Customer Reviews

Bosnia: A Short History

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

Malcolm does a pretty good job in covering almost 1000 years of Slav history in Bosnia. Most of his book looks at Bosnia during the Ottoman Empire and the reign of the Kotromanic dynasty. His narrative for the most part is very clear-sighted and does not allow anger or bitterness to take over, unlike many other historians who have written books on the Balkans (Philip Cohen springs to mind)

Saying that, however, there are certain subjects that he just doesn't cover in enough detail, particularly since they were very important parts of Bosnia's history. For example, he mentions the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia during WW2 in passing, reserving only one sentence on this subject, and completely fails to mention that thousands upon thousands of Serbs, Jews and others perished there.

His last chapter about the most recent Bosnian war I found to be too short and simplistic. He blames forces in Serbia for most of the mayhem wrought upon Bosnia, which is fair enough, but does not even hint at the fact that Bosniacs and Croats also committed war crimes. While the Serbs were busy expelling and killing Bosniacs from their area of control, the Croats were also doing the same in Herzegovina and central Bosnia, culminating into a civil war between the Bosniacs and the Croats during 1992-1994. This side of Bosnia's tragedy is sadly neglected.

Ok, as the title describes, it is a SHORT history at the end of the day but it just seems to me as if he managed to cover the earlier parts of Bosnia's history very well but seems to slightly taper of at the end of the book. All in all, a good book which is certainly one of the more balanced books out there on Bosnia.

Bosnia: A Short History is the historical primer for Bosnia. Yes, it does paint the Serbs in a negative light. And yes, there are much better book on the Bosnian War available: The Fall of Yugoslavia for example. Due to publication dates, the effects of the last five years of peacekeeping are not touched upon: for that Faking Democracy after Dayton is the best reference. However, this book give the single best history until the post World War II era. If you are about to deploy to the Balkans, reading of this book will give you a good historical background of the events leading up to 1989.

Malcolm delivers a strong, if brief, history of medieval Bosnia. He presents a cogent explanation of who the Serbs, Croats and (others? Bosniaks? Muslims?) are, and where they came from. And then he delivers a stilted modern history, twisted by his (somewhat understandable, Western) sympathy for Izetbegovic.

One thing a history should do is go beyond an encyclopedia entry. This book succeeds. Rather than just list kings, conflicts, edicts... Malcolm digs into disputed questions of history, and takes a side, based on evidence. There is a Bosnian history, distinct from Serbia or from Croatia. There was a Bosnian church, but it was not Bogomilist. There was, briefly, an independent Bosnia.

The book is thorough during the Ottoman period. There was no mass conversion to Islam. There were rivalries and conflicts among local, Bosnian Ottomans of different ranks, and between locals and the Porte. Malcolm looks at politics, at economics, and at military issues as they wrap together. The status of peasants varied, based not only on religion but also on what sort of farm/estate they were on.

Malcolm goes beyond Bosnia's borders. To explain internal politics in the empire (temporary posts, the end of the Janissaries, the devrisme) he brings us to Salonika or Istanbul. Relations with Austria, ongoing warfare, refugees from Ottoman defeats in Hungary, cross border raids... all are treated in some detail.

The best of this book, in a way, comes when it reaches the late 19th and early 20th century. Bosnian Slavs were Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic. We've already learned about how and where many of these Slavs came from (in many cases, other groups assimilated, as, for example, the Vlachs on the military border with Austria slavicized, and retained their Orthodoxy). But in the context of growing Balkan nationalism, Orthodox Bosnian Slavs came to identify as Serbs, and Catholic Bosnian Slavs as Croats. And Muslim Bosnian Slavs? The question mark is Malcolm's, not mine, and helps set the stage for the 20th century.

But the worst of the book is what comes after. Malcolm is (from a western standpoint, understandably) sympathetic to the Muslim position in the war after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Malcolm also is hostile to communism. The combination colors his history from post-WWI onward. The history of WWII is stilted, soft-peddles the role of the Ustashe, is hostilely revisionist towards the Partisans, and goes to odd lengths to equate them with the Chetniks. The post-war chapter seeks to downplay the positive developments in Yugoslavia, and digresses in order to excuse, in advance, Izetbegovic's position in the 90's.

Don't read the book for its post-WWI coverage. But do read it for its compelling, surprisingly detailed history of Bosnia up to that point.

To me this book, which focuses mostly on Medieval and Ottoman Bosnia, is a brilliant scholarly introduction to the rise and fall of Bosnia.

The scope of the book includes Bosnia's interaction with Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia and other countries of the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including the rolls of Islam and Muslims.

The Author's task was complicated by the fact that there are three versions of the history - the Bosnian version, the Croatian version, and the Serbian version - and all three are colored to some degree by oral traditions of Christian and Muslin experiences.

It appears that the Author has gone to extraordinary efforts to assure an unbiased account of events and this will have to do until the potential facts can be viewed from 30,000 feet.

In his Book Malcom takes extra steps to show how flawed and one sided are each of there histories courently tought in Bosnian schools. Taking the research into libraries of ottoman, habsburg empires and further, he writes most objective piece. This is the book that all bosnian should read and it should be required reading in all history clases in bosnia.

It is almost sad that the most accurate historic book about Bosnia was writen, not by a person born in Bosnia, but someone born outside it's borders. In Bosnia today there are three official versions of history, Bosnian, Croatian and Serb, remnances of which we can see in many loaded comments listed bellow, none of which give Bosnian history respect and accuracy it deserves. They are mostly expansions of the myths and deluded ilusions of people who never thought of Bosnia as their home, their homeland. Unfortunately, as it has happened so many times before, the few were able to tint the picture of Bosnia, not only to the world outside, but also tint the picture of Bosnia to people in Bosnia themselves. It is absurd, but true. Malcolm takes a bold step to clear that picture to both insiders and outsiders and bright the historical perspective closer to the truth.
The author takes a fresh and unbiased look at the centuries of Bosnian history, and most of all he backs it up with an enormous detail and footnote. He is not just speculating, he is listing facts....isn't that something fresh for history of a country, where loudest (and equally sadly most successful) proponents base their entire knowledge on vague narrative and myth.
The most interesting part of the book for me was his unrestrained bashing of the UN, EU, US and the world in general for lack of action; of countless narrowminded envoys these countries assigned to "rescue" Bosnia. This part of the book has a great place in any history book for it shows ineptness and impotence of the world community to solve a problem when there are no vital geopolitical interests in danger-offcourse I am talking about the major players.
All in all, great unbiased book, should find its way as an official version of Bosnian history, rather that the garbage the kids are being thought in Bosnia today. I recommend it to anyone even mildly interested in understanding the conflict that was imposed to my country.

Malcolm's BOSNIA: A SHORT HISTORY is an outstanding work. The book shows the range of Bosnian history and the rich complexity and texture of its various religions. It puts into perspective the savage attack on Bosnia, both by nationalist militias and by propagandist media within the former Yugoslavia.

Particularly impressive is the discussion of the Bosnian Church, which brings into a clear and accessible language the breakthroughs by Balkan and Western historians on early Bosnian Church history. Malcolm demolishes the mythologized history of the Serbian and Croatian militias by showing that the patterns of conversion in Bosnia were historically complex. He refutes the notion that present day Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims are derived in a straight pattern of blood descent from the 15th century. Indeed, there were large-scale conversions back and forth throughout the history of Bosnia.

This is no abstract scholarly debate. The stereotype that present-day Bosnian Muslims are descendants of "traitors" in the 15th century who betrayed Christianity is a key element in the attack on Bosnia and also a part of the mythology of "age old hatreds" promulgated by the architects of ethnic-cleansing and adopted by some Western policy makers and journalists.

Malcolm shows that Bosnia was for 500 years, despite its many tensions and wars, a successful civilization with different religions that engaged each other in complex ways far beyond the cliches of age-old hatreds.

This book is recommended for anyone who cares about the Balkans or who wishes to understand the stakes involved in the struggle against "ethnic cleansing."

Malcolm's analysis of the radical Serbian nationalism in Belgrade was unfortunately dismissed by some British political leaders and intellectuals. The horrors in Kosovo today are a tragic vindication of his analysis. Those who dismissed him with a facile refusal to acknowledge an unwelcome message, are left brutal evidence of what they denied.

Malcolm no doubt, and all of us, wish he had been wrong--or at least that his warnings, stated with such cogency and scholarly accuracy, had been heeded. There is still time to read this book now and allow the history of Bosnia to come through the smoke of genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and desires for religous apartheid based on historically false and destructive mythologies of age-old hatreds.

The study of Bosnia and its surrounding neighbors will never be simple and probably tough for an outsider to understand, and likely for an insider to decipher without prejudice and bias. The mighty powers of Rome, Charlemagne, the Ottomans,and the Austro-Hungarians, and the faiths of Western and Estern Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all played significiant roles in the history and development of Bosnia as it stands today. To understand what is happening, you must first try to understand the origins of the continual fighting,and the second is the need to dispel some of the mists of misunderstanding, deliberate myth-making (propaganda from all sides) and sheer ignorance in which all discussion of Bosnia and its history has become shrouded. One thing that a traveler notices right away is that there is no typical Bosnian face and Bosnia has been called microcosm of the Balkans. It is a mixture of people, light and dark, big-boned and wiry-limbed, etc., because of all the trading and invasions, and co-mingling during the preceding centuries. The author does a good job in analyzing the myths, races, and orgins, and how geography was extremely important, especially the two main two routes of travel either through the high mountains or along the Dalmatian coastal strip. Historians may find fault in some areas of the book, but as a tourist and adventurer, I evaluated the book as a 'must-read' to help understand the Balkans.

Much of what goes by "history" in the Balkans is actually myth, generated and repeated by the regional tribes to serve their chauvinistic purposes. The serious historian will necessarily clash with those treasured myths. Malcolm is a serious historian.

When published in 1994, in the middle of the war, this book was Malcolm's herald to an uncomprehending world. He had the fortitude to state up front that he believed the Serbians were primarily responsible for the destruction of Bosnia. For this, he was attacked as "biased." He is not so much biased as opinionated. Objectivity does not require neutrality. Or, as he expressed it himself, truth is not the average of the contending viewpoints.

Two main themes pervade.

First, the idea of Bosnia as a distinct, free-standing nation is very old and very well-established. The oft-heard claim that Bosnians are "really" Croats or "really" Serbs is historically unsupportable. In a fascinating digression, Malcolm demonstrates that the core ancestors of modern Bosnian Serbs were not even Slavs. They were Vlachs, a Romanized migrant tribe, remnants of the Illyrians, who pre-dated the 6th century Slav migration by hundreds of years. So much for Serbian and Russian affinity for their "Slav brothers."

Nor was was Bosnia merely an arbitrarily-drawn administrative district. It was an independent kingdom from the end of Byzantine dominion in 1180 until the Ottoman conquest in 1463 (Herzegovina was annexed in 1326). The Ottomans conferred on it the distinction of being a separate eyalet, or province of the Empire, with its own high-ranking pasha. The Austro-Hungarians from 1878-1918, and Tito's communists from 1945-1989, in their turn treated it similarly.

Malcolm's second major theme is that the much-cited "ancient hatreds" that were said by superficially-informed Western commentators to have "re-surfaced" after the collapse of the Yugoslav state did not exist. All the grim episodes in Bosnian history, he maintains, were engendered by outside forces, not internal hatreds.

That is especially true of the 1992-95 war. Bosnian Catholics and Bosnian Orthodox Christians share nothing distinctive with inhabitants of Croatia or Serbia, except religion (the more-or-less common language cuts across all religions; and there is no distinctive Bosnian or Serbian or Croation race). Croatia and Serbia, in their competition with each other, have long tried to persuade their co-religionists in Bosnia that they were "really" Croats or Serbs. Slobodan Milosevic pushed that gambit to its limits. In truth, the claim that religious hatred characterized the history of Bosnia is a distortion.

During the 400 years of Ottoman rule, there seems to have been little religious strife. Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims lived in substantial harmony, at least in comparison to the bitter religious conflicts occurring on the main part of the European continent. Jews and Gypsies were treated better by these Mohammedans than by just about any country in Christian Europe.

When the Ottomans completed their conquest of Bosnia in 1463, resident Muslims were 2% of the population. By about 1600, they were a majority. Malcolm goes to lengths to argue that the conversion was voluntary. He cannot avoid conceding that non-Muslims were discriminated against. "Voluntary" converts attained lower taxes and access to the courts and to government careers. Moreover, about 200,000 Christian boys were forcibly taken to Istanbul for conversion during that century and a half in the infamous devsirme. But mass conversion was not coerced in the brutal way that our Christian ancestors so nobly enlightened conquered pagans.

Similar harmony continued under the Austro-Hungarians, who made tolerance an imperial policy; and, despite some localized pogroms, through the inter-war period as well. Under Tito, all religion was repressed (though not forbidden). The combination of 40 years of atheistic communism plus the greater secularism of the modern era made Bosnia, on the eve of the 1990s war, one of the most secular nations in the world.

Malcolm is scornful--almost bitter, it seems--of the Western belief at the time that the 1990s war was a "civil war" caused by a thing called "violence" which "flared up" on both sides, rather than what it was--a carefully-planned Serbian invasion of a woefully out-gunned Bosnia.

Milosevic had control of the federal Yugoslav army. His strategy, borrowed from the Vietnamese communists, was to set up "Serb autonomous regions" in Bosnia; to arm them through the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic (now on trial at the Hague); to create violent local incidents inviting Bosnian reaction; then to have the autonomous regions request "protection" from the federal army.

The actual war began when a leader of the Serb irregulars, the notorious Arkan, attacked the town of Bijeljina, in northeastern Bosnia just across the border from Serbia. It was the axial point of two swaths of territory to be taken over by the Serbians: across the top of Bosnia, linking Serbia with Banja Luka, and down the eastern border to the ethnically Serb areas of Herzegovina. Federal artillery would pound each town, then the irregulars would go in and terrorize the populace. In six weeks, the federal army supporting various paramilitaries took 60% of Bosnia.

The federal army supposedly was then withdrawn, and the fighting left to the Bosnian Serbs under command of the future butcher of Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic (still at large). In fact, Malcolm argues, it was all a sham, with most of the federal army staying in Bosnia under different cloaks (shades of Vietnam, again).

Malcolm excoriates the West for two mistakes. The first was its refusal to lift the arms embargo, which in practice disadvantaged only the Bosnians. To lift it, said British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd with astonishing thick-headedness, "would only prolong the fighting."

The second was to proffer the Vance-Owen Plan calling for ethnic cantons labeled as such, but leaving the boundaries unsettled, which invited further fighting. Worse, it engendered a true civil war, as Muslims and Bosnian Croats battled each other for territory.

Malcolm adds that the final Western blunder was to abandon all pretense of enforcing the Vance-Owen plan, and adopt instead the tragically laughable policy of establishing UN-protected "safe areas." One of those was Srebrenica. The book ends in 1993. The worst horrors were yet to come.

Malcolm's credibility slips in only one respect. He seems to bend too far over backwards to present Muslims favorably--not just the Bosniaks of the recent war, but the Ottomans as well. Were they really so mild and well-meaning?

Books, like Olympic divers, should get degree-of-difficulty marks. This was a hard book to write. The sources are scanty and access to them difficult. Bosnia was settled, invaded, and impinged upon by so many civilizations that there is no unified tale, just dozens of fragmented tales. The bibliography is in ten languages.

The old tale of the blind men and the elephant is too simple a metaphor for Bosnia. Any faction can argue any position and find some past episode to support it. A novice in Balkan history like me must be modest in evaluating a work by so learned and diligent an expert as Malcolm. I can, though, exercise the veteran trial lawyer's instinct for credibility. On that basis, I judge him honest and sincere, at a minimum, and mostly credible. That's a solid endorsement in a field so suffused with axe-grinding.

Malcolm is an extremely bright writer with an obvious, deep scholarly interest in the subject matter, and the sort of rare grasp of general historical facts, issues, ebbs and flows, which makes his books so interesting to read and seduces many simpler souls to take them as the "ultimate" opinion. However, it becomes clear quite early in reading of his short history of Bosnia that the writer has chosen a point of view which has a way of struggling with facts. One does not have to be a specialist in Balkan history, an Oxford don, or speak two dozen languages to realize that Noel Malcolm belabours an opinion which will be hard to defend among the fair-minded.

Some efforts by Malcolm at appearing even-handed are amusing. Arguing that Bosnia was historically a political entity, and against the Serbian (,as well as, to a certain degree, the Croatian,) "myths" which see the place as its (their) national hinterland, he names two kings who ruled as Bosnian "independents" (Stephen Kontromanic,Stephen Tvrtko) who just happened to be related by blood to the Nemanjas, the ruling Serbian dynasty of the times. To deal with the undeniable fact that Tvrtko saw himself a heir to Stephen Dusan's "Greater Serbia", and naming himself as a king of Serbia too, Malcolm offers "that he never attempted seriously to exercise political power over Serbia". To a curious non-specialist like myself, this however appears entirely beside the point.

I can see where the Serbian intellectuals have a problem with Malcolm's historical stance. He acknowledges the social devastation of the devsirme (the "blood tax" on the Balkan Christians, forced to surrender their young men to the Ottoman slave army) which depopulated some areas. On the subject of the Archduke [...] he remains neutral, acknowledging Serbia's willingness to co-operate, and bloody riots against the Serbs of Sarajevo. He even grants there was a "war against a Serb population" waged in BH during WWII. However, Malcolm's technique of "handling" the historical assaults on the Serbs in the area is unmistakable. Roughly it consists of three elements: 1) diminishing the problem, 2) creating a new context for it or mangling the real one, 3) complaining about the Serbs. For example, the bloody history the Serb peasant revolts and the legendary cruelty of the Moslem Begs in the 19th century is prefaced by testimony to the Bosniak's religious purity and their high morals by foreign travelers from the East. Only then Malcolm allows that some were 'fanatics' although he immediately dismisses the argument that this was a permanent feature of Bosnian Islam. Next, he quotes one Chaummette-des-Fosses who saw the barbarity as a result of the French appearing in Dalmatia (yes, this pearl comes from Malcolm who makes it his profession to shred "myths" and idiotic theories about Balkans) and the emergence of Serbia as a state which made the Bosnian rulining class feel "...surrounded and threatened. This situation, by raising their fears,...has inspired them with a fear of seeing their raya rebel; and to keep them in check they have had recourse to barbarity". So, by this standard, it would appear, if Stalin's NKVD shot hundreds of political prisoners in Riga in September 1941, it was wholly excused by the proximity of Wehrmacht panzers. All that would need to be added by a Stalinist advocate is that the Germans themselves were criminally abusing the Russians. So Malcolm dutifully adds that Serbia, whence "those Muslims who were not massacred were expelled, strengthened the fears of the Muslim clergy." No incidents to illustrate this sweeping allegation are provided.

But it is in the chapter on the Second World War, where Malcolm really shows his intent to torture history. In the introductory paragraph he says that there were several parallel wars waged in Bosnia which were started when Germany and Italy (such a stickler for detail !) invaded Yugoslavia. Though suspicious, I was ok with the paragraph until Malcolm states that one of those "other" wars was conducted by "Croatian extremists against the Serb population...a war of aggression on one side and sometimes indiscrimate retaliation on the other". There are immediately two problems with this sort of a summary. If one would not describe the operation of SS-Einsatz Truppen in Russia as the work of "German extremists", I don't see where one could do that in the case of the Ustase paramilitaries. This appears a formula devised to confound the identities, size of the armed forces and aims and means of the struggles. Further, Malcolm's editorial sense tells him that the causal link between the "extremists" which established themselves as a state and [...] Germany needs to be revealed only in paragragh two, i.e. only after the reader learns that the people on whom a "terror and genocide" was unleashed were a pretty nasty and unruly sort themselves as they fought back.

There is a sad but true incident from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 in which a retreating Polish army and columns of civilians descended on a German ethnic population of Bydgoscz (Bromberg) and slaughtered the lot "indiscriminately" - about 10,000 civilians. No one except [...], would see this as a proof of Polish expansionist designs or ethnic hatred that [...] invasion sought to do away with.

The alliance between the Ustashe and the Moslem Bosniaks is commented on in a very misleading, and to Serbs no doubt a sleazy, manner. Entirely missing is a frank and unamibiguous admission that the leading Moslem politicians and the bulk of the urban intelligentsia were pro-Ustashe and supported wither the status of Croatia's protectorate or some other link with Zagreb. No doubt the relationship was strained from time to time (due to some of the Ustashe "extremism" spilling on the Moslems, in some areas of BH where the Croats insisted on being the sole "Herrenvolk", and pulling out their knives on their buddies) but it cannot be denied that there were significant political affinities the between the Ustashe, and fascism generally, and the Bosnian Moslems. Malcolm admits that the Bosnian Kulenovic was the vice-president of Croatia but naming him in isolation creates an impression (,or does nothing to prevent it,) that he was a token presence in Zagreb. In fact, a score of Ustashe government and parliamentary figures recruited from Bosnian Moslems. Similarly, Malcolm omits the mention of Moslems in the regular Axis armed forces(German-Croatian units) , limiting himself to their fighting in volunteer units, the Handzar Waffen SS, and among Tito partisans. This creates the intended illusion that the peaceful Moslems who never intended to lord it over anyone were caught in the middle and were beaten by all sides. (BTW, I do not buy the Serbian propaganda about the "fundamentalism" of the Bosnian Islam. The prevaling culture and tradition there, and in this respect Malcolm seems credible, is the salafiya school of al Afgani/Abduh/Qutb as was traditioned until 1970's, which is removed from the current "puritan" Wahabi dominated jihadism. On the other hand, one should not be naive about the potential of the Bosnian links to the Islamist hotbeds).

It is then no surprise that Malcolm book which seeks to dispel "the myth" that a real conflict existed among the different communities in the 1990's misses on some really interesting historical events which shaped the latest war. The ethnic cleansing by the Bosniak-aided Ustashe around Bratunac and Srebrenica in 1941 begat the first Cetnik raids into the area, spread quickly and culminated in the wholesale slaughter of (mostly) Muslims at Foca early in 1942. Naser Oric'large-scale ethnic cleansing operations around Bratunac and Srebrenica in 1992-1993 led to the formation of the Drina brigade and Mladic' revenge on "the Turks" of Srebrenica in 1995.

In this instance, history repeated itself - and not as a farce - precisely because the actors did not learn from history. I am afraid Noel Malcolm's erudition does not help us learn the most important thing about Bosnia - i.e. that one cannot be too partisan in this end of the Earth if one does not want to end up bloody real fast !