LETTERS A joke too far
Sir: I used to think that Sir Alfred Sherman was just a figuie of fun when he dabbled in Balkan affairs. There are indeed some touches of the familiar comic figure in his last letter (7 August), such as his assurance that Serbdom is 'healthy at heart'. Howev- er, when I think of him sunning himself at the Serb headquarters in Pale, while healthy-hearted artillery officers on nearby hills caused a few more dozen deaths and amputations in the city below him, I feel that the joke has faded. I can no longer find his combination of rambling self-impor- tance and slapdash miscomprehension nearly so amusing.
His statement that 'Izetbegovic argues [in The Islamic Declaration] that their aim for Bosnia must be to . . . have Muslim religion within a Muslim society within a Muslim state' is simply untrue. Izetbegovic makes no statements there about aims for Bosnia; he does not mention Bosnia once in the whole book. He does argue, however (as I explained in my article), that a Muslim state can be formed only where Muslims are in an absolute majority: this directly excludes Bosnia from his argument. And Sir Alfred's claim that I was being deceitful, when I said that a book written in 1970 was written in 1970, is just childish: it is Sir Alfred, not I, who thinks that the book con- tains sinister designs for Bosnia which now need to be disavowed.
When Sir Alfred criticises me for using the term 'fundamentalism', he seems not to have noticed that I was commenting on other writers who had used the term. Sir Alfred first announces that 'Islamic funda- mentalism' is a misnomer, then identifies it with one form of Islam, then announces that all Islam is fundamentalism: so much for his grasp of simple logic. My remark that Bosnia's Muslims were highly secu- larised is confirmed by all serious observers and scholars of the subject, including the Serbian émigré Alexandre Popovic (the leading academic expert on Balkan Islam and hardly a Muslim 'propagandist'), who wrote in 1986 that 'a large part' of the Bosnian Muslim population 'has almost no connection with religion any more'. Because I state this simple fact, Sir Alfred muses absurdly that I have `no systematic knowledge of Islam'. His own systematic falsehoods may indeed be linked in some way, as he suggests, to his experience of Bosnia in 1947. If all his information about Bosnia is nearly 50 years out of date, this may explain a great deal.
As for his claim that Bosnia was a 'Ser- bian kingdom' in the mid-15th century, it shows that Sir Alfred is ignorant of the most basic facts of Bosnian history. Bosnia had been under Serb rule for short periods in the 10th and 11th centuries, but during the entire period from 1180 to 1463 it was either an independent state or under Hun- garian suzerainty.
Sir Alfred solemnly insists, 'It is quite untrue to claim that Bosnia's borders remained unchanged throughout history.' It is indeed, and I made no such claim. I did mention that some of its modern borders reflect very early historical borders. But what I claimed was that Bosnia, unlike Ser- bia, had remained a distinct entity under Ottoman rule from the 16th century. Bosnia was not, as Sir Alfred seems to think, simply a Pashaluk on a par with the Belgrade Pashaluk. The Belgrade Pashaluk was merely a subdivision of the Eyalet of Roumelia; Bosnia was an Eyalet in its own right. That is an important distinction, though its importance will not be apparent to Sir Alfred until he has learned some ele- mentary Ottoman history.
Some of his other remarks are so off- beam that they hardly deserve an answer. He accuses me, absurdly, of 'Holocaust revisionism'; I only touched once on the Holocaust, when I mentioned the Serbian policemen who helped to round up the Jews. This again is a historical fact, and the only people who deny it are Serbian revi- sionists. As for my 'defence of the Ulema's collaboration with Himmler', I made no such defence. Sir Alfred has drifted off into fantasy.
Your other correspondent, Mr Lezaic, also criticises me for things I did not write. I did not say that 'everything that comes out of Serbia is propaganda'. Borba (like Politika, and of course Vreme) has pro- duced some accurate news reports, such as the reports of public statements and press conferences to which I referred. Mr Lezaic prefers to believe the retrospective self-jus- tifications of a Croat extremist. He also denies that the Croat-Muslim war is a con- sequence of the Vance-Owen plan; but the evidence does not support his argument. There were frictions at various times between Muslim and Croat forces in 1992, but there was no serious fighting between them before the apparently 'ethnic' Vance- Owen map was unveiled in January 1993; after that, fighting began in areas which were contested on the map. And the reason why I 'failed to mention' Croatian soldiers was, first, because I was not writing a gen- eral article about the whole war, and, sec- ondly, because the Croatian army operated in Bosnia under a formal agreement with `The food's terrible but the service is good.' the Bosnian government. Mr Lazaic, who blusters about my 'extraordinary heights of ignorance', seems unaware of that fact.
Noel Malcolm
The Daily Telegraph, 1 Canada Square, London E14
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