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In October, 1992, Jajce, an important town northwest of Travnik
on the main road to Banja Luka, had been under siege by the
Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) for nearly five months. A mixed garrison
of Croatian Defense Council and Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
soldiers defended the town and its two important power stations.
They were supported from Travnik over a tenuous, narrow, twenty-five-mile-long
corridor through Serb-held territory. Reinforcements, food,
ammunition, and other vital supplies were brought forward by
truck, usually at night. Constantly under fire, the nightly
convoys that snaked from Travnik along the primitive road through
rough mountain terrain barely sufficed to keep Jajce's beleaguered
ganison and civilian population alive. On October 27, 1992,
the BSA's I Krajina Corps acted to end the siege of Jajce with
an all-out attack preceded by several air strikes. The following
day, Jajce's HVO defenders evacuated their sick and wounded
along with the Croat civilian residents before abandoning the
town that evening. The Muslim soldiers and civilians soon followed
when, on October 29, the BSA entered the town and began a program
of "ethnic cleansing" that resulted in what has been
called "the largest and most wretched single exodus"
of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
For many of the
thirty thousand refugees who fled over the mountains or down
the by-then notorious "Vietnam Road" toward the
relative safety of Travnik, it was not the first time they
had been forced to flee before the BSA. Many had fled earlier
to Jajce from Banja Luka, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Kotor Varos,
and other towns and villages in the Bosanska-Krajina region.
For the most part, the HVO soldiers and Croat refugees who
fled Jajce filtered down into the relative safety of Herzegovina
or even into Croatia itself. The twenty thousand or so Muslim
refugees, on the other hand, had no place else to go and therefore
remained in Travnik, Novi Travnik, Vitez, Busovaca, or villages
near Bila and Zenica. Amidst mutual accusations of having
abandoned the defense of the city, both the HVO and the ABiH
were forced to repair the substantial military damage suffered
while their respective civilian authorities were faced with
the problems caused by a major influx of refugees into the
central Bosnia area.
Therein
lay the seeds of the coming conflict. The Muslim refugees
from Jajce posed both a problem and an opportunity for Alija
Izetbegovic's government. The problem was where to relocate
them. The opportunity was a military one: the large number
of military age males, well motivated for revenge against
the Serbs and equally ready to take on the Croats, provided
a pool from which the ABiH could fill up existing units and
form new mobile ones that would then be available to undertake
offensive missions. Until the last months of 1992, the lack
of mobile units trained and motivated for offensive operations
had prevented the ABiH from mounting a sustained offensive
action against the BSA or anyone else. However, the influx
of refugees from Jajce, combined with large numbers of military-age
refugees from eastern Bosnia and the arrival of fundamentalist
Muslim fighters (mujahideen) from abroad, made it possible
for the ABiH to form such mobile units and to contemplate
offensive action on a large scale for the first time.
Thus,
contrary to the commonly accepted view, it was the fall of
Jajce at the end of October, 1992, not the publication of
the details of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) in January,
1993, that precipitated the Muslim-Croat conflict in central
Bosnia. It was the Muslims, who had both the means and motive
to strike against their erstwhile ally. The United Nations-backed
VOPP proposed the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into ten
provinces, each of which-except for the one surrounding Sarajevo-
would be dominated by one of the three principal ethnic groups.
The plan's details were announced in December, 1992, and the
supporting map was released the following month. The common
but nevertheless erroneous argument is that the Muslim-Croat
conflict in central Bosnia arose from the Bosnian Croats'
premature and ruthless efforts to implement the plan in the
central Bosnian provinces assigned to them.1 However, that
argument rests on faulty post hoc propter hoc reasoning unsupported
by convincing factual evidence as to means, motive, and opportunity.
Nor does it take into account the time required to plan and
execute an offensive campaign. Open conflict between the Muslims
and Croats in Central Bosnia broke out on January 14, 1993,
just two days after the VOPP cantonal map was finalized in
Geneva but two and one-half months after Jajce fell.
On the
other hand, the temporal and causative connections between
the massive influx of Muslim refugees into central Bosnia
following Jajce's fall and the outbreak of the Muslim-Croat
conflict are clear. Their disruptive presence in central Bosnia's
towns and villages, their incorporation into the ABiH's new
mobile offensive units, and the urgent need to find them living
space are well-known and widely accepted facts. The role they
played as the catalyst for the Muslim-Croat conflict was pointed
out by Franjo Nakic, the former HVO Operative Zone Central
Bosnia chief of staff, and many other witnesses appearing
before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Fomer Yugoslavia
in The Hague. As Nakic succinctly stated, "the Croats
and Muslims, the local ones, would never have entered into
a conflict were it not for the influx of these refugees who
sought a space for themselves, having lost their own in Western
and Eastern Bosnia."2
______________________________
1 The
unsubstantiated opinion that the Muslim-Croat conflict in
central Bosnia was precipitated by the Croat insistence on
early implementation of the VOPP surfaced early in the conflict.
For example, Lt. Col. Robert A. Stewart, commander of the
British UNPROFOR battalion in the Lasva Valley, recorded in
his diary that he had expressed to the Equerry to the Prince
of Wales his belief that “the HVO were causing problems in
order to force the Muslims to agree to the Geneva Peace Plan”
(Stewart diary, Jan. 29, 1993, sec. 3, 12, KC D56/1 and KC
d104/1). It has also been promoted by journalists (e.g. Peter
Maas in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, n 286); by human
rights organizations (e.g. Helsinki Watch [Human Rights Watch]
in War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 2:379-81); and in other
Western publications (e.g. Jane’s Information Group, Jane’s
Bosnia Handbook, sec. 2, 3-4).
2 Franjo
Nakic, Kordic-Cerkez trial testimony, Apr. 13, 2000. Nakic
was chief of staff of the HVO’s OZCB from December 1992 to
December 1996.
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