This book has so far emphasized the power motivations behind civil war alliance choices. These instrumental decisions, however, were always accompanied by evocative narratives. In the 1992–1995 Bosnian civil war discussed in Chapter 6, those narratives – of Serbs as royalist Chetniks and Croats as fascist Ustashe – directly referenced symbols and events from a past war that had traumatized the psyche of the different constituent nations residing in Bosnia. This chapter presents the warring group interactions and alliance and group fractionalization dynamics of that war of half a century earlier – Bosnia's 1941–1945 civil war – using primary archival documents from all warring sides. Specifically, this chapter references the Main Laws and Orders of the Independent State of Croatia (Zakoni Nezavisne Države Hrvatske); documents from the archive of the Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Arhiv Komunističke Partije Bosne i Hercegovine); documents and a chronology on the National Liberation War of the Peoples of Yugoslavia (Zbornik Dokumenata i Podataka o Narodno-Oslobodilačkom Ratu Jugoslovenskih Naroda and Hronologija Oslobodilačke Borbe Naroda Jugoslavije 1941–1945); as well as documents from the Military Archive in Belgrade (Vojni Arhiv) along with its two sub-archives – the Chetnik fund and the National Liberation Army fund – as they relate to the intergroup and intragroup fighting in World War II Bosnia.

Before presenting the events that transpired in that civil war, I need to note the historical disagreement as to whether the war in Bosnia, in the broader context of World War II Yugoslavia, should be seen as a civil war in the first place. After all, in post–World War II Yugoslavia, it was largely portrayed as a war of liberation against foreign occupiers (Germany and Italy) rather than as an ideological civil war among different Yugoslav factions. Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the victorious Partisans who became renowned as the Yugoslav nation-builder, would not have had it any other way. However, whereas primary documents from the time clearly indicate that Tito and his Partisans cast the war as largely one of national liberation, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, a Nazi military officer, talks of the war in Bosnia as a civil war. So did Serb Chetnik leader Dobroslav Jevđević, who underlined the flexibility of population loyalties for Bosnia by concluding that “as in every other civil war, the masses are fluid and are joining the stronger party.”