Authors

Discussion

“The conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina is basically a conflict among peoples. Just as it was in the case between India and Pakistan, and that’s nothing new, it resulted in a huge resettlement of the peoples. Muslims cannot live with others. We must be clear on that. They couldn’t live with the Hindus, who are as peaceful as sheep.”

So said Radovan Karadžić in a speech to a gathering of his party in late February 1992, just weeks prior to the outbreak of the Bosnian War. It would not be the only time he made such a comparison to the partition of India, nor the only prior case of ethnic partition which he sought to invoke as a model for the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina: among others, he would also at times draw analogies to the 1921 partition of Ireland and the 1948 partition of Palestine. These three cases have been considered archetypal by prior historians of partitionism (most notably Arie Dubnov & Laura Robson in their essential 2019 collection Partitions) who have argued that later cases tended to follow their trajectories.

Additionally, these three aforementioned cases all had in common the role of British imperial power (and the departure of the presence of that power) in crafting the partitions. While British power was of course significantly diminished by the time of the Yugoslav Wars, British officials such as Lords Peter Carrington and David Owen continued to have an outsized role in the international mediation effort, and indeed throughout the peace process it was these British officials who pushed more strongly for partitionist proposals to bring an end to the war. The UN peacekeeping contingent also included a large British contingent, many of whom had previously served in Northern Ireland - of the five commanding officers of peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, two were British.

This paper explores and makes the case that Karadžić and Serb nationalism consciously sought to appeal to this peculiar “British track” of 20th ethnic partitionist diplomacy to win sympathy or acceptance for their own project of an ethnically partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina.