘international conflict’, reflecting the involvement of Croatian and Serbian forces.

Serbian lawyer Djordje Dozet said however, that according to his experience in war crimes cases, any definition of the war has no bearing on the judicial process.

“Not because the judges do not care, but because in the courtroom we discuss the consequences and that is always something negative. Our courts, in principle, do not divide suspects into ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’,” Dozet said.

In the small number of cases where the indictment is based on the wider context of the war, courts