Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and Chetniks, 1941-1943 by MarkoAttila HoareReview by: Heather WilliamsSlavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Summer, 2008), pp. 465-466Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652871 .

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Book Reviews 465

Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and Chetniks, 1941-1943. By Marko Attila Hoare. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2006. xiv, 386

pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Maps. $99.00, hard bound.

Marko Attila Hoare has given us a well-written and detailed narrative of the emergence of the communist partisans in

Bosnia-Herzegovina and the development of the civil war with their noncommunist rivals, the "Chetniks." It is set against the backdrop of the forc

ible inclusion of Bosnia-Herzegovina into the "independent" state of Croatia in which

Ante Pavelic's brutal fascist Ustashas set about murdering, expelling, or

forcibly converting to Catholicism the Serbian Orthodox population. In addition the state was divided into

spheres of influence between competing German and Italian occupiers. Hoare argues that a

specific, Bosnian consciousness produced a Bosnian revolution.

Resistance began in self-defense against the Ustasha massacres and was, therefore,

overwhelmingly Serb and peasant, in the tradition of nineteenth-century uprisings against the Ottoman empire. In order to achieve their revolution, the Communist Party of Yu

goslavia (KPJ) had to harness the politically unsophisticated masses. Drawing on a range

of sources, including interviews with Partisan veterans, the author provides an interesting

account of how the KPJ set about doing this, while attempting to turn the movement into a "multinational" one. He paints

a clear and wide-ranging picture of the very particular economic and social conditions prevailing in Bosnia by the eve of the war and argues that

the fluidity between urban and rural populations aided the growth of the KPJ's influence

disproportionate to its membership. He notes that this influence was insufficient to create

a revolutionary movement, however, and details the problems confronting the KPJ in its

struggle to ensure the loyalty of forces under its leadership. These included divisions and

competition within the communist leadership itself, Partisan policies that sometimes alien

ated both the population and their own followers, the occasional lack of discipline among their forces, and the civil war and the propensity of people to switch sides. Hoare recounts

the complex situation throughout Bosnia area by area, giving a meticulous account of dif

ferences stemming from local circumstances, and provides a vivid picture of the total chaos

that often prevailed. We also get a clear picture of the horror of civil strife.

Surprisingly, in such a detailed study, he misses the fact that the Partisan offer of a

truce with the Germans was not rejected by the latter: negotiations went on at increasingly

high levels and the truce that lasted around six weeks contributed to the Partisans' victory over the Chetniks on the Neretva River. This was why Josip Broz Tito ordered that there

should be "no conflict with the Germans" on 29 March 1943 and why it was an "unex

pected blow from behind" (338-39) when the Germans resumed their offensive when the

truce was ended on Adolph Hitler's orders. Despite the resulting setback for the Partisans, Hoare concludes that by autumn the Partisans had won the contest with the Chetniks for

the political and military dominance of the Bosnian Serbs.

Seeking to relate the events of 1940s Bosnia to the conflict there in the 1990s, Hoare

concludes that the communists never quite succeeded in "changing the consciousness of

their rank and file" and perceives the 1990s as "a rematch of the Partisan-Chetnik war of

half a century before" (352). Possibly the attempt to make this link, without touching on

events and socioeconomic factors in the intervening years, accounts for the contradic

tions between some of his conclusions and the evidence he presents in the narrative: for

example, he introduces the "Chetnik Movement" as though it were a single entity and

asserts that it was "genocidal and collaborationist" (8). But he later tells us that it was

not a disciplined, centralized movement with a

leadership capable of ordering the geno cide of Bosnian Muslims, that there were considerable local variations in the treatment

of Muslims, and that, in some cases, Muslims were members of Chetnik bands. He credits

Draza Mihailovic with leadership of the Chetniks and their "genocidal" policy before go

ing on to say that his Yugoslav Army in the Homeland held no sway at all with the Bosnian

Chetnik leadership. The rather unsubtle heaping together of all non-Partisan elements

in occupied Yugoslavia sometimes leads to inaccuracies, especially on the question of col

laboration and "Great Serbia" and engenders a slight suspicion that he is a little too close

to his Partisan sources, with perhaps a whiff of their wartime propaganda creeping in.

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466 Slavic Review

Despite these reservations, this is a useful addition to the history of the Partisan move

ment, although for a wider view it should be read in conjunction with other studies of

wartime Yugoslavia.

Heather Williams

University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Czeslaw Milosz et le vingti?me si?cle. Ed. Maria Delaperri?re. M?moires de la Soci?t? Histo

rique et Litt?raire Polonaise. Paris: Institut d'?tudes slaves, 2006. 303 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. Photographs. Tables. 32.00, paper.

This rich collection of essays, published in French, is the product of a commemorative con

ference on the late Czeslaw Milosz convened in June 2005. Edited by Maria Delaperri?re, these proceedings consist of six sections of essays arranged thematically, along with a dozen

or so of Milosz's poems side by side in Polish and French. The majority of the essays were

penned by leading Polish literary scholars, such as Jacek Lukasiewicz, Tomasz W?jcik, and

Marta Wyka. Several among them?namely Aleksander Fiut, Wlodzimierz Bolecki, Michel

Maslowski, and Jerzy Jarzebski?enjoy a more international presence as well. The texts,

along with the poems?ranging from selections from Trzy zimy (Three winters, 1936) to

more recent works from Druga przestrzen (The second dimension, 2002)?offer a solid

framework for appreciating the recurrent passions and preoccupations of Poland's best

known Nobel Prize Laureate over his eight-decade-long career in letters.

There is much here to satisfy the general reader and the Milosz enthusiast alike. The

thematics of the six sections nicely synthesize some of the chief approaches taken in re

cent Milosz reception and criticism. They are titled: "Milosz et ses patries" (Milosz and his

homelands); "Dans le sillage du totalitarisme" (In totalitarianism's wake); "Milosz ?crivain

moderne?" (Milosz: a modern writer?); "L' 'arspo?tica' de Milosz" (Milosz's "ars po?tica"); "La qu?te de l'identit?" (The quest for identity); and finally, "Milosz ou la recherche du sens" (Milosz and the search for meaning). They combine to sketch the figure of a writer for whom, as

Delaperri?re observes in her preface, "l'exp?rience historique et exp?rience existentielle sont ins?parables" (7), a writer always keenly aware that life's painful contra

dictions can become an "essential source" (8) of artistic inspiration. If there is a

slight weakness in this volume, it may lie in the fact that the collected es

says do not always cover significant new ground, as a number of the themes they broach

have been worked through in earlier collections and Festschriften, compiled by scholars in Poland and elsewhere. Some of these problems?for example the question of his na tional

belonging and survival under tyranny?have also been explicated by Milosz himself on various occasions. This minor limitation aside, Czeslaw Milosz et le vingti?me si?cle repre sents a welcome contribution, on the international scene, to the lively debate surrounding

Milosz's place in the pantheons of Polish poetry and the western intellectual tradition. The essays in the first two sections of the volume?by Thomas Venclova, Luigi Mari

nelli, Alfred Sproede, Lukasiewicz, Anna Saignes, Anna Demadre-Synoradzka, and Marek

Tomaszewski?will be of special interest to the North American readership, as they ad dress the figure of the transnational Milosz and the poet as a

political creature, focusing especially on the existential predicament of the creative individual versus the hegemony of the state, in particular of the totalitarian variety. Interestingly,

a number of the essays in the later sections also reflect the particular predicament of a poet who sought autonomy

but who, having made his escape from the "other Europe," was nonetheless necessarily, and willy-nilly, a

political figure. In several of the papers, the traditional biographical argument?that of the poet

embodying the voice and the repressed desires of le peuple?is inverted. This promising methodological reconfiguration in Milosz criticism (in part, perhaps, as a reaction to

the embarrassing public hysterias that sullied and disgraced the discussions of Milosz's

"Polishness" or "anti-Polishness" immediately following his death in 2002), signaled by Delaperri?re in her preface (7), is evident in particular in the excellent contributions

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