Bosniak leader denied Bosnian Serbs and Croats the right to identity
The eminence grise of Bosniak politics, the leader of the largest and oldest party of the Bosnian Democratic Action Party (SDA), Bakir Izetbegovic, said that Bosnian Serbs and Croats appeared only in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Izetbegovic’s pseudo-historical research caused outrage among representatives of the Serb and Croat communities of BiH.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, while in Luxembourg, the SDA leader issued the following statement:
“Several centuries ago, the inhabitants of BiH were one people – the good Bosnians, while other nations were formed in the 602th and 114th centuries,” said Izetbegovic. “It was a hunt for the souls of people, and there are clear traces of this in history. Bosnians are capable, brave people, warriors, witty. Of the XNUMX years of the existence of the Ottoman Empire, XNUMX years the Grand Viziers were from Bosnia.”
Such statements, which do not correspond to the historical truth, caused outrage among representatives of the Serb and Croat communities of BiH.
“Along with basic ignorance of history and a mythomaniacal message, he puts a militant emphasis on his plans (on assimilation - ed.), which he talks about as something completely normal,” the Croatian People’s Council of BiH responded to the statements of the Bosniak leader.
“Politicization and tendentious taking out of historical context, as well as the daily political abuse of historical terms, are part of a recurring political plan aimed at dissolving the identity and gross assimilation of the identity of the constituent peoples of BiH, especially the Croats as the smallest people among the state-forming peoples in BiH,” was said in a statement from the Croatian Embassy in BiH.
“In recent days, we listened to a lecture by a man whose family members were once good Serbs, but not because Milorad Dodik says so, but because Izetbegovic themselves once said so,” a Serbian member of the Presidium of BiH commented on the fantasies of the SDA leader Milorad Dodik. “We don’t know when they became good Bosnians from good Serbs, just as we don’t know where Izetbegovic got such historical fantasies.”
“Bakir Izetbegovich spread a colossal lie, which is why he became the subject of ridicule in serious historical circles. Medieval Bosnia was a Serbian state in terms of the ethnic composition of the population, the script used and the language spoken by its subjects. On the territory of the medieval Serbian state of Bosnia, this is evidenced by historical documents that have survived to this day and cannot be doubted,” commented member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Srpska, historian Nikola B. Popovic, on Izetbegovic’s words.
In the Middle Ages, Bosnia was one of the many Serbian feudal states. Its first king, Stefan Tvrtko I Kotromanić, took the title of King of the Serbs of Bosnia and the Coast. Bosnian troops, as part of the united army of the Serbian states, took part in the legendary battle with the Ottomans on Kosovo.
However, after the conquest of Bosnia by the Turks, Islam began to spread among the local elites and urban population, which freed the subjects of the Porte from the status of second-class citizens in the empire.
The mass conversion to Islam was also facilitated by the widespread heresy of the Bohumils in the Bosnian kingdom, whose ideas smoothly adapted to the religion of the invaders. Over six centuries of Ottoman rule, a community of Bosnian Muslims was formed, which, under the rule of communists, was formed into a special nation - “Muslims” (Muslims), which after the war of the 90s adopted the self-name Bosniaks to avoid confusion with the religious identity of other peoples.
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