Review Essay

Balkan Battlegrounds
James J. Sadkovich

Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conict, 19001995. Volume 2. Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 2003. Charts. Annexes. Endnotes. Index. Pp. 580. Available from the Superintendent of Documents: (202) 5121800, or internet: http://www.access. gpo.gov/su_docs/. The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes. By James Gow. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003. ISBN 0773523863. Map. Tables. Notes. Index. Pp. xiii, 322. $19.95. Bitka za Vukovar. By Davor Marijan. Zagreb: Hrvatski Institut za Povijest, 2004. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Sources. Index. Pp. 335. Euro 60. The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History, 19921994. By Charles R. Shrader. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. ISBN 1585442615. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Glossary. Notes. Sources. Index. Pp. xxi, 223. $42.95.

HE wars that accompanied Yugoslavias dissolution ended a decade ago, but there are surprisingly few military histories of these conicts. So these four books are welcome. But the reader should be aware that each of these studies reects its authors background. Charles Shrader worked as a consultant for the defense at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia), and he is sympathetic to the Croatian view of events.1 James Gow worked at The Hague as well, but for the OTP (Office

1. I also worked for the defense at the ICTY, and I acquired Shraders manuscript for Texas A&M University Press while I was editor of its Eastern European series.

James J. Sadkovich holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is presently affiliated with George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has previously taught at the American University in Bulgaria, the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, and Marquette University. His monographs include Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 19271937 (1987), The Italian Navy in World War II (1994), and The U.S. Media and Yugoslavia, 19911995 (1998).
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of the Prosecution), and like the OTP, he tends to be critical of both Slobodan Milos evi c and the adversaries of what he terms the Serbian project, an effort to create a Greater Serbia.2 Davor Marijan has worked in Croatias military archives and museum, and he is associated with HIP (Croatian Institute for History); he approaches the siege of Vukovar from a Croatian perspective. The authors of the CIA study write as critical American analysts, who attempt to be as even-handed as their sources allow. The second volume issued by the CIA on the conicts in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina is intended as a supplement to its predecessor, and it is incomplete without the rst volume. Its analysis is uneven, at times simply reecting its sources, and most citations are of secondary sources, press agencies, newspapers, memoirs, and testimony at the ICTY.3 The authors also tend to sympathize with the JNA officer corps, e.g., they dismiss TO (Territorial Defense) units as little more than bands of armed civilians which JNA professional officers would come to loathe; they lament the inability of the General Staff to implement its excellent study in theoretical staff planning; and they laud the Army for its ability to undertake multi-front offensive operations under such chaotic conditions.4 Their observation that the JNAs lack of infantry forced it to use artillery and armor to bludgeon the Croatians into submission is problematic, given their account of the advance on Slunj, where the JNA used air attacks and tank and artillery re to systematically destroy Croatian villages, which the Serbian TO (Territorial Defense) then burned. It seems odd to refer to such attacks as well-led and spirited, especially since their outcome was congruent with the goals of ethnic cleansing, which James Gow sees as intimately linked to Serbian strategy, making it doubtful that lack of infantry was the only reason that the JNA used massed repower to obliterate its opponents.5 Nor does it seem fair to argue that all war crimes in Slavonia were committed by volunteers who had been recruited to make up for a shortage of infantry, especially since

2. Gow, Serbian Project, 14, 26, notes that he worked for the OTP for four years, with Milan Vego and Norman Cigar, who has written Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), and coauthored, with Paul Williams, War Crimes and Individual Responsibility: A Prima Facie Case for the Indictment of Slobodan Milosevic (Washington: Balkan Institute, 1996). 3. See CIA, Balkan Battlegrounds, 274, for their dismissal of ill-informed journalists, an interesting comment for a study which relies heavily on the press. 4. Ibid., 27, 13536, 199200, 274, 31920, notes that volunteers were used to spearhead attacks and mop up after them; blames the SDS (Serbian Democratic Party), NCOs, and the lower ranks for the poor performance of the JNA; and attributes Serbian victories to professional JNA officers and repower. 5. Ibid., 9091, 201, and 225, 227, 230, do not note that Serbian forces razed the village of Kijevo after occupying it in August 1991. Gow, Serbian Project, 2.

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the JNA helped to arm these units, which were already operating in Croatia in the spring of 1991.6 Like Davor Marijan, the authors of the CIA study conclude that Zagreb lacked the forces to relieve Vukovar or to hold the city, which nonetheless fullled its strategic role of disrupting the Serbian offensive. But they credit Milos evi c, not the Croatian Army (ZNG, HV) with stopping the JNA, a conclusion that seems more an exoneration of General Pani c than a realistic assessment of an army exhausted physically and morally.7 Their conclusion that the JNA was keeping the peace in Bosnia contradicts their observation that the Army supported Bosnias Serbs and is debatable, as are their conclusions that the Army reacted to the mobilization of the TO and police by a Bosnian government seeking to protect itself against Serbian paramilitary units and their comment that the JNA attacked Croatian areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992, a month before the HVO (Croatian Defense Council) was formed, in response to a Croatian initiative, or their observation that the JNA pushed down the Neretva Valley to eject Ustasha from Mostar and the port of Neum.8 Many will see a pro-Serbian, anti-Croatian bias in such statements, but the authors also praise the HV for good staff work and organization and label it the nest armed force in the Balkans by 1995.9 Yet they see both the HVO and the regular Croatian army as aggressors in Bosnia, depicting Ahmici as the Guernica of the Bosnian conict, not, as Charles Shrader does, its My Lai, and the massacre at Stupni Do as a serious war crime, not a quarrel among black marketeers. How strongly point of view inuences interpretation is obvious in their explanation of a massacre of Croatian civilians by Bosnian forces at Uzdol as a military action gone awry, an explanation similar to the one offered by Shrader for the massacre at Ahmi ci.10 It is a pity that the authors end their study with Operation Zima (Winter) in 1994 rather than following the HV, HVO, and ABH to victory in 1995. Instead, they offer a chapter that praises UNPROFOR and NATO, notes the futility of NATO air power without strong
6. CIA, Balkan Battlegrounds, 13132. 7. Ibid., 2079, also seem to credit Serbian sources that Croatian troops wore black, Ustasha uniforms, but only HOS militia wore black. 8. Ibid., 25759, 263, 29395, 345, 35658, argues that unlike Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs, the JNA had no strategic plan to dismember Bosnia. For Croatian policy, they lean heavily on Warren Zimmermanns memoirs, Tanjug, and memoirs. 9. CIA, Balkan Battlegrounds, 36465. 10. Ibid., 41719, 43435, 43740, 44950, 500501, view the seizure and ethnic cleansing of Vares by Muslim forces as retaliation for the havoc created by the Croats, even though it seems that the attack had been prepared well in advance of the massacre at Stupni Do. They also note that the UN did not object to Muslim units slitting throats during a commando-style operation on Mount Bjelasnica, a demilitarized zone.
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ground forces, and blames both Croats and Muslims for impeding the RRF (Rapid Reaction Force).11 James Gow sets out to investigate the link between strategy and war crimes in the context of the Yugoslav war. Like the CIA, he depends heavily on published sources, and, given the topic, Serbian documents. He also seems to be in search of a more elegant conceptualization that will reconcile all the factors in one serviceable approach, a goal very different from the effort by Charles Shrader and Davor Marijan to discover what actually happened.12 There is a great deal of information in Gow regarding the efforts of Serbian leaders to seize and cleanse areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the extent to which his narrative and conclusions reect Serbian sources will unsettle both Croats and Bosniaks, who will balk at his comment that Milos evi cs use of force criminalized a legitimate Serb question which sought to include all Serbians in a Serbian state, and his view of the adversaries of Milos evi cs projectCroats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albaniansas awed victims who, given the opportunity, arguably might happily have seen Serbs cleansed from the region.13 Nor will Croats and Bosniaks welcome his suggestion that Serbian cleansing and settlement of areas in Yugoslavia after 1918 gave them a legitimate claim to those areas in 1991 or his listing of Mladic as among the thirty best active generals in the world.14 Bosniaks will be particularly upset with his conclusion that the ABH (Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina) had a policy of co-locating military positions close to hospitals, so as to draw re onto them and generate international outrage. Nor will Croats be pleased with his conclusions that the war in Croatia was a defensive reaction by Serbians who felt threatened by Franjo Tudmans nationalist HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), that Croats were not bona de victims, and that Croatias Operation Storm was the byproduct of NATO air attacks and a Serbian withdrawal, an evacuation-cum-cleansing of the Serb population of the Krajina region.15 Others will be upset

11. Ibid., 54366, for their praise of Operation Zima 94 as a resounding battleeld success which set the stage for the 1995 successes by the HV and HVO. 12. Gow, Serbian Project, 2, 15. 13. Ibid., 4, 89, 31, 44, 4647, 22830. 14. Ibid., 36, 39, 183, seems to approve Mladi cs quasi-medieval strategy. For Belgrades plans to use Croatian and Bosnian Serb manpower in an armed campaign funded, run, and ultimately commanded from Belgrade, see pp. 5558, 8086, and 177. 15. Ibid., 184, 151, 16970, 198, 159, 23641, and 25051, argues that the ABH attacked its own positions and those of the UN to get sympathy; Muslim guerrillas had no compunction about murdering Serb civilians; the HVs prowess had not been tested in 1995; arguments emphasizing the role of Croatian and Bosnian forces on the ground . . . are spurious. Air power was decisive; the Croatian village of Kijevo, -man razed by Mladi cs forces in 1991, was an ethnic stain on the landscape; Tud

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that he argues that much of what Serbian forces did in Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina, and Kosovo was not only comprehensible, but also justied. Unlike the authors of the CIA study, he considers Serbian paramilitaries high-caliber forces, and he argues that shelling cities should not be viewed as a war crime, but as a form of psychological torture, intended only to harm property and to drive people out of their minds.16 In retrospect, he writes, that which appeared to be spiteful and senseless had a clear purpose: to drive out an unwanted and potentially hostile populationthat is, to cleanse the territory and so to preclude political disruption, terrorism, or guerrilla tactics.17 His argument that the adversaries of the Serbian project shaped Serbian aims, strategies, and operations seems an exoneration of Serbian forces, especially given his conclusion that they were not the aggressor. He insists that we consider the contextual character of war crimes and take seriously arguments of military necessity and proportionality, even for gross acts committed against civilians, and he suggests that only professional soldiers, not human rights activists, are qualied to judge the type and degree of force used. In short, he appears to have written a brief not for the prosecution, but for the Serbian defense. That enormous crimes had been committed in prosecuting the Serbian project, he acknowledges, but he does not believe that they justify retributive persecution.18 Davor Marijan sets out to dispel the myths and legends that have grown up around the siege of Vukovar, a city in Eastern Slavonia which became the Croatian Stalingrad. He mines Croatian and Serbian sources, particularly police and military archives, and he brings a military historians skills and sensibilities to his task. The result is a detailed study of a battle that blunted the Serbian offensive in 1991, raised Croatian morale, and became a domestic political hot potato. By focusing on the military aspects of the siege, including a JNA doctrine that was essentially defensive and the ZNG (Zbor Narodne Garde), the predecessor of the HV (Croatian Army), he explains both why Serbian forces stalled outside the city and why Croatian forces could not relieve it.19 Vukovar has been called the Croatian Stalingrad, and there are parallels. Like the Germans on the Volga in 1942, the JNA tied up a signicant portion of its forces on the Danube in 1991 for no obvious reason30,000
wanted Croatian towns attacked to implement his victim strategy; and Croatians irritated the JNA by besieging its garrisons. 16. Ibid., 184. 17. Ibid., 16165, and 175, for his comment that Serb forces drove out non-Serbs and disloyal Serbs from occupied areas. 18. Ibid., 22531. 19. Marijan, Bitka, 1436, 297300, notes a confused JNA doctrine and a chronic lack of everything among Croatian units, of which only 5 of 65 brigades were capable of operating outside the country where they were formed (matic na op cina).
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men, 1,000 AFV, 980 guns, and 750 rocket launchers to besiege a city that could as easily have been bypassed.20 Many Croats, like many Germans, nursed the illusion that they could relieve the city, but the disparity in forces and the lack of mobile forces that could operate strategically, not political chicanery, doomed the Slavonian city as surely as a lack of aircraft and armor doomed Stalingrad.21 Marijan includes a detailed discussion of the events leading up to the siege that leaves no doubt that Serbian paramilitary forces and the JNA colluded to seize Vukovar, and his accounts of the ghting are straightforward and informative, although those who hew to a Serbian interpretation of the three-month siege will nd little comfort here.22 But for those who have the necessary language skills and no dog in this ght, Marijans study is the best work on the subject and an important addition to the literature. Charles Shraders work is more controversial, and his effort to persuade his readers that the Muslims, if underdogs in their struggle against Serbian forces, were the aggressors in their conict with the Croatians will disconcert Bosniaks and those who believe the ICTY is helping to clarify rather than obfuscate the events of 199195. Like Gow, he believes most of those who have written on the war have been ill-equipped to understand its military aspects, and he rejects the distorted, counterfactual, and anecdotal evidence that underlies the underdog myth.23 Rather than the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, he argues that the fall of Jajce in late October 1992 and the consequent ood of Muslim refugees into Croatian areas provided the means and the motive for the Bosnian government to implement a strategy of occupying and clearing Central Bosnia of its Croatian inhabitants.24 What appeared to outside observers as Croatian aggression was, he argues, the use of an active defense, a concept familiar to those in the American military.25
ivota Pani 20. Ibid., 29394, cautions against putting too much faith in General Z c, as he believes Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin/BBC Books, 1996) have done. 21. Marijan, Bitka, 308. 22. Ibid., passim, esp. 4662, for his account of the massacre of Croatian police in Borovo Selo in May 1991, which differs from that of James Gow, Serbian Project, 159, who sees the murder and mutilation of Croatian police by Serbian paramilitaries there as echoes of Ustasha practice in the Second World War. 23. Shrader, Muslim-Croat War, xviixx, 24, estimates that the HVO (Croatian Defense Council) was outnumbered 3:1 in Central Bosnia by the ABH (Army of BosniaHerzegovina). For the development of the ABH, see Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: Saqi Books, 2004). 24. Shrader, Muslim-Croat War, 3 ff., and 171 n. 3 sees the formation of the 7th Muslim Motorized Brigade and the 17th Krajina Mountain Brigade in November 1992, and the 27th Krajina Mountain Brigade in June 1993, as signicant, since all were comprised of refugees and all were deployed against Croatian forces in Central Bosnia. 25. Ibid., 5859.

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Shrader sets the stage by discussing the historical context of the Muslim-Croat conict and the physical environment in which it occurred. He also examines the opposing forces, their training and equipment, and their effective command, control, and communications.26 He bases his account on ICTY documents, and he seeks to make his reader rethink the war. Given the state of HVO communications, he asks, could the HVO command exercise effective command and control over its units? Should the HVO have been held accountable for actions by HOS (Croatian Defense Force), which operated as a branch of the ultra-nationalist HSP (Croatian Party of Rights), a political rival of Tudmans HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), which controlled the HVO (Croatian Defense Council)? How does one evaluate the actions of commando groups like the Vitezi (Knights), which operated behind enemy lines with less than orthodox methods? At what point does clearing a village of civilians to protect them become confused with ethnic cleansing? What role did mercenaries, criminals, and mujahedin play in radicalizing the war? Were UN and European Community observers a mixed blessing, given their efforts to impede employment of troops, their tendency to pass on sensitive information, their attacks on some belligerents, and the criminal activities of some UN units?27 Shraders arguments and conclusions will disconcert and unsettle those who believe, as James Gow does, that the Muslims were the only bona de victims in Bosnia. His account of the massacre in the village of Ahmic i on 16 April 1993 is a case in point. While the CIA study follows the ICTY in portraying the massacre as premeditated, Shrader argues that Ahmi ci was a legitimate military target, defended by ABH (Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina) forces, and therefore the objective of an HVO spoiling attack by the 4th Military Police Battalion. He deplores the massacre that resulted when the commander lost control of his troops, but he views it as an aberration, not part of a pattern of persecution, and he provides accounts of other HVO operations to show that the Croats operated according to the laws of war.28 Because Shrader bases his argument on ICTY documents, interviews, and rst-hand knowledge of the ground over which Croats and Muslims contended, his work is a major, if controversial, addition to the eld and adds signicantly to our knowledge of military

26. Ibid., 545. 27. Ibid., 4553, 86, 96, notes, for example that the HVO temporarily removed civilians from villages in combat zones and that in some areas both Muslim and Croatian civilians abandoned their villages before and during combat. 28. Ibid., 92100. Persecution, a pattern of persecuting enemy civilians, is central to the indictments by the ICTY. Shraders argument that Ahmici and Stupni Do, pp. 15458, were exceptions is a rejection of charges that ethnic cleansing was HVO policy.
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operations in Central Bosnia; it should be required reading for anyone interested in these conicts.29 Indeed, all four books need to be read by those interested in the Yugoslav wars of succession. Each contributes its own point of view, based on a particular data base and the views of the various authors, and lacking a standard interpretation, we have little choice but to read what is in print if we want to make sense of a seemingly senseless set of conicts. Writing eight years ago, Sarah Kent noted that specialists were still arguing over facts, not just interpretations.30 This is still the case.

29. Ibid., 16063, presents a list of lessons we can take away from the conict, including his belief that it was typical of a type of intrastate conict between religious and ethnic groups seeking to control a given territorial space that resembles tribal warfare or the nationalist wars of the 1800s. 30. Sarah Kent, Writing the Yugoslav Wars: English-Language Books on Bosnia (19921996) and the Challenge of Analyzing Contemporary History, American Historical Review 102 (October 1997): 10851114, notes that critical perspective was lacking in 1997, and the literature was suffused with myth, propaganda, oversimplications, and [misleading] analogies.

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