ABSTRACT
Between December 1990 and April 1992 the fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina hung in the balance. The first democratic elections in the history of the republic produced a deeply divided political system. As the republic became politically polarized from within, the external environment became chaotic. When war broke out in Croatia in summer 1991, Croats and Serbs from Bosnia joined in the fray. The Croats began training Muslims for war in Bosnia. The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) trained and armed Serb reservists throughout Bosnia. In the fall, the JNA sent reservists from Montenegro rampaging across Herzegovina. Elsewhere, Bosnia was a zone of relative quiet, surrounded on three sides by violence, ethnic cleansing, and destruction. The Bosnian media propagated the notion that Bosnia's traditions of national tolerance would help it avoid war. President Izetbegovic contributed to this "suspension of disbelief' by insisting that he knewhow, he did not explain-that war would not come to Bosnia. On the eve of the outbreak of the war, he insisted that the conflicts in Bosnia were being fabricated and would end after recognition. 1
Yet the ability of Bosnia to avoid violence was rapidly diminishing as a result of two developments. The first was the onset within Bosnia of a veritable revolution from above. The three national parties began a purge of state administration, replacing those cadres still loyal to the Titoist system with persons loyal to the national parties. The nationalists thus destroyed the intricate system of interethnic checks and balances that had been at the heart of the Titoist system.2 The second development took place outside Bosnia. We have argued in chapter 2 that Bosnia-Herzegovina had survived, despite its history of ethnic violence and social conflict, because it
had been a ward of other multinational states from the middle of the fifteenth century onward. Periods of ethnic strife in Bosnia had been closely associated with the decline or military defeat of these states. The period from 1990 onward, when Yugoslavia collapsed, proved no exception. The breakup of Yugoslavia, the only authentic multinational state in the Balkans, generated deep fissures within an already politically divided Bosnia. Both these developments are examined here.
