Divide and Fall? - Bosnia in the Annals of Partition by Radha Kumar Verso 207pp, £14 in UK
When back in the late summer of 1995 NATO decided to get tough on Bosnia, many breathed a great sigh of relief that at last our political and military leaders were taking action. The planned destruction of a society by Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies in Serbia and Bosnia appeared to be in reversal. But a just resolution of this conflict, which was much less a war than "parish-pump genocide", failed to materialise.
The Dayton Agreement, signed in the wake of the Alliance's massive assault on the Bosnian Serb Army, ultimately gave the "ethnonationalists" through negotiation what they murdered, raped, pillaged and destroyed for from 1992-5. Radha Kumar's erudite study of partition in Bosnia during the war and its aftermath, and in several other countries, seeks to "counter the recently revived idea that partition can be a solution to ethnic conflict". She believes Dayton - which on paper insists on the territorial integrity of Bosnia but in the reality of its (non)implementation means fragmentation and consequently partition - has given a new lease of life to "ethnic partition".
Divide and Fall? seeks to locate the Balkan episode in a historical context of mainly British attempts at partition in "ethnic" disputes. Kumar says that support for current variants on partition theory draw on British colonial justification that it is the most satisfactory "lesser evil"; turning the argument around, it is a humane policy precisely because it achieves through negotiation what would otherwise be achieved through war. She examines in some detail the experience of partition in Ireland, India, Palestine and Cyprus and draws out some useful points of comparison.
But ultimately Kumar argues that partition policies as a solution to ethnic conflict will be seen as doing more harm that good and that Bosnia will be the turning point of partition theory. What grounds are there for such optimism?
Unfortunately, Divide and Fall? gets bogged down in the dramatic detail of historic partition and with its own obsession with continuity in great-power policy making. The use of terms such as "divide and rule" and "divide and quit", though catchy, merely obfuscate. These originate respectively from colonial rule and the decolonisation process and don't really further analysis of the current predicament in Bosnia. Why SFOR may be withdrawn from Bosnia has much more to do with a lack of political will to deter aggression and ensure aggression doesn't pay - a key feature of the war, which the author doesn't fully elucidate - than policies deriving from Britain's "divide and quit" strategy on India, for example. A study of the relationship between the policies of appeasement and partition would be of greater value.
To its credit, Divide and Fall? presents a thorough critical history of the war and the various peace plans which laid the path to partition. She is rightly sceptical about the efforts of the international community to negotiate a peace, and explains how various international efforts led towards the kind of de facto partition existing today. The void at the heart of this study is the failure to suggest or even hint at any alternative policy for action.
But perhaps the assumption that Bosnia will presage a turn away from partition, i.e. will sour the idea of partition itself, is this work's biggest flaw. No serious case is put for this eventuality, despite it being a key argument of the book. She assumes, correctly, that the aim of a unified Bosnia will fail if there is no push to arrest war criminals and protect refugees returning to cleansed areas. What isn't clear is why a lesser evil, such as Cyprus-style partition, that may well drag on for the next twenty years or more, won't be acceptable to the major powers when it served so well in the past. As in the Cypriot, Irish and Indian cases, the policy provided a lasting means of containment. It is this that served the short-term objectives of foreign ministers with one eye on their poll ratings and the other on a future mediation role in the next international crisis.
Gregory Kent's book, Moral Solidarity, the Media and the War in Bosnia, will be published next year