I initially wanted to post this in the HVO forum, but I don't know Croatian and don't trust Google Translate to not screw up the translation, so I'll try here first.

Here in the US (where I'm posting from), we receive a lot of rifle parts that are left over from the Balkans war. I believe these were from militia arms destroyed by UN agreement. Sometimes they have unusual markings on the furniture made by the soldiers who carried them. Usually these are just carved or scratched-in names, but sometimes there are more elaborate carvings made by a more talented artist.

Anyway, I recently acquired this stock, with stickers on it from the 110 Brigade in Usora. I would like to find out anything I can about the 110 Brig; all I've been able to find on the internet is that they were assigned early in the war to a 2nd Corps army group under ARBiH, and stayed on with them to fight the Serbs even after fighting broke out between Croatia and Bosnia. This is all I know.

Can anyone tell me any more about the 110 Brigade? Or maybe also anything about this unusual practice of personalizing weapons as apparently happened on all sides during the war?

That is a cool find!

We do have people from Usora on the forum and a thread dedicated to the region of Usora as well: srednja-bosna/usora-t111.html If you get no response on this thread I suggest you post there, and yes people do speak English on the forum.

Unfortunately I am not an expert on the 110th Usora Brigade.

Just to correct what you wrote the fighting was between units of the HVO and ABiH and not between Croatia and Bosnia per say. A good read about the fighting in Central Bosnia (south of Usora) can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Muslim-Croat- ... 1585442615

You might find this interesting:

In Usora, Croats were said to be dismayed at the cooperation between their ethnic kin in nearby Zepce and the Serbs against the Muslims. This may be so, but the ARBiH also expressed concerns in February 1994 that the HVO Brigade in Usora were“frequently in contact with the aggressor’s side.” That this was the case is clear from an HVO document dated 9 August 1993 that shows that the 110th Usora Brigade made contacts with the Serbs to discuss joining them and the HVO 111th Brigade in Zepce in the fight against the Muslims. In another document, the HVO commander in Usora describes the problems the HVO and Croat civilians experienced due to being “sandwiched” between the “Chetniks” (Serbs) and the Muslims. Usora became a separate municipality after the war, in line with local Croat opinion.

http://rgallivan.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06 ... bosna.html

Yes, I wrote it. Shameless self-promotion I know.

Thanks for this analysis Rory; it was a point that had eluded me, why in the face of an armed conflict with the Serbs, the allied armies of HoV and ABiH would turn on each other. This sums it up a bit better, as does the factor of Croat population percentage in the regions where HVO units faced this quandary.

In the case of the 110th, how would this unit's refusal to switch sides come to be viewed by other Croat units who were fighting the Muslims? Would they be seen as "turncoats", or would the 110th make the same accusations about nearby units who had done so, such as the 111th? And how would the 110th come to be viewed by their ABiH superiors? Apparently they must have held them in some suspicion given that they made some note of the fact that 110th leadership had made contact with their Serb counterparts to discuss switching sides, even though they evidently elected not to. Would the 110th find themselves switched to other duties and positions, ones that were less likely to allow them to combine with the Serbs in an attack? What became of the 110th after Croatia was established as an independent nation with defined territories?


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According to one source, the Bosnian Croat leadership thought the Usora HVO were "idiots" for continuing to side with the Muslims. (See my blog post: http://rgallivan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02 ... croat.html). I am sceptical of this though. I think the Croats wanted to control land where they had substantial populationa and that sometimes brought them into conflict with the Muslims, while sometimes it was better to be allied with them. So I doubt if the 110th and 111th Brigades really did see each other as turncoats.

It seems clear that the the 110th Brigade were viewed with suspicion by the ARBiH. From what I can remember, the 110th Brigade operated with a high degree of autonomy meaning that the ARBiH was not in a position to switch their duties or interfere in other ways.

The whole HVO was incorporated into the Army of the Federation by the Dayton Agreements of 1995. This was not related to the establishment of Croatia as an independent nation. The HVO was the Bosnian Croat Army, very much distinct from the Croatian Army (HV).

My friend from Žepče area doesn't like the Usora wartime leadership and says that they were traitors, but has nothing against local Croats in general. But I think that this kind of opinion is not so widespread among local people, large majority of people think that Usora and Žepče Croats are brothers in arms. In my opinion, Croats of Usora had no choice, they would be overrun by Muslim forces if they tried to make an alliance with the Serbs.

On a very fundamental level it was the fact the situation which had brought them together was no longer in existence. With the fall of Jajce in late 1992 there were no longer any heavily mixed Muslim-Croat territories that would be coveted by the Serbs. All such areas had already fallen to the Serbs, eliminating any urgent benefit to further cooperation. Meanwhile the question of who would have the upper hand in the many heavily mixed territories (or even just wholly Croat areas) that the Serbs were not interested in remained open.

The Croat-Muslim war in Bosnia and Herzegovina can not be understood without realizing that Serb ambition in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while excessive was not unlimited, but the Bosnian Muslim ambition really was (100% of BiH — the more centralized the better).

Indeed. Any sensible person could see the Croat communities scatterd around Central Bosnia were playing a relatively weak hand and could ill-afford the luxury of doing away with political realism. Whether the matter was cooperation with the Muslims, the Serbs, or even partial subordination to the former, it is commonly understood it was what was necessary to remain to the greatest extent possible "svoji na svome" — on their own land and not marginalized and disempowered. The Croats of Usora and Žepče areas both suceeded in this to the maximum extent they could given the circumstances, where even some Bosnian Croat communities which were in a seemingly somewhat better position, like the Croats of Bugojno, unfortunately did not and were scattered to the winds, so a salute to them, for both their resolve and skill in diplomacy.

I think kinez sums it up pretty good.

With regards to Usora, they did what they had to in order to protect the population.

On a larger scale the 115th HVO Brigade in Tuzla found itself in a similar situation and did something similar, thereby saving thousands of Croats in the Tuzla region from getting expelled. This article came out last week and I would run this through google translator to get the gist of the article. http://hrsvijet.net/index.php?option=co ... Itemid=112

Back to Usora the other key takeway is that that a separate municipality was established for Usora after the war. So not only were Croats able to hold out in the area during the war, they were able to secure a political entity vis-a-vis a municipality. I don't know that a lot of people recognize the significance in the creation of the Usora municipality. You can read some thoughts about the creation of the Usora municipality in the first link below and discussion weighing the pros and cons of a Croatian political enity in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the second link.

english/unintended-consequences-in-bosnia-herzegovina-t5596.html

english/the-croatian-entity-t4470.html

I guess I hadn't realized just quite how fragmented things were during the war. Of course I knew that the war raged between ethnic groups, but now it seems that it also was waged independently by various militias against their own neighbors, without a coordinated larger plan except to defend/expand the unit's immediate ethnic population's control over their towns and property. Ethnic groups X and Z fights Y in this area, while in a neighboring area X and Y fight together against Z.

I wonder about the personal feelings of the Croat soldiers in BH, faced with the question of who to ally themselves with. I understand at this point it is every community for itself, but all the same, would it not be difficult to fight alongside one group for a time against another, and suffer at that enemy's hands, and then in spite of this hostility to join with them and turn on former allies?

I dunno, I suppose the US had a somewhat similar situation recently in Iraq, where the US fought for years a very vicious war against Sunni insurgents. Then both sides reverse course, and we begin training and arming the very people we have been fighting so hard against, each side coming to the table for our own reasons.

I noticed that the mods posted this article on the HercegBosna facebook page so hopefully we can track down some more information on this battalion. See here https://www.facebook.com/hercegbosna.org

Back to the war here is a rough idea of who lived where:



(disregard the thin white lines - the thick ones are the boundary between the RS and Federation).

As you can see certain areas are split by the boundary. I think what makes this situation more tricky is that while the war was going on, people were trying to figure out the best solution to end it and it and some of the proposals served to agitate some of the groups.

Also keep in mind that you have situations even today where even though say the Croatians and Muslims were allies, say in Sarajevo, the Muslims will not let the Croatians build a memorial to the HVO unit that fought for Sarajevo's defense. So in some ways it is like the war is still going on.

http://www.hvosarajevo.ba/novosti/saraj ... o-spomenik

Awesome! Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll keep an eye on it so as to not miss anything. The best thing that could happen, though it would be a small miracle, would be for someone to say "that's MY stock!"

Okay, it is very unlikely, but you never know.



Crazy! What a nightmare.

Just a note on the stock also: I'm not the only one who has a rifle stock from the 110, as evidenced by the stickers. Someone in California has rebuilt one into a single-shot rifle using the original Romanian AK kit brought over here, just as mine was. Same sticker as on the right side of my stock.

1. Well you tell us seeing how your are world champions in turning on your former partners and partnering with your foes. In how many conflicts now did you go against your 1980s friends of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda? Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen? And in how many did you take the same side your supposed arch enemy (but former partner) Al Qaeda was on? Bosnia & Herzegovina, Libya, Syria? It's quite difficult to keep track of your flip-flops.

2. It's not allies, it's co-belligerents.

3. Ask the Bosnian Muslim general staff, made up of YPA officers who fought against the Croats, and with the Serbs in the YPA in 1991, then led ARBiH against the Serbs, partnering the Croats of HVO.

I put a few comments here

topic8062.html

Interesting new information on this stock from another forum! This message is from Mato Usora (with English translation after by River City):

"Ja osobno sam bio pripadnik te brigade (110 HVO), bio sam u I bojni, a ovo je iz treće, neistinito je da smo bili potčinjeni Armiji BiH.
Za čitavo vrijeme rata 110.ta je bila u sastavu HVO-a, samo što se nije otvoreno sukobila sa ARBiH, kažem otvoreno jer bilo je nekih trzavica i zategnutuh situacija.Zaista je interesantno gdje je završila ta puška, a također je vrlo vjerojatno da ti se i vlasnik javi."

(" I was a member of that brigade (110 HVO, HVO = Croatian council of defense) but in the 1st battalion, and this one you have belongs to someone from the 3rd battalion.
It is not true we were subordinated/attached to Army BIH (at that time almost explicit Bosnian muslims army) , but were part of HVO. This 110 brigade didn t have direkt contact/confrontation against Army BIH except some minor clashes/incidents. It is really interesting to see where this gun ended and it is quite possible that you can get in contact with the owner.")

http://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?p=42 ... st42231705