FRANJO TUĐMAN AND THE MUSLIM-CROAT WAR OF 1993

From the fall of 1992 through spring of 1994, the Croatian Defense Council and the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina fought a war which proved disastrous for both Croatia and Bosnia\u27s Croats. Franjo Tuđman\u27s support of the HVO earned his government the sobriquet of agressor and seemed to confirm rumors of a secret deal to divvy up Bosnia and Herzegovina that he had purportedly made with Slobodan Milišević in 1991. But these are not accurate, nor even very useful, interpretations, if we are interested in understanding what occured in order to learn lessons for the future, They are the result of a scholarly literature which is based on a profoundly flawed narrative cobbled together by observers in Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Washington, D.C., and other capitals, with a modicum of input from reporters on the ground in BOsnia and Herzegovina. Most observers and journalists appear to have had a poor grasp of the history of the region and little understanding of the opposing forces operating there, and even those who understood the region have offered problematic interpretations, in no small part owing to the fragmented and misleading information available, but also because, like reporters and pundits, scholars tended to take sides