The Serbs Of Bosnia Herzegovina

Divide and Fall?, the first full-length analysis of the post-Cold War revival of ethnic partition, is a major intervention in the study of international relations. Radha Kumar examines the carve-up of Bosnia, comparing it to earlier divisions of Ireland, India, Palestine and Cyprus.

This book examines the historical, cultural and political dimensions of the crisis in Bosnia and the international efforts to resolve it. It provides a detailed analysis of international proposals to end the fighting, from the Vance-Owen plan to the Dayton Accord, with special attention to the national and international politics that shaped them. It analyzes the motivations and actions of the warring parties, neighbouring states and international actors including the United States, the United Nations, the European powers, and others involved in the war and the diplomacy surrounding it. With guides to sources and documentation, abundant tabular data and over 30 maps, this should be a definitive volume on the most vexing conflict of the post-Soviet period.

Mahmutcehaji'c (former vice president of the Bosnia-Herzegovina government) first prepared this text as a lecture to be given at Stanford University in 1997, but he was unexpectedly denied a visa to enter the United States. The book is an indictment of the partition of Bosnia and a plea for Bosnia's communities to reject ethnic segregation and restore mutual trust. He argues that different religious and ethnic cultures have co-existed in Bosnia for centuries, and that the partitioning was made possible by Western complicity with Serbian and Croatian nationalists. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

An indictment of the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, formalized in 1995 by the Dayton Accord. The war in Bosnia divided and shook the country to its foundations, but the author argues it could become a model for European progress. The greatest danger for Bosnia is to be declared just another ethnoreligious entity, in this case a 'Muslim State' ghettoized inside Europe. The author examines why Western liberal democracies have regarded with sympathy the struggles of Serbia and Croatia for national recognition, while viewing Bosnia's multicultural society with suspicion.

Who are the Serbs? Branded by some as Europe's new Nazis, they are seen by others—and by themselves—as the innocent victims of nationalist aggression and of an implacably hostile world media. In this challenging new book, Timothy Judah, who covered the war years in former Yugoslavia for the London Times and the Economist, argues that neither is true. Exploring the Serbian nation from the great epics of its past to the battlefields of Bosnia and the backstreets of Kosovo, he sets the fate of the Serbs within the story of their past. This wide-ranging, scholarly, and highly readable account opens with the windswept fortresses of medieval kings and a battle lost more than six centuries ago that still profoundly influences the Serbs. Judah describes the idea of "Serbdom" that sustained them during centuries of Ottoman rule, the days of glory during the First World War, and the genocide against them during the Second. He examines the tenuous ethnic balance fashioned by Tito and its unraveling after his death. And he reveals how Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president, used a version of history to drive his people to nationalist euphoria. Judah details the way Milosevic prepared for war and provides gripping eyewitness accounts of wartime horrors: the burning villages and "ethnic cleansing," the ignominy of the siege of Sarajevo, and the columns of bedraggled Serb refugees, cynically manipulated and then abandoned once the dream of a Greater Serbia was lost. This first in-depth account of life behind Serbian lines is not an apologia but a scrupulous explanation of how the people of a modernizing European state could become among the most reviled of the century. Rejecting the stereotypical image of a bloodthirsty nation, Judah makes the Serbs comprehensible by placing them within the context of their history and their hopes.

The first comprehensive study of national identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ranging from medieval times to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992, this volume concentrates on the internal development of the Muslim community in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its relations with various suzerains. This updated edition features new bibliographic material, including a new section on resources covering Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia available through the Internet.