How Bosnia armed /

Few military formations have been created amid such chaotic and catastrophic conditions as the Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ARBiH). Hoare (Cambridge) explains how Bosnia's leaders delayed creating it out of a misplaced confidence in the Yugoslav National Army and a reluctance to provoke the country's Serb population. The result was a relatively large but ill-equipped and undisciplined force that initially relied heavily on an unlikely combination of policemen and gangsters. Although the ARBiH was also abandoned at the outset by virtually all of its Serb officers, there is good coverage of the early collaboration of the scattered Croatian communities of central Bosnia until nationalist political leaders persuaded or coerced them into abandoning the central government. The result was the inexorable transformation of the ARBiH from a nominally multiethnic force into the instrument of Alija Izetbegovic's Party of Democratic Action (SDA), albeit only after a struggle between secular "Yugoslavs" and Muslim "Zionists." Hoare has compensated for the lack of available government documents by conducting numerous interviews, which partly explains the detailed coverage of infighting between various military and political leaders. This well-written account would have benefited from the inclusion of maps showing the ARBiH's moderately successful campaigns near war's end. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. Ingrao Purdue University