Rory Gallivan je napisao/la:
I have read Shrader's book. I replied to someone about this on my blog. I haven't come across much discussion of the book in English, just one favourable review by James Sadkovich. I have seen it in shop windows (in Croatian) in Zagreb though, so I imagine it made quite an impact in Croatia and Bosnia.
Review of:
"The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History, 1992-1994",
by Charles R. ShraderTexas A&M University Press, College Station, 2003.
Great review and a great book.
He covers a lot of what the mainstream press covering the war in BiH refused to cover.
http://voiceofcroatia.net/arhiva/Shrader.htm Can the Shrader Book Help Blaskic and Others By V.M. Raguz
At a time when sexed-up reports and Paris advocacy for the Islamic world are commonplace concepts, Charles R. Shrader's book about the Muslim-Croat conflict in Bosnia may be extremely well timed. Even though the book was written much before the recent Iraq crisis, his conclusions suggest that both notions, however recent, are applicable in explaining this highly controversial war-within-a-war that took place a decade ago in Europe's own back yard.
Formerly a US Army logistics officer, Shrader is now a noted military historian and instructor at the US military academies. In this book he works mainly from the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) trial transcripts in Blaskic, Kordic, and other central Bosnia cases, and concludes quite explicitly that anyone who knows anything about military issues (and evidence) could never surmise that Croats initiated the conflict in central Bosnia. Moreover, there was no grand scheme to ethnically cleanse the Muslims from the area, as the ICTY incorrectly found. Quite the contrary, says Shrader.
He makes a case that Sarajevo made an early strategic decision, in Fall 1992, to fight the Croats because they were weaker than the Serbs; because it wanted to resettle the Muslim refugees from eastern Bosnia and Posavina into the Lasva Valley; and, because it wanted to seize the military production facilities under Croat control in Busovaca, Vitez and Novi Travnik.
Gen. Sefer Halilovic, the first Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ABiH) chief operations officer wrote along the same lines in his book the "Cunning Strategy". ("Lukava Strategija," S. Halilovic, Marsal, Sarajevo, 1997.) The key element of that strategy was to seize military plants in Gorazde, Konjic, Bugojno, and Novi Travnik. The last three were under the control of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO).
To add, what is striking in the Halilovic book is the underlining theme that the Croats were, from the outset, as dangerous to the future of the BiH state as were the Serbs, and thus, equally a target. Tellingly, as Belgrade-trained officer, he often referred to the Croats with derogatory term Ustashe. Halilovic also wrote about close relations between Izetbegovic associates and Milosevic envoys throughout 1992-93, including discussions about territorial swaps and the division of BiH between the two.
Similarly, a senior Muslim official told this reviewer in Spring 1993 that the Muslims would not seek negotiations with the Croats because the thinking in Sarajevo was that they can be defeated. The going logic was, he said, that the Croats were much weaker than the Serbs; that Croatia would not help them much because it had its own problems; that BiH Croats are settled in the most economically viable parts of the country, in the Lasva and Neretva valleys; that they control the access to the sea; and, that eventually, there will be a big war between Serbia and Croatia, where the HVO would be forced to retreat south, and to the flanks, to help the Croatian Army (HV) around Dubrovnik in the east and Knin in the west, thus making it even easier for the Muslims to push southward.
Back in December 1992, at the Extraordinary Session of the Organization of Islamic Conference in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this reviewer participated in a meeting between the Croatian Foreign Minister Zdenko Skrabalo and Alija Izetbegovic, where Skrabalo appealed to Izetbegovic to accept Franjo Tudjman's offer to form joint military headquarters, either in Zagreb or Bugojno, and take on the Serb extremists together. Skrabalo brought with him the Zagreb Mufti Sefko Omerbasic, who argued that the Tudjman offer was genuine, and consistent with Zagreb's assistance in arming of the ABiH. But Izetbegovic refused, saying that such an alliance would further antagonize the Serbs. However, it is more likely that Izetbegovic said no because the Halilovic strategy was already well in place.
Shrader says that in January 1993, the ABiH carried out what he calls in military jargon a probing attack, to gauge the HVO defenses, and in April 1993, the first major attack. The Croats were largely surprised by the probing attack, but not by the main attack. After January 1993 they began gathering intelligence on the ABiH, and rightly anticipated that the main attack would come on April 15th. Central Bosnia HVO commander Tihomir Blaskic prepared and practiced, what Shrader calls "active defense," a common NATO pre-emptive tactic. This first ABiH operation to fragment the Lasva Valley into isolated pockets failed, but was repeated two more times in the Fall. He adds that the Lasva Valley would have been overtaken if it were not for the early 1994 Washington Accords, as the Croats were substantially under-manned, under-gunned, and completely encircled.
The situation of the Croat community in central Bosnia is likened to the misfortune of the French Union camp at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Like the French troops that were in great tactical and numerical disadvantage sitting in the Nam Yum valley against Vietminh soldiers on the surrounding hills, the Croat community was squeezed into an even smaller area in the lowlands of Lasva valley against the Muslim forces on the mountainside. Unlike the Union troops, the Croats managed to survive until the Washington Accords due to Blaskic's active defense strategy.
Shrader writes that there is not slightest of evidence that HV troops or advisers operated in central Bosnia. He does add in a footnote that there is evidence of HV troops in the Gornji Vakuf area, to the south, in Dec 1993-Jan 1994, but that they were not active in the fighting in central Bosnia. In February 1994, the Security Council used the reports about these troop movements as evidence of Croatia's interference in BiH.
The massing of HV troops in Gornji Vakuf in December 1993 is consistent with other reports that the troops were moved in because Zagreb feared that Lasva Valley would fall, and wanted to manage the resultant refugee flows that would have destabilized Dalmatia, as well as to prevent further ABiH advances south that could have isolated Dubrovnik once again.
Shrader relies extensively on UNPROFOR and the European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM) reports on the events in Lasva Valley, and concludes that UNPROFOR was largely balanced in its reporting. It became better after being initially surprised by the developments in central Bosnia. But he goes on and says that ECMM monitors were consistently misinterpreting events to the detriment of Croats and downplaying atrocities against the Croats (which appear to have been more numerous and widespread).
In the "Sources" section at the end of the book he goes on and points a finger at the French head of the ECMM, Jean-Pierre Thebault, as the reason for such ECMM reporting. Shrader speculates that Thebault was acting under national instructions, consistent with the Paris policy to advocate Arab interests in the West. To add to this point of view, Shrader notes that ECMM reporting improved once Sir Martin Garrod took over the mission in October 1993.
Another reason for Thebault's biased reporting may have been the EC plan for BiH at the time, which looked to assign 33% of BiH territory to the Muslim-majority republic. The EC lead negotiator Lord Owen wanted to achieve this percentage by assigning the largest part of the Lasva Valley to the Muslim-majority republic. As a Brussels civil servant, Thebault would have understood his role as needing to craft his reports to advance the policy goals of the negotiators, i.e., to support the ABiH offensive. In turn, Sir Martin would have been motivated to change the reporting direction when Brussels and Lord Owen began pressuring the Muslim side to accept the three-republic Owen-Stoltenberg plan in Fall 1993, after the Croats accepted it in the Summer.
Taking cue from the Iraq crisis, one simply cannot overlook the concept of sexing up. But Thebault clearly went to the extreme. In fact, he was not sexing up, but perverting down. As a result, the mainstream view of this conflict is so convoluted and yet, as such, embedded in stone. Thus, it compelled the Blaskic defense to, in effect, accept the main premise of the ICTY Prosecution about the Croat grand scheme to ethnically cleanse the Muslims, and argue naively that Blaskic, despite being the chief military officer in the area, was innocent because he personally did not partake in such a campaign.
Thus, in some way, the book comes too late for the central Bosnia cases at the ICTY, but its outstanding research and current concepts in international relations, might make it a powerful document in the future. It is the first work on this conflict in any language. Blaskic and others just may be able to introduce it eventually as new evidence in national courts in the countries where they will be serving their unjust sentences.
The author was Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the E.U. and NATO in 1998-2000. He occasionally comments on Balkan affairs in the Wall Street Journal Europe and other media.
