From: kurtovic@gold.cchem.berkeley.edu (Zoran Kurtovic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna,soc.culture.croatia
Subject: Re: NPR: Bosnia Faces Aggression now from Croats
Date: 21 Jan 1993 22:48:11 GMT
Organization: Dept of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: gold.cchem.berkeley.edu

In article <1jmqsa$hld@agate.berkeley.edu> boyle@kirkuk.berkeley.edu (Joseph Boyle) writes:
>In article <C17t4G.Iyx@apollo.hp.com> goykhman@apollo.hp.com (Red Herring) writes:
>>    The media often refers to the Bosnian goverment as "Muslim-led".  
>>    To me, this sounds neither "secular", nor "democratic".
>>
>>    Are we talking about the same goverment?
>
>I think so.  The Bosnian government and armed forces include Croats and
>Serbs as well as Muslims, and has consistently supported a pluralist
>democratic state through the whole conflict.  Government-held areas now
>hold mostly Muslims, but this is more because the government lost Serb-
>or Croat- majority areas early on, because government-held areas have 
>received Muslim refugees, and because only Serbs or Croats are welcomed
>as refugees in Serbia or Croatia, not because of massacres or expulsion.
>
>   [REST DELETED]


This last statement is completely without any basis in fact.  There are
somewhere around 400,000 Bosnian Muslim refuges in Croatia.  This 
number is, I believe (though I don't have the exact figures in front of
me), more than half the total number of refuges from Bosnia in Croatia.
I think the total number of refuges from Bosnia in Croatia is about
600,000.  The reason for this is that many of the Croatian refuges from
Bosnia were relocated to the Croatian controlled parts of Herzegovina.

To get back to the thread of the discussion, it is necessary to understand
the different usages of the word Muslim when referring to the conflict in
Bosnia.  To the average American, the word Muslim means religious group.
The term Muslim with respect to Bosnia means ethnic group.  The Muslims
of Bosnia aren't very strict religiously.  The Bosnian government was to
have representation from all of the ethnic groups.  The reason it is 
Muslim dominated is that the other ethnic groups organized themselves
outside of the Bosnian government.

So the war in Bosnia is a political war with the ethnic groups separating
along different political lines.  (The different political sides being
those fighting for a unitary state, those fighting for a plural state, and
those fighting for separate states.)  Calling it an ethnic conflict is, in
my opinion, an abbreviation used by Western media to present the conflict
in a certain way.  I think that Muslims are being `ethnically cleansed'
not because they are Muslim, but because they would resist a vote to remove
parts of Bosnia and join them with Serbia.  The fact that they are Muslim
makes them easily identifiable, and the history and religion is brought 
up to encourage the Serbian soldiers to do the work.  So it is, in my
opinion, a misnomer to call the war a religious war.

I would be curious to see what other peoples opinions are regarding this
subject.  I realize that my understanding might be a little bit off, 
having never lived in the region.

Regards,

Zoran

Xref: sparky soc.culture.yugoslavia:10745 soc.culture.croatia:518 soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna:1388