The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

200 annihilating difference
has become known as the “Lasva Valley Offensive.” The offensive is described in
several U.N. Criminal Tribunal documents in connection with indictments of HVO
soldiers who are believed to have held command responsibilities during the offensive.
In 1999, General Tihomir Blaskic was sentenced to forty-five years in prison
by the court at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague for “having ordered
the commission of a crime against humanity for persecution of the Muslim
civilians of Bosnia in the municipalities of Vitez, Busovaca and Kiseljak.” Particularly
aggravating was the massacre of 116 inhabitants, including women and children,
in Ahmidi, a small village in the municipality of Vitez, an area believed to
be under the command of General Blaskid. (Five other Croat military and political
leaders have been indicted on the same accounts.) Although the HVO initially
had considerable military and political success in carving out a Croatian “statelet,”
by the summer of 1993 the HVO was losing ground to Bosnian government forces
(ABiH—Armija Bosne i Hercegovine), who were also engaging in revenge attacks
in central Bosnia and expelling Croats and burning and looting their homes. In Zagreb,
politicians and intellectuals were becoming increasingly critical of President
Tudjman’s policies in Bosnia. At a point when domestic and international criticisms
against Tudjman’s war in Bosnia were running high, and the HVO continued to
lose ground to the Bosnian government forces, the United States took the initiative
to create a federation between the Croats and the Bosniacs in B-H. 18
The Washington Agreement was signed in March 1994. The agreement set the
framework for a future common administration and state structure, and provided
for an immediate cessation of hostilities between the two parties. The war between
the HVO and the ABiH (and by extension between the Croat and the Muslim communities)
started almost a year later and ended a year and a half before the war
ended between the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) and the ABiH with the signing of
the Dayton Agreement in November 1995. It had several of the characteristics of
the war in Northern and Eastern Bosnia that the Bosnian Serb Army was waging
against non-Serb civilians, but it was also different in many respects. It was preceded
by a public rhetoric of exclusion portraying Muslims first in demeaning and
dehumanizing ways, and then as attackers out to destroy the Croats. Muslim inhabitants
were persecuted through campaigns of terror, expulsions, and the destruction
of homes and mosques. The ferociousness of the campaign to force Muslims
from territory controlled by the Croat separatists (HVO/HDZ) varied quite
considerably from area to area, and particularly between Herzegovina and parts
of central Bosnia. The HVO do not appear to have organized or committed mass
killings on a scale comparable with that of the Bosnian Serb Army. This may be
explained by several factors, though I will suggest only a few. First, the Bosnian
Army was better equipped and better prepared for combat at the time when war
broke out with the HVO (indeed, when the BSA attacked there was no Bosnian
Army). Second, there was a vocal opposition among Croats within Bosnia, but more
important within Croatia, against the war with the Sarajevo government and “the
Muslims” in Bosnia. Furthermore, Croatian popular opinion as well as that of the