Conclusion: the Partisan-Chetnik Conflict in Retrospect

The war of 1992–1995, which pitted supporters of a unified and multinational Bosnia-Hercegovina against supporters of a Great Serbia, was in a sense a rematch of the Partisan–Chetnik war of a half-century before. Its outcome was equally paradoxical: the establishment of a Bosnian state formally independent but in fact under foreign rule; formally unified but in fact partitioned three ways; formally at peace but in fact locked in a permanent conflict, a conflict that is at once a cold war and a civil war. The very ambiguousness of this outcome is, perhaps, the best testimony to the enduring nature of the Partisan–Chetnik divide in Bosnia-Hercegovina.