Islamic and democratic forces in the Bosnian camp
The left's inability to mobilise a solidarity movement with democratic forces in former Yugoslavia is partly the result of a thorough confusion over who is who, and who we should support. This is especially true in Bosnia, where the relationship between anti-chauvinist and democratic currents and the Islamic leadership of the state is complex and inpenetrable.
This extract from a longer report is an attempt to clarify the situation.
International Viewpoint #264 MARCH 1995 by Catherine Samary
The differences which run through the Muslim SDA between the Islamic and civil factions are becoming more and more apparant. The Prime MinisterAlija Izetbegovic) is aiming at making Bosian society fully Muslim. But this project can only be defended either by being a minority movement in a lay and multinational state or by going towards a division of the Muslim' state which would be more easily controlled by religious movements. Since the beginning of the war, Izetbegovic's oscillations have been hesitations between these two alternatives, the first having the advantage of offering a larger state for Islamist propaganda and the second which is more homogenous. The difficulties of coexistence, seen in the open fight with the other nationalist parties, clearly favours a division into three states. Certain Muslims will find themselves in this situation through fundamentalist conviction, others through despair.
But the large majority of Bosnian Muslims (as an ethnic/national community) are secular. Their attachment to Bosnia is more 'national' - it is the country where they lived and were dominant for centuries when Bosnia was part of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, part of whom lie at the extremes of the country near the neighbouring Serbian and Croatian republics, the Muslims have no other state than Bosnia. The SDA therefore contains another faction, the civil *Bosnian Muslim Nationalist movement. Currently its main representative is the Prime Minister, Haris Silajdzic. The defense of the Bosnian State's frontiers is the biggest priority of this faction - by whatever means: international military intervention and a 'national liberation' war. The lack of a majority in the country makes it necessary to forge alliances and engage in multi-ethnic debate; but its programme remains hazy and in the process of evolution - trapped between its alliance with the current Muslim Islamists and the Nationalist Croat Party and for the moment with the anti-nationalist opposition. But this last party is very marginalised: the Sarajevo Circle of 99 which organised a petition, with more than 200,000 Sarajevan signatures on it, against the division of the town was quickly attacked for being 'tohetnik'. If the discussion is multi-ethnic the policy that dominates the Federation would not give equal status to the Serbs. And the nationalist parties demonstrate the placid juxtaposition of community interests (villages) more than the logic (more urban or industrial) of ethnic blending and of 'Bosnian' citizenship... Only the war and the logic of reinforcing Muslim representation in a single party keeps the SDA together.
In effect, the Islamist offensive (notably in the 7th brigade of the Bosnian Army which is recruiting many Muslim refugees from the countryside) has been publicly denounced recently by five members, Serbians, Croatians, Muslims and the Bosnian Presidency (where the SDA is in the minority). The following points made on this subject are important for the future: the Bosnian army is as heterogeneous as the SDA and the Bosnian Parliament - which includes the opposition parties and non-nationalists. The criticisms formulated by the five nonmembers of the SDA about the Presidency aim to explicitly preserve its lay character in the army. Its Islamisation signifies the explosion of the Federation. But the power games and territories between the nationalist parties are another cause of fragility. The United States are on the point of admitting that they actually envisage a type of 'protectorate' or a team of unbiased experts on conflicts putting the parties on opposing sides in the Federation... And the Left?
The Left is dramatically absent from the scene. The non-nationalist democrats, in Bosnia as in Croatia or Serbia, are often cut off from their people, profoundly turned towards this 'International Community' and the European Union, expecting the earth from them - in other words they regard them as one of their own, the partisans of democracy and market economy, the true Europeans. Now the forces which count, the negociators, the regimes supported by these 'defenders of human rights governments are the nationalist parties. Bitterness runs deep
[...] At the moment the drama is only being played out amongst the peasant population (who are the base of radical nationalism in each camp), security is about being inside 'good frontiers" - those of the ethnic/national state which will protect your property. The workers in Yugoslavia are often peasant/workers. Moreover they have been split, divided by a very categorised self-governing system and decentralised. What is destroying Yugoslavia (and what has ravaged the rest of world since the 80s) is also preventing the emergence of a credible alternative: market liberalism - each man for himself, each republican power to be for privatisation and incorporation into the world market.
The opposition parties have taken the much sought after label of social democrats' and sometimes, although more rarely, socialists. But here, as in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, there are two principle types: either a liberal market economy or a tendancy towards Milosovic style nationalist populism... *
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