History, Integration into Yugoslavia

At the end of the war in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. Bosnia became part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929). Serbia’s Karadjordjevic dynasty and a Serb-dominated government and administration ruled the new state. The kingdom’s political parties, suppressed under a royal dictatorship from 1929 to 1934, were all ethnic nationalist parties except for a pan-Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned and went underground in 1921. The main Bosnian Muslim party, supported by nearly all Muslims, was the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (YMO), founded in February 1919 and led by Mehmet Spaho until his death in 1939. Spaho skillfully maneuvered himself and the YMO into a balancing position among other parties that ensured that the YMO and Muslim interests would be represented in most Yugoslav governments and policies. Spaho died two months before the Yugoslav government made a major concession to Croat national aspirations and created an autonomous Banovina (Province) of Croatia that included parts of Bosnia with large Croat populations.

When Nazi Germany and its Axis allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941, during World War II, Bosnia was divided into German and Italian occupation zones. It was made part of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, or NDH in Serbo-Croatian). The NDH was an Axis puppet state run by the Ustase, a Croat fascist and terrorist organization whose wartime attempt to exterminate the NDH’s nearly 2 million Serbs was modeled on Hitler’s genocide of Europe’s Jews. Bosnian Serbs fled to the forests to join two violently competing resistance movements. These were the Serb royalist Cetniks, under Draza Mihailovic, and the Partisans, a Communist-led multiethnic “Army of National Liberation” organized and headed by Josip Broz Tito, the Croat head of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

Bosnia became the Partisans’ principal zone of operations in two overlapping wars. In one war the Partisans battled the Axis armies of occupation. In the other they fought a parallel civil war against both the Cetniks and the Ustase. The fighting was particularly fierce between the Partisans and the Cetniks. The Cetniks’ anti-Communism and determination to restore a Serb-dominated monarchy led them to join first Italian and then German operations against the Partisans. In November 1943 Tito convened a Partisan congress in Jajce, a medieval Bosnian capital. The congress proclaimed a new federal Yugoslavia of equal South Slav peoples, naming Tito marshal and prime minister. The congress included the Muslims as one of the South Slav peoples. Bosnian Muslims and Croats joined the Partisans in growing numbers.