Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

Scholars and diplomats who attended a 1999 conference on Bosnia held at
the University of Western Ontario have produced a highly credible,
thought-provoking book. The papers delivered there and published here
argue that until the 1990s, Bosnia’s Muslims were liberal, tolerant
types, who also married people of other faiths. (This is in keeping with
my own observations during a 1980 visit to Sarajevo. It was Ramadan, but
non-Muslims had no trouble finding restaurants that were open during
daylight hours. Women dressed in Western European style emerged from
mosques, slipped their veils into their purses, and disappeared into the
crowd indistinguishable from anyone else.) Unfortunately, Serb and Croat
demonization of Muslims in general combined with clumsy Western
(including Canadian) diplomacy pushed the Bosnians into the embrace of
non-European Muslims and transformed Bosnian Muslims into more militant
and culturally distinct Muslims.

John V.A. Fines blames Western powers for believing Serb and Croat
propaganda and trying to divide Bosnia along religious lines. Until
Westerners began to exert pressure, says Fine, Bosnian leaders sought to
have a pluralistic society. Once that hope evaporated, Christians fled
from predominantly Muslim areas, and vice versa. As the need to placate
non-Muslims disappeared, more dogmatic and conservative Muslims took
control or exerted pressure on those who had control. Tone Bringa argues
that Muslims were not the only group to become more militant. Roman
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs did likewise as religion became the
means of asserting or exhibiting nationality.

The 11 Canadian and American historians, theologians, anthropologists,
and diplomats who wrote these articles have read the literature, lived
among the people, or participated in the diplomacy that determined
Bosnia’s fate. Yet, there are disagreements. Peter W. Galbraith, U.S.
ambassador to Croatia at the time of the Dayton Accords, challenges the
assertion that his country and its allies imposed a religiously divided
structure on Bosnia. He says that there was no choice. According to
Nader Hashemi, Canadian diplomacy dismantled “a multi-ethnic society,
rewarded aggression, and prolonged the war in the Balkans.”

An index would have made this fine book even better.