Marko Atilla Hoare,The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History

Reviewed by: Tea Sindbæk, Copenhagen University, Denmark

The history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia is both difficult to cope with and complicated to grasp. The war was a chaotic combination of a war of resistance against the Axis and Fascist occupiers of Yugoslavia and a complex civil war between different groups of Yugoslavs, divided along political and national lines, who fought each other, sometimes in collaboration with the occupying powers. Within the framework of the war, genocide and large-scale massacres of civilians were committed. The Second World War brought the communists to power in Yugoslavia and enabled them, as part of a socialist revolution, to rebuild the state as a multinational federation and a communist one-party state.

Marko Atilla Hoare’s study of the Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War will make a great contribution to our understanding of this complex history. Though the book’s title emphasizes the Second World War, what Hoare really aims to analyse is the Yugoslav socialist revolution, which, he claims, had its epicentre in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Due to the power balances between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Bosnia, argues Hoare, was the key to power in Yugoslavia, and the Muslims the key to power in Bosnia. A main theme, therefore, is the effort by the communist-led ‘People’s Liberation Movement’ (that is both the partisan army and the social, political and propagandistic work behind the front) to win over Bosnia’s Muslims for its cause.

In eight long chapters, the book takes the reader chronologically and thematically through the Second World War in Bosnia-Hercegovina, often drawing in the wider Yugoslav context. The first chapters describe the many different interest and opposition groups acting in Bosnia and the grassroots resistance activities by the People’s Liberation Movement in the first years of the war. The remaining six chapters deal with the last two years of the war in Bosnia, with a particular focus on the establishment of administrative and state institutions, paving the way for the communist revolution.

Hoare does a very good job of combining the general picture with detailed accounts, while not losing sight of the complexity of events. He is careful to emphasize both the complicated connections between activists of different groups and the frequent blurring of categories. During the Second World War in Yugoslavia there could be close personal relations between members of sternly opposed groups such as the Communist Party and the Croatian Fascist Ustasha movement, which were both radical and revolutionary underground movements in interwar Yugoslavia. Especially in Bosnia the boundaries between Partisan military units and the Serbian nationalist militias, the so-called Chetniks, were often uncertain, with individual fighters and sometimes whole units shifting between the two groups, as Hoare himself has shown in earlier studies.

The book benefits greatly from Hoare’s substantial work in the archives and careful reading of numerous memoirs. One of its greatest strengths is the detailed description of events on the ground, sometimes including personal narratives, such as that of Dušanka Kovačević, a young communist activist, who escaped from an Ustasha prison, thanks to her personal connections within the Ustasha movement. The numerous accounts of the Partisans’ difficulties in setting up governing institutions in areas where their cause was not favoured by the majority give fascinating, clear, close-up pictures of the practical revolutionary work that led to the establishment of Communist power in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. And archive reports of the problems presented by the inclusion of new fighters from enemy militias, such as the Chetniks and the regular armed forces of the quisling regimes, provide interesting illustrations of the ideological challenges and propagandistic efforts of the Partisan Army.

In publishing this eminent study, Hoare aims to challenge what he sees as the widely accepted myth of a pristine Communist revolution carried out by a unitary and homogenous Yugoslav Communist Party. While the sense of such a myth may be exaggerated, Hoare is certainly right in pointing out that there is a lack of good English-language research on the Yugoslav Partisans and the development of Communist and Partisan power. Thus, this study of the Partisans and the workings of the Partisan movement is most welcome. Hoare generously adds to our knowledge of the ways in which the People’s Liberation Movement worked also outside the much-studied and mythologized battlefields, in the towns and villages, at the grassroots level, and how it mobilized support across ethnicity, gender, class and even ideological inclinations.