The sack of Mostar, 1992–1994: The politico‐military connection

Abstract

To date, most of the academic and journalistic accounts and analyses have treated the Bosnian War as a relatively uniform conflict among two or three warring parties along a nearly 1,000 km‐long front line. Yet the most militarily charged and conflictual spots along this line were several strategic urban areas such as Bihac, Mostar, Sarajevo, Brcko, Tuzla, Srebrenica and Gorazde. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina can thus also be viewed as a collection of local wars. By focusing on the case of Mostar the authors argue that these local conflicts were part of a state‐building process, but that, due to the connivance among the different militias and state armies on the ground, the Mafia‐style war economy, as well as thanks to the newly emerged ethnically based institutions and ruling elites, such process resulted in a polity that more resembles a seventeenth‐century pirate colony than a modern state. In this sense the word ‘sack’ instead of ‘war’ describes more aptly the politico‐military dimension of the war waged in and around Mostar.

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