Muslims AS “Others” in SERBIAN and Croatian Politics In

CHAPTER four

MUSLIMS AS “OTHERS” IN SERBIAN AND CROATIAN POLITICS

The conquest of Constantinople, it has been said, ‘dealt a wound to European man.’ Few countries could have taken that blow harder or felt it more deeply than Bosnia. Ivo Andrić, “Preface” to his doctoral dissertation, 1924 (1990: xvi)

Bosnia-Herzegovina is a European country, and its people are European people. Even the evil inflicted upon us has not come from Asia, but has a European origin. Fascism . . . and Bolshevism . . . are European- made products. Alija Izetbegović, speech to the London Conference, August 26, 1992 In November 1994, newspapers throughout the world carried a terrible picture taken from a broadcast by the Bosnian Serb television station in Banja Luka. Bosnian Serb forces had just carried out a successful counter- attack against what had until then been a successful Muslim offensive from Bihać, taking a number of prisoners in the process. In the picture carried by the print media, a laughing Serb soldier was putting a fez on the head of an understandably distraught Muslim prisoner. The mocking triumph of the first and the fearful misery of the second were apparent in their expressions and postures towards each other, the Muslim attempt- ing to shrink from his tormentor. I find this grim scene revealing of more than the sheer physical domi- nance of the Serb over his Muslim prisoner. The Serb was forcing a mark of Muslim identity on his victim that the latter had not, in fact, worn himself. Whatever the nature of the prisoner’s view of his own identity as a Muslim, the Serb felt compelled to impose one upon him. This scene from Serb television symbolizes a process of imputation of “Islamic” identity on Bosnian Muslims by their opponents that has been contrary to the personal identity of many of the Muslim people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is not to say that Bosnian Muslims deny that they are Muslims; rather, the question goes to the symbolism of markers of that 72 chapter four identity. Whatever many Bosnian Muslims may have thought about their own identity as Muslims, Europeans, or Bosnians, their Serb and Croat antagonists impute to them a cultural essence that dichotomizes Muslim from European, thus denying the possibility of a Bosnia, since it would be composed of incompatibles: putatively non-European Muslims and “Euro- pean” Christians. This paper explores the content of the labels that have been imposed on Bosnian Muslims by their Serb and Croat opponents. This academic exercise has normative implications. In his study of ethnic fratricide and the dismantling of democracy in Sri Lanka, Stanley Tambiah1 has quoted Voltaire: “If we believe in absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” Cer- tainly, the images of Bosnian Muslims that have been propagated (and propagandized) by their opponents are absurd for most of the Muslims of Bosnia. At the same time, the fact of this absurdity may be irrelevant in practice, for reasons well established in other realms of intellectual endeavor. The first, drawn from structural anthropology, argues that the fact of distinction is more important than the markers of that distinction. Put another way, once units of a system are defined in contrast to one another, the characteristics that supposedly distinguish them may change without changing the basic distinction among the units, or that they remained defined in contrast to each other. The second reason for pessimism of the intellect, and thus perhaps also of the will, stems from the well-known phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy, although in the case of Bosnia, self-fulfilling history might be a more appropriate phrase. The ferocious rejection of a multi-national (in European terms) or multi-ethnic (in American terms) Bosnia and Herze- govina by the leaderships of most Bosnian Serbs and Herzegovinian Croats has reinforced those Bosnian Muslim leaders who would prefer to create a Muslim state rather than a civil society. Just as many Serbs in Croatia did not define themselves primarily as Serbs until the Croatian national- ist regime of Franjo Tudjman defined them outside of the bodies political and social in Croatia,2 many Bosnian Muslims now see Islam as central to their identity, and to that of their country, since other forms of identity,

1 Tanley Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 5. 2 I am quoting Milorad Pupovac, leader of the moderate Serbs who have remained in Tudjman’s Croatia and who are trying to reach accommodation with the Croatian gov- ernment. Pupovac refers to himself, but the number of Serbs in Croatia who identified themselves as “Yugoslavs” until 1991 was high.