Posted on 09/13/2006 5:57:49 AM PDT by kronos77
SARAJEVO, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Bosnian Serb Republic Prime Minister Milorad Dodik said on Tuesday his people did not see their future in Bosnia, which they have reluctantly shared with the Muslim-Croat federation since war ended in 1995.
A lingering Bosnian Serb secessionist sentiment has been revived after Montenegro's independence vote in May and is expected to become much stronger if Serbia's Albanian-dominated, U.N.-run province of Kosovo becomes a sovereign state this year or next.
"The dominant feeling among the people in the Serb Republic is that they don't see the Serb Republic in Bosnia in the long run," Dodik told a news conference ahead of a national election on Oct. 1.
Blunt-speaking Dodik, courted by the West in the late 1990s when he ousted from power the nationalist loyal to war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, caused a storm in May when he said the Montenegrin recipe could be applied elsewhere in the region.
He backed off after peace overseers warned it would breach the 1995 Dayton peace treaty. But the public mood has swung behind the idea and Serb politicians have since threatened to call for a referendum if their region's existence was in danger.
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
ping!
Bosnia, as a national identity, was a communist created canard. Let it die already.
Even Henry Kissinger, during the beginning of the Bosnian war, pointed out that Bosnia had never been a country and that there was no Bosnian ethnic identity.
The weirdest thing to me is that the Internationals supported the break-up of a multi-ethnic country (Yugoslavia), and then demand "multi-ethnicity" from mini-states carved out along ethnic lines. And the point was?
The only thing that I can see that was accomplished politically by the break-up of Yugoslavia was a deliberate power shift away from the single largest ethnic group in the area (the Serbs) and to the various smaller minorities across the map of Yugoslavia. In short, borders were gerrymandered (something forbidden by law in the US) to empower minorities -- and thus living up to the pinko, liberal Left's idea of "the way things should be", all the while calling those who opposed this move "commies". The Goebbels double-speak was perfect!
Yugoslavia, like Iraq is an artificial entity created after WWI, that should have never been. Mapmakers tried to force people who had been fighting each other for centuries to live together before they were ready.
Actually that is not true. Yugoslavia was a voluntary creation at the time -- but not for the right reasons. The Serbs won the war in that area and the Croats, Slovenes & Muslims didn't want liability for war reparations for having been on the wrong side, so they half-heartedly joined Yugoslavia -- only to jump ship in favor of fascism at the earliest opportunity.
This is from the Grey Falcon blog & has an interesting piece translated from Serbian:
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
"Bosniaks" vs. Bosnia
The recent flurry of nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia brought to mind something I read a couple of months ago. Back in March this year, former Bosnian politician - now an analyst - Nenad Kecmanovic gave an extensive interview to Nova Srpska Politicka Misao. Excerpts from it later appeared elsewhere, but the full article is not available in English.
I've taken the liberty of translating the passages most relevant to the current situation:
Contrary to the widespread thesis that Serbs and Croats are the main opponents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, your opinion is that Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] are the destroyers of B-H. What is the basis of your judgment?
[Kecmanoviæ] If you have a project you care about, but you cannot implement it without voluntary cooperation of two partners who are not interested, the only reasonable way is to try to persuade them, win them over. Bosniaks, who are precisely in such a situation regarding their desired integration of B-H and the position of Serbs and Croats towards it, are doing precisely the opposite. They label their partners - Serbs, but Croats as well - incessantly as genocidal, fascist war criminals and push them even farther from their project. [...] They simply do not want voluntary, equitable integration that would be achieved through democratic dialog, mutual concessions, compromises and consensus. What they want is a unitary, centralized state, dominated by them, that would be forcibly imposed on Serbs and Croats by the international community.
How much room to maneuver do Serbs and Croats have within that concept?
The right of their neighbors, as constituent people, not to accept their project the Bosniaks don't see as a right to self-determination up through secession, but only as the right to submit or simply leave Bosnia [emphasis added]. So that Serbs and Croats wouldn't have any illusions that this project might actually be beneficial to them, Bosniaks are already declaring themselves the "fundamental people," meaning the other two are not fundamental, but minorities, interlopers, afterthoughts. Their language, invented like the name of their ethnicity, is called not "Bosniak," but Bosnian, in an effort to impose it as the only official language simply by its name. Their historiographers and publicists glorify Ottoman occupation as a Golden Age and a period of tolerance towards Christians, and invent their aristocratic genealogy. Naturally, this provokes in their Christian neighbors the collective memory of centuries of occupation and Turkish atrocities.
On top of all this, they still live in a conviction that, unlike Serbs and Croats, they bear no responsibility for the war, that they were solely the innocent victims, that they killed their neighbors only in self-defense, that only their national movement was not chauvinistic, that Izetbegoviæ was the leader of all Bosnians, that with him they were building a civil society and defended multiethnic tolerance, that the mujahedeen came from somewhere out there, that their connections with Islamic terrorism are malicious fiction, that they embody the values of democracy... and that for all of this, of course, the West simply idolizes them.
http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2006/08/bosniaks-vs-bosnia.html
"Poor Muslims" syndrome.
Perfectly said.
"They label their partners - Serbs, but Croats as well - incessantly as genocidal, fascist war criminals"
Standard commie tactic.
Compare to John Dean sometime.
Or Nancy Pelosi.
Or George Soros.
Or John Murtha.
Or John Kerry.
Or Harry Reid.
etc
The other factor at the end of the war was that Italy wanted to annex a lot of the territory east of the Adriatic (as they had been promised by the English and French to get them to join the Allied side) so for the Croats and Slovenes it was a choice between joining the Serbs or being under Italian rule.
You are absolutely correct. Sorry didn't get much sleep last night.
But the point that Croatia and Slovenia were not forced into Yugoslavia by the Serbs or an outside entity -- they chose it rather than be claimed by Italy.
The Serbs, however, would have probably been far better off if they had let Italy have them.
There wasn't much freedom of choice involved--there were some intellectuals and politicians who favored the idea of "Yugoslavia," and some Serbian politicians who agreed with the idea, but then the great powers made the final decisions on which nationalities would have the right of self-determination and which would just have to accept what they were told. It might have been better to have transformed Austria-Hungary into a loose federation, or else to have created an independent Slovenia and Croatia then (of course there would have been a problem with boundaries as there was later). Some Slovenes were handed over to Italy and their experience was pretty miserable under Mussolini.
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