Bosniak Nationbuliding

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Dunj a Larise] On: 19 March 2015, At : 12: 08 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ cnap20 The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and nation building by Muslims/ Bosniaks in the Western Balkans Dunj a Larise a a Yale MacMillan Cent re f or Int ernat ional and Area St udies, PO Box 208206, New Haven 06520-8206, CT, USA Published online: 17 Mar 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Dunj a Larise (2015) The Islamic Communit y in Bosnia and Herzegovina and nat ion building by Muslims/ Bosniaks in t he West ern Balkans, Nat ionalit ies Papers: The Journal of Nat ionalism and Et hnicit y, 43: 2, 195-212, DOI: 10. 1080/ 00905992. 2014. 998186 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 00905992. 2014. 998186 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. 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Term s & Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Nationalities Papers, 2015 Vol. 43, No. 2, 195–212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2014.998186 The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and nation building by Muslims/Bosniaks in the Western Balkans Dunja Larise* Yale MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies, PO Box 208206, New Haven 06520-8206, CT, USA Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 (Received 23 October 2014; accepted 23 October 2014) The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia posed challenges for the universal concept of the Yugoslav Muslim nation for which several development paths were imaginable under the new circumstances. The concept of Bosniakdom, which was initially developed to address the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gradually grew to become a new and coherent national program to include all the Muslims of former Yugoslavia, primarily due to its new pan-Bosniak orientation. The present article traces the conceptual history of the national ideas of Muslimdom versus Bosniakdom within the former Yugoslav states, as well as the conceptual and institutional history of the pan-Bosniak idea and movement during the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by emphasizing the decisive role the Official Muslim Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina played in their development and divulgence. This article claims that, contrary to some expectations, the strategy of internationalization and universalization of the hitherto territorial concept of Bosniakdom toward Muslims in neighboring countries during the second half of 1990s and 2000s was closely linked to the idea of the construction of the Bosniak national state. It also proposes that the evolution of Bosniakdom into pan-Bosniakdom during that time primarily followed concerns related to that goal. Keywords: national identity building in West Balkans; Bošnjastvo; Bosniaks; Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina; Muslims of Yugoslavia Alija Izetbegović had the ambition to Islamise Muslims all over the world. Our ambition is somewhat smaller; our ambition is to Bosniakise the Bosniaks. (Cerić 2011a)1 Introduction The nation building of Muslims in former Yugoslavia was a protracted one, which seemingly reached its conclusive phase during and after the civil wars concomitant to the disintegration of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in the early 1990s. During this time the changing identities of Muslims in ex-Yugoslavia were influenced on the one hand by the nation-building projects of the newly established successor states they lived in and their respective ability and willingness to include or exclude Muslim *Email: [email protected] © 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 196 D. Larise populations in these projects, and on the other by the urge to establish a separate Muslim nation, whose distinctive nation building already began in the 1960s and was exacerbated by the atrocities against Muslims during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1996). The nation building of Muslims in former Yugoslavia was historically linked to the political and cultural destiny of the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina (further referred to as B&H), who were the most numerous of the Yugoslav Muslim populations. The close linkage between the Yugoslav Muslim nation-building project, from the 1960s to 1991, and the distinctive historical and cultural experience of B&H gave the Yugoslav Muslim nation-building project the necessary legitimatory power against the assimilationist pretensions of other nationalisms within SFRY, but at the same time it bore the danger of overshadowing the particular historical identities and experiences of other Muslim groups in Yugoslavia by issues peculiar to B&H. The ambivalence of this linkage has remained one of the central problems of the Muslim nation-building project in the western Balkans up to the present time. In the early 1990s, Muslim nation building in B&H entered a new phase distinguished by the construction of the Bosniak national identity. Although motivated by the urgent need for a stronger symbolical tie between B&H and its Muslim population in the face of the growing territorial aspirations of the neighboring countries, the concept of the new Bosniak nation, constructed as such by the intellectuals close to the institutions of the official Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the nationalist Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije; SDA), was never explicitly tied to Bosnian Muslims only, but had the potential to be extended to other Muslims in the western Balkans from the start. The present essay argues that this potential for extension, which was built into the concept of Bosniakdom after 1992, was not only central for the subsequent evolution of the Bosniak national idea in B&H but also decisive for the national identity building of other Muslim groups in the successor states of the SFRY. This essay further claims that the project of what will subsequently evolve to be pan-Bosniak nation building was primarily elaborated and carried out by the institutional structures of the official Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (ICB&H) and its international subunits as well as intellectuals from its ranks close to the SDA party, and most of all its powerful ReisUl-Ulema Mustafa Cerić, who was at its head for almost 20 years between 1993 and 2012. This essay relies on the constructivist approach to both identity and nation building, as it draws a clear demarcation line between nation and state building, which in the case of B&H can be mutually obstructive. It explores how religion, ethnicity, and the idea of a common history have come to play a part in the construction of the pan-Bosniak national movement since the 1990s. The question about the historical and social circumstances under which this particular project of Bosniak national identity building has emerged and evolved should nevertheless be understood as part of the broader set of questions whose function is to analyze the social conditions under which ethnic, religious, and national identities are constructed and become significant in political and social action. The essay combines the historical constructivist approach to nationalism (Hobsbawm 1990) with a political analysis of the social conditions for national identity building (Brubaker 2004) and a longitudinal analytical approach relying on archival sources and textual analysis. In my opinion, the latter is best suited to analyzing social and political developments over longer periods of time and changing historical conjectures. The first chapter offers an overview of the historical evolution of the Muslim national identity idea in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II. The second section develops Nationalities Papers 197 Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 an analysis of the debates revolving around the definition and the position of the Muslim people within the multinational state of SFRY and Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina until the breakup of SFRY. The third and fourth sections scrutinize the role of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the redefinition and repositioning of the Muslim national identity-building ideas and strategies in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s and their impact on the national identity building of Muslims living in the territories of other successor states of the former Yugoslavia during the 2000s. The evolution of the national identity building of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina The political identity of the Muslims in B&H during the Ottoman period was marked by cohesive elements of Islamic universalism and Ottoman patriotism (Höpken 1994) which coalesced with identity patterns based on regional belonging, as epitomized in the Ottoman reference to Bosnian peoples as Bosniaks (Bošnjaci). At the regional level, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina generally referred to themselves as Turks in distinction to other Bosnian or Bosniak populations which were labeled along the lines of their confessional belonging as Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews. It has to be added, however, that confessional distinction patterns, although dominant in the previous centuries, are not to be regarded as any more essential or “real” than those constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this sense, every identity must be understood as a fluid social cum historical construct. The emergence of the Serb and the Croat national movements in the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly absorbed Bosnian Catholic and Orthodox populations into their nation-building projects, profoundly changing the hitherto exclusively confessional cum regional identity patterns in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The dominant narratives in regard to national identities in the region took an increasingly essentialist turn during the 1990s, in particular within the contemporary Serb and Croat national history telling. These narratives tended to regard the present Serb and Croat populations of Bosnia as Serb and Croat nationals from time immemorial and not as the relatively recent product of national ideologies and movements dating from the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most revealing historical documents contradicting this essentialist view of the currently existing nationalities in B&H is, not without irony, the notorious Načertanie by Ilija Garašanin, a controversial minister of interior affairs under the Serbian prince Aleksandar Karađorđević in 1844. In the chapter entitled “Chapter about the policy of Serbia regarding Bosnia, Monte Negro and northern Albania,” Garašanin ([1844] 2009) emphasizes the importance for the Serbian princedom of gaining the sympathies and trust of the Bosnian populations of different faiths and making Serbia appear as their desired protector, which would eventually open the door for the extension of the Serbian princedom to the west. Contrary to the contemporary Serb nationalist projections on the nineteenth-century history of the region, Grašanin himself never referred to the specific differences among the Bosnian populations in any other sense but the confessional: speaking of Orthodox, Mohammedan, and Catholic Bosniaks. Concordant to the Ottoman sources, Grašanin too used the term Bosniak (Bošnjak) in a strictly geographic-regional sense, comparable with the contemporary usage of the term Bosnian, indicating strictly territorial belonging (Garašanin [1844] 2009). As of 1844, no reference can be found, either in Ottoman or in Serbian or Austrian documents, to Serb, Croat, or Bosniak/Muslim nationalities related to the land of B&H. Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 198 D. Larise However, this nonexistence of the present national identities in nineteenth-century Bosnia and Herzegovina should not mislead us to the assumption that the present Serbs and Croats in B&H are not “real” Serbs and Croats, as occasionally concluded by the champions of an essentialist Bosniak nationalism in the present. The factual nonexistence of the present national identity patterns in the region indicates their gradual construction during the second half of the nineteenth and during the entire course of the twentieth century. Following the arrival of the Austrian empire in 1878, the Muslim population of Bosnia gradually lost its bonds and the sense of unity with the Ottoman Empire, albeit failing to replace it with some new and coherent national construct as was the case with the emerging Serb and Croat nationalisms in the region. The Austrian Empire encouraged the detachment of the Bosnian Muslims from the Sublime Port for its own political reasons, due to which it also had a vested interest in discouraging Serb and Croat nation-building. National movements were, not without reason, regarded as dangerous and destabilizing for the Austrian Empire. The first step in the strategic detachment of the Bosnian Muslims from the Sublime Port was the establishment of an autonomous, official religious Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was independent of Istanbul and was supposed to be led by regional religious scholars and was to form an integral part of the institutional religious structure of the Austrian Empire. For this purpose the Austrian Empire introduced the institution of the Reis-Ul-Ulema (head of the Islamic scholars), as the head of the institutionalized Islamic Community in and for Bosnia and Herzegovina and his office, which was called Rijaset. With the adoption of the Islam Act of 1912, in which Islam was recognized as one of the official religions of the Austrian Empire, the Reis-Ul-Ulema of Bosnia became, de facto, the head of the Islamic Community of the entire Austrian Empire. That decree, as we shall see, was to have a lasting legacy on the structure, influence, legitimacy, and identity of all future Islamic Communities in both Yugoslav states and after. To roll back the spread of the neighboring Serb and Croat national ideologies and movements (which were gaining force toward the end of the nineteenth century), which seemed to have been mutually supportive as pointed out by Adanir and Faroqhi (2002) to B&H, the Austrian Empire cautiously encouraged universal Bosnian identity building. This encouragement was, however, rather limited due to the (reasonable) fear that it might itself go too far and drift into some kind of coherent national identity, potentially pernicious for Austrian interests in the region. For this purpose, the Austrian authorities, represented by the provincial government under the governor Benjamin Kállay, resorted to the Ottoman name for inhabitants of the Bosnian vilayet – Bosniak (Bošnjak) – to encourage its usage as a common denominator for all the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Within a short time, however, its usage was confined exclusively to the Bosnian Muslim population. The Austrian strategy of (limited) universal identity building for B&H failed lamentably. The most common explanation for its failure is that Serb and Croat nationalism had already taken too strong a hold over the Bosnian Orthodox and Catholic populations, so that the Austrian endeavors were inevitably too late (Dick 2003). The most important reason, however, is to be found in the ambivalence of the aim itself. The Austrian Empire had good reason to distrust not only Serb and Croat national movements, but also any coherent national movement within its borders as potentially destabilizing for its unity. This applied to a possible universal Bosniak nation building in B&H as well as to any other nation building within its borders. In addition to this, the concept of Bosniakdom as developed by Benjamin Kállay lacked sufficient clarity in terms of to whom it was actually addressed (primarily Muslims or all inhabitants of B&H) and who should have been included or excluded from it, and on Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Nationalities Papers 199 which terms (Radenić 1976). Subsequently, the concept of Bosniakdom managed to attract only a relatively thin stratum of the local Muslim aristocratic intellectual elite such as Safet Beg Bašagić and Mehmed Beg Kapetanović, leaving the broader public largely indifferent. After the end of World War I in 1918, Bosnia and Herzegovina was integrated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians (since 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). In both kingdoms Muslims were treated largely as a confession, but thanks to the political and organizational ability of some of their leaders, notably Mehmed Spaho and Ibrahim Maglajlić (the leaders of Muslims in Yugoslavia), they nevertheless exercised considerable political leverage for some time, as was demonstrated by their ability to impose their conditions on the so called Vidovdan constitution, which guaranteed the administrative borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina within the kingdom of SCS (Petranović 1988). In 1939, however, the tide changed and the leading Serb and Croat national parties in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia agreed on the future domains of influence of these two competing national blocks. The subsequent Cvetković–Maček agreement abolished Bosnia and Herzegovina as an administrative unit and adjoined its territories to the newly constructed Banovina Croatia, still an integral part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This agreement was the concession of the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia to growing Croatian national demands. Bosnia and Herzegovina as an administrative and political unit would not be reinstated until the second convention of the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia and the first convention of the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of B&H, both held by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in November 1943, establishing frameworks for the federal nature of the future Yugoslav state. Both Councils established Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of the five future federal units of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (later SFRY). The draft of its future constitution created the framework for the definition of its future constituency as follows: “Bosnia and Herzegovina is neither Serb, nor Croat nor Muslim, but belonging to all, Croat, Serb and Muslim” (ZAVNOBiH 1943). The Communist Party of Yugoslavia shared the Marxist idea of the nation as a relic of the bourgeois past which was doomed to wither away with the further development of socialist society. Nevertheless, it was aware of the benefits of the still existing separate nation-states and, after Tito’s break with Stalin’s Comintern, also the blessings of separate national revolutionary movements. By this token the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was able to acknowledge the existence of the nationalist sentiments of the people, including its own party members. The socialist state operated with a plethora of distinctive concepts to designate and define national, civic, and ethnic groups. Adherence to the Yugoslav state was relegated to the notion of citizenship, which did not necessarily coincide with nationality. The constitutive nationalities were Slovenian, Croat, Serb, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. Apart from them, there were also the legally acknowledged categories of national minorities and peoples. The distinction between peoples (narodi – congruent with the German notion of Volk) and nations (nacionalnosti) was not so clear, although only nations were acknowledged as constitutional elements of the new state. At the moment of the reconstitution of B&H in 1943, this time as a federal unit within socialist Yugoslavia, Muslims (muslimani) belonged to the category of peoples for whom several development paths were imaginable: either to embrace one of the existing nationalities, such as Macedonian, Serb or Croat, or to construct a separate nation in the future. For the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the 1940s, the former strategy was the first choice. But since almost 90% of Muslims declared themselves unwilling to choose 200 D. Larise between being Muslim Serb, and Muslim Croat, and so on at the first census in 1946, the stance of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia gradually reversed by the late 1960s. At the historical twentieth Summit of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1968, the Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the following decision: The practice has demonstrated the deleteriousness of the different kinds of pressure from the past to make Muslims have to choose between declaring themselves as Serbs or Croats, for it was shown earlier, and the present socialist practice demonstrates too, that Muslims are a distinctive people. (Central Committee 1968, 39) Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 This act paved the way for the recognition of Muslims as a separate and independent nation within SFR Yugoslavia, and it re-opened the discussion about the inclusiveness, definition, and the name of the future Muslim nation in Yugoslavia. The debates over the name for the Muslim nation in Yugoslavia from 1968 to 1993 The decisions of the twentieth Summit and the recognition of Muslims as a nation on equal terms with other already recognized nations in Yugoslavia did not remain uncontested. As early as a few months later, at the summit of the Communist Party of Serbia held in May 1968, the issue incited a heated debate. Two prominent members of the Communist Party of Serbia, the novelist Dobrica Cosić (who would become the president of the Milosević led rump-Yugoslavia in 1993) and the historian Jovan Marjanović objected to the reconstitution of the national structure of Yugoslavia. They argued that the formation of another nation in Yugoslavia would bolster nationalism and challenge Yugoslav socialist consciousness. These arguments were decidedly contravened by Miloš Minić and Ivan Stambolić. Both emphasized the massive participation of Muslims in the partisan liberation movement and accused the former two speakers of Serb nationalism (Communist Party of Serbia 1968, 98). Yet in the shadows of the twentieth Summit another debate over the Muslim national question engaged communists and noncommunists alike: the debate around the name and the inclusiveness of the future nation. In March 1967, a Bosnian Muslim intellectual, Muhamed Filipović, published an article named The Bosnian Spirit in Literature (Bosanski duh u književnosti). The Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina branded the article as an attempt to presume that the Bosnian Muslim people were the unique autochthonous and authentic nationality of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to foment the primacy of one of the Bosnian constitutive nations over the others. Filipović’s article argued against the – at the time dominant – categorization of Yugoslav literature according to the federal republic pattern, by which the literary output of Bosnian writers, notwithstanding their religious or national adherence, was usually assigned to Bosnian literature. Filipović rejected such territorial principles, advocating the national principle instead. In his view the writings of Bosnian authors such as Ivo Andić, Aleksa Šantić, or Petar Kočić should be ascribed to Serb national literature, for … these works are the works of Serb national literature, whose national spirit is expressed through the interpretation of Bosnian history and the historical experience of Bosnian men from the viewpoint of the idea of the Serb nation, its mythology and its interpretation of history. (1968, 2) The vivid dissention which arose over that controversial article opened up other pressing questions surrounding the changing national arrangements in Yugoslavia. Two issues Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Nationalities Papers 201 were central for the later debates: first, the question of the historical identity of the people of B&H and second, related to that, the choice of a suitable name for the future Muslim nation in Yugoslavia. On the one hand, the question of the Muslim nation in Yugoslavia was primarily tied to B&H as the republic harboring the largest Muslim population within the country, but on the other, the issues concerning the new Muslim nation in Yugoslavia involved other Yugoslav Muslims as well, so that decisions on the subject could not have been left exclusively to Bosnian Muslims. Finally, the second consideration prevailed and the name including “Muslim” with a capital M (Musliman) was adopted as the name for the new nation of Yugoslav Muslims. By contrast, “Muslim” with a minuscule “m” (musliman) continued to solely denote adherence to the Islamic faith in the language of the land. The new nation was adopted under this name in the Constitution of the Socialist FRY in 1971 alongside the newly created Yugoslav nation – the term which seized to designate exclusively the citizenship (common practice in the multination states of “really existing socialism”) by acquiring legitimacy as a full-scale nationality. The construction of a new pan-Yugoslav Muslim nation, however, did not entirely resolve the question of its relationship to B&H. The adoption of the name Muslim (Musliman) instead of the alternative Bosniak (Bošnjak) implicitly detached the nation in construction from its territorial identification with B&H and gave it a universal Yugoslav outlook. This conscious retreat from the territorial principle of nationality had the advantage of promoting easier identification by non-Bosnian Yugoslav Muslims with a new nation and, even more importantly, it was taken to inhibit the new trend of Bosniak territorial nationalism, which was seen as destabilizing for the integrity of B&H (CKSKJ 1968). On the other hand, the new pan-Yugoslav Muslim nation legitimized its national distinctiveness in relation to other nations in Yugoslavia primarily with the historical peculiarity of the Bosnian situation and the specificity of the historical evolution of the Bosnian Muslims. Some secular critics objected to the allegedly purely confessional allusiveness of the name of the new nation, but the official Islamic Community in Yugoslavia, as well as its subunit (Mešihat) for B&H, seemed to be satisfied with the choice. In the words of one of the leaders of the Islamic Community in the 1960s, Đozo: From now on the term “muslim” (written in original with a small m to denote only the religion) does not designate only the adherent of the Islamic faith, but also a member of the Muslim people, regardless of him being a believer or not. (…) One could assume that Islam loses by this arrangement. (…) But it is not the case. I would say that here there is more about return than about alienation. The small m does not lose, it gains. The capital M gives it strength and steadiness. (1970, 205) In 1990, the tide began to change once again. Adil Zulfikarpašić, a Bosnian Muslim émigré intellectual, returned to B&H from his exile in Switzerland with the aim of establishing a new political party, the political program of which was to bolster the concept of Bosniakdom (Bošnjaštvo). Zulfikarpašić´s own highly ambivalent concept of Bosniakdom alternated between relative openness and the readiness to include “Bosniaks of all three religions” (1962) and the view according to which it was “the true and only national identification” of the Bosnian Muslims (1963). In the same year Zulfikarpašić, alongside with Muhamed Filipović, established the new political party Muslim Bosniak Organization (Muslimanska Bošnjacka organizacija) (MBO) and organized a joint symposium under the title “Bosnia and Bosniakdom” – an intellectual platform to discuss issues concerning the Bosnian national identity and to launch debates about Muslimdom (Muslimanstvo) versus Bosniakdom (Bošnjastvo). Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 202 D. Larise Overall, the majority of the invited non-Muslim Bosnian speakers referred positively to the open concept of Bosniakdom, emphasizing the importance of its inclusiveness to all people living in B&H and criticizing the trend of its exclusive identification with its Muslim component (Horvat 1990; Lovrenović 1990; Ladan 1994). Communist Muslim intellectuals feared that the exclusively Muslim-based concept of Bosniakdom could create the impression that Bosnian Muslims–Bosniaks would endeavor to monopolize Bosnia as their future nation-state. Therefore they defended the concept of the universal (Yugoslav) Muslim nation also including other Muslims in Yugoslavia (the fact that Yugoslavia still existed at that time had an important leverage) and agreed that it would not be the case with the concept of Bosniakdom, which in their opinion addressed Bosnian Muslims only (Hadžidedić 1990; Isaković 1990). Islamic intellectuals such as Alija Izetbegović and Rusmir Mahmutćehajić vociferously rejected Bosniakdom too, but in their case for fear that the choice of such a secular name would symbolically detach the nation from Islam, which according to their view had to remain the central pillar of their national identity (Purivatra, Imamović, and Mahmutćehajić 1990). It seems that the idea of Muslimdom was as central to Alija Izetbegović as the idea of Bosniakdom was for Adil Zulfikarpašić.2 It was thus not surprising that Alija Izetbegović and his pan-Islamist grouping soon withdrew their support for Zulfikarpašić and established their own political party in May 1990: the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije; SDA). The statutes of both parties displayed their mutual differences with regard to the political content of the national idea for both Muslims and B&H: whereas the SDA defined itself as a “political union of Yugoslav citizens belonging to the Muslim cultural – historical circle” (SDA 1990, 1), the MBO emphasized the fight for “the right to our real national name – Bosniak.” In spite of the strong focus on Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), the MBO, unlike the SDA, declared itself to be a supra-confessional party. The first multiparty elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina (still a federal republic of Yugoslavia) in 1991 brought political victory to the three ethnic-national parties of B&H. The SDA managed to attract the overwhelming majority of Bosnian Muslim votes and to impose itself as the leading Muslim national party in B&H, whereas the MBO gradually sank in oblivion. The Islamic Community in B&H and the question of national inclusion – Muslims and Bosniaks revisited: the first stage of Bosniak nation building Mufti Mustafa Cerić, one of the cofounders of the SDA who was later to become Reis-UlUlema of the new Islamic Community in B&H, followed the line of his party on opposing the concept of Bosniakdom as championed by Zulfikarpašić and Filipović, fearing, like the majority of his SDA party comrades, that it might be a direct way of secularizing Bosnian Muslims. In the following years, however, he would become one of its most committed proponents and one of the key figures of Bosniak nation building for the subsequent two decades. On 28 April 1993, following the referendum on the secession of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia and the concomitant beginning of the war in B&H on 6 April, the Sarajevo-based associates of the Muslim Community of B&H, hitherto member of the Muslim Community of Yugoslavia, rushed to establish a new and autonomous Islamic Community in B&H. This urge to establish an independent Islamic Community as early as possible was especially vigorously epitomized by the group of clerics in the active Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Nationalities Papers 203 posts of the SDA. The divide between that group and the incumbent leaders of the still existing Islamic Community of Yugoslavia (based in Sarajevo) arose as early as 1990 with the rivalries around the elections for the institutions of the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia. Since the time of its establishment in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia had its seat in Sarajevo (except for the short intermezzo from 1929 to 1936) and all of its Reis-Ul-Ulemas had been from B&H. In the 1990 elections for the new Reis-Ul-Ulema of the IC of Yugoslavia, the association Ilmije proposed Jakub Selimovski, a Macedonian cleric, for the office and the Bosnian cleric Salih Č olaković as the director of the Mešihat. Another group, close to the SDA and headed by the professors of Gazi-Husrefbeg Madres in Sarajevo, favored Mustafa Cerić as their candidate for this function. The Ilmije grouping and their candidate Jacub Selimovski finally won the election. The reaction of the leadership of the SDA to that election was conspicuously reserved (Hečimović 1998).3 In the early spring of 1993, nearly the same group of persons (involved in Mustafa Cerić’s campaign for the Reis-Ul-Ulema in 1990)4 issued an initiative for the constitution of an independent Rijaset of the Republic of B&H, followed by the so-called First Renewal Meeting of the Islamic Community in B&H. This meeting abolished the old Mešihat of the IC in B&H and established the new, autonomous Islamic Community in B&H with new structures and leaders. Mustafa Cerić was elected Reis-Ul-Ulema and Mustafa Spahić his deputy. The incumbent Reis-Ul-Ulema of Yugoslavia, Selimovski, was ousted from both his position of Reis-Ul-Ulema and his office in Sarajevo, in what was, according to him, an illegitimate takeover under “coup-like circumstances” (2008). Since the city was under siege, the members of the Mešihat of the (old) Rijaset of the IC in B&H from other regions of B&H were unable to participate in the First Renewal Meeting. Similarly to Selimovski, many of them, notably from Zenica and Tuzla, regarded the Renewal Meeting as a coup rather than a legitimate institutional change.5 The overlapping agencies made the new Islamic Community in B&H closely intertwined with the SDA and its political agenda. This agenda concerned, apart from the issues of war and peace, the elaboration of strategies for Bosniak Muslim nation building in B&H in the context of an often very uneasy coalescence between the quest for the territorial sovereignty of the Republic of B&H and the urge to establish the party’s control over state institutions in the territories controlled by the Army of B&H. In this situation, another historical meeting was held on 27 September 1993 in Sarajevo upon the initiative of the SDA and the (new) Islamic Community in B&H. The agenda of the Bosniak General Assembly (Bošnjacki sabor), as the meeting was titled, was first to discuss the Owen–Stoltenberg peace plan, which was rejected, and second to change the name of the Muslim nation (hitherto Muslim with a capital M) to Bosniak nation, which was adopted. Peculiarly enough, it was not mentioned at any point whether the renaming of the Muslim nation to the Bosniak nation concerned only Bosnian Muslims or also other Muslims in what was once Yugoslavia. Although the primacy of the concrete Bosnian concerns in the discussion could have made the impression that it would concern only Bosnian Muslims, this was by no means clearly expressed. As we shall soon see, this lack of precision on the issues of inclusiveness and the definition of the new nation was by no means accidental, but rather a fundamental issue for the future Bosniak nation-building project. The choice to rename the nation Bosniak was legitimated by the necessity to “strongly tie ourselves to our country Bosnia and its legal state tradition, to our Bosnian language and to the entire tradition of our history” (Resolution 1993). However, it was not an easy Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 204 D. Larise decision for those who, as the majority, were not so long ago fierce detractors of the concept of Bosniakdom as advocated by Adil Zulfikarpašić. Latić, one of the founding members of the SDA and (at the time) one of the publishers of the Islamic journal Preporod (and later Ljiljan), currently a professor at the Islamic Faculty in Sarajevo and Novi Pazar, referred to the abandonment of the Muslim national name as a “sad farewell,” exhibiting at the same time an awareness of the inevitability of such an act if higher national goals were to be achieved: “Those in Europe who don’t have a national name cannot have a (nation) state either” (1993, 29). He added that Muslims must become Bosniaks “if they want to persist in their own state.”6 However, he retained one concession to his former panIslamic disposition: “And the future? Will not the time of post-nationalism one day come when the living fate and not the dead nation is going to determine our lives?” (Latić 1993) The leading persons of the Islamic Community now strive to emphasize sameness between the religious and national identities, this time in favorable terms by opening the door for a possible Islamization of the future nation-building project. Neimarlija, a high ranking official in the IC in B&H, referred to the decision of the Bosniak General Assembly as the closure of an illusory dilemma between the religious and the national by Bosniaks, which he conceived as being identical: Bosniaks are Muslims. (…) Bosniaks are Muslims in the same way as Croats are Catholics. We simply cannot allow anyone, and the very least ourselves, this dilemma, (…) because our national being, our national identity was determined by Islam, not as a faith but as the one of the three great, or high, or world cultures. (1994, 32) One of the first strategies for the now desirable preservation of national cum religious “purity” was intense campaigning against interreligious and interethnic marriages, which was legitimized as the best bulwark against a possible future genocide as if the connection between the one and the other were self-evident.7 At first glance, it seems that Adil Zulfikarpašić’s Bosniakdom conception had triumphed at the end of the day, but a closer look reveals significant changes in its semantic content. The most conspicuous of these changes was the scope of its inclusion. The idea of the Bosniak nation as elaborated by Adil Zulfikarpašić was a strong territorially related concept referring only to the Bosnian Muslims (and sometimes even to non-Muslims of B&H). Contrary to this, the new concept of the Bosniak nation adopted by the Bosniak General Assembly in 1993 lacked this explicit reference to Bosnian Muslims as its exclusive constituency. Leaving the scope of the nation only implicitly but never explicitly pronounced bound to the Bosnian territory, it engendered the potential to be eventually extended and exported to other Muslims in former Yugoslavia, especially to those of Sandžak. A fixed territorial concept such as Zulfikarpašić’s would have emphasized the nation’s stronger symbolic ties to the country of B&H, and would have eventually had more potential to legitimize the claim for a Bosniak nation-state within the AVNOJ borders of B&H, but it would subsequently lack the capacity to be exported outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina and hence to extend the nation for additional constituency. Its aptitude for export to other Muslims of the former Yugoslavia was crucial for the Bosniakdom concept of the Renewal Meeting for one major reason: the pivotal problem of an eventual construction of the Bosniak nation-state in B&H (within its AVNOJ borders) has always been the obvious fact that half of the population of B&H is not Muslim, and accordingly not Bosniak, so that the national state of Bosniaks within the present borders of B&H was very hard, if not impossible, to achieve. This problem made it a pressing strategic necessity to include Sandžak Muslims, and later also other ex-Yugoslav Muslims, in the Bosniak nation-building project as part of the future constituency. However, this strategy could have easily collided with the Nationalities Papers 205 equally important necessity of keeping the nation in construction symbolically tied to B&H as far as possible. The skill required was thus to bridge this symbolic gap with some sort of discursive unity. The person to achieve this task was Reis-Ul-Ulema Mustafa Cerić. Bearing in mind the substantial changes which the concept of Bosniakdom has undergone in the last two decades, it is possible to speak about two consecutive stages in Bosniak nation building during this time. The first stage is connected to the symbolic tying of the Muslim/Bosniak nation to the idea of Bosnia and Herzegovina as their “motherland” during the 1990s, and the second, to the strategic export of Bosniak national identity to Muslims in other regions of ex-Yugoslavia during the 2000s, which Mustafa Cerić himself refers to as a pan-Bosniak project (Cerić 2011b). Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the internationalization of Bosniakdom within former Yugoslavia: The second stage of Bosniak nation building With the rise of the Serb and Croat nation-building projects, which were becoming increasingly secessionist in the early nineties, and with the idea of the creation of a Bosniak nationstate in B&H gaining force, the diverging positions of ethnic political elites regarding the political future of the country during the 2000s became entrenched. The separate nation building of the three ethnic communities in B&H evolved to be mutually reinforcing during that time, in accordance with Barth’s (1969) observations about the internal dynamics of identity bond groups, by which the identity building of one (ethnic) group is always determined by the interaction with other (often competing) groups. The mutually exclusive nation-building projects in B&H progressively moved along ethnic-confessional lines, thus increasingly undermining any realistic possibility for the construction of a supraethnic or supra-confessional civic form of nationhood, which, measured by the totality of votes cast for supra-ethnic parties at the elections in 1990, had relatively few adherents even before the civil war of 1992–1996.8 Between 1990 and 1992 Izetbegović favored the civic nationalist discourse in relation to the press.9 Yet in the light of his ideas from the 1980s, which envisaged an Islamic state for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Izetbegović 1990), it remains hard to determine whether his civic national rhetoric from the early 1990s was a transitory phase in the evolution of his political ideas regarding the nature of the future Bosnian state or rather a matter of strategic concern. The latter deserves consideration in the context of the referendum on the independence of B&H, which was held in February 1992. A positive outcome of that referendum seems to have been of uttermost importance for Izetbegović, and yet it depended entirely on the vote of Bosnian Croats, whereby it was very unlikely that they would have voted for the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina if they had been led to expect it to become a Bosniak nation-state.10 From 1990 to 1994, the SDA publicly advocated civic citizenship and the territorial integrity of B&H on the one hand, but at the same time, in October 1991, it bolstered a referendum on the “political and territorial autonomy of Sandžak, with the right of adjoining to one of the sovereign republics in Yugoslavia.”11 The majority Muslim population of Sandžak was prominently incorporated into the Bosniak nation-building project since its very beginning in the early nineties.12 Being the hegemonic fraction in the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo under siege, the SDA attempted to push through the idea of the Bosniak nation-state in February 1994. The draft, which was redrawn at the last minute, included the formulation “The Bosnian Republic is an independent democratic republic Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 206 D. Larise of the Bosniak Muslim people. Serbs and Croats in this state have the position of national minorities and enjoy all rights according to the valid international legislation and conventions” (Kupusović 1994). The persistence of the civil war and concomitant ethnic cleansing made new ethnic territorial divisions a reality. This sad reality, however, made the creation of ethnically relative homogenous independent states along the frontlines entrenched by the war a realistic possibility. By late 1993 all of the sides seemed to have realized that the full realization of their territorial demands was not likely to be achieved by military means and hence became more susceptible to an eventual compromise. Alija Izetbegović, confronted with the hard military situation on the ground and increasing international pressure to accept some kind of territorial compromise, became progressively inclined to sacrifice the maximum agenda of full territorial sovereignty for the Bosnian state for the more realistic scope of the creation of a minimal Bosniak nationstate in the territories controlled by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina under his command. On 16 September 1993, he signed an accord on the peace plan in Geneva with Momčilo Kraišnik, the chairman of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, which foresaw the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina according to ethnic separation lines. The agreement finally failed, but this time not due to Izetbegović’s reluctance to accept ethnic administrative division as such, but due to concrete (overlapping) territorial demands (Izetbegović 1990). Two years afterwards all three sides were to agree to the Dayton peace accord, which was to create two separate political–territorial units: the Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska in the state of B&H, thereby putting an end to almost four years of civil war. Not being directly exposed to the pressure of governance like Alija Izetbegović, ReisUl-Ulema Mustafa Cerić maintained more constant support for the idea of the Bosniak national state in the full territory of Bosnia. After the death of Alija Izebegović in 2003, Cerić publicly supported Haris Silajdžić, the former SDA minister of foreign affairs, who split from the party in 1996 to establish a new party – the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Stranka za Bosnu i Hercegovinu), which advocated full territorial sovereignty, the abolition of Republika Srpska and a strong centralist stance with regard to the inner constitution of B&H (Silajdžić 2007). The victory of Haris Silajdžić at the elections for the Bosniak member of the three headed presidency of B&H in 2006 inspired some French media like Courier de Balkans to speak about Mustafa Cerić as the “faiser de roi” (kingmaker) (2006). The 2007 “Detroit speech” marks the point after which Mustafa Cerić´s nationalist rhetoric became more directly pronounced. He openly advocated the Bosniak nationstate in the entire territory of B&H, publicly calling for the abolishment of the Dayton constitution (OHR 2007). From this point on, the definition and the scope of inclusion of the national concept of Bosniakdom concerning other Muslims in ex-Yugoslavia gained fundamental importance. Cerić’s reference to B&H as the “holy land of all Bosniaks” explicitly includes all ex-Yugoslav Muslims in the definition of the Bosniak nation by simultaneously denying the right of national sovereignty to other constitutive nations within B&H.13 He supports his claim by making parallels between the genocide of the Jews in World War II, which, according to Cerić, led to the establishment of the Jewish state, and the genocide of Bosniaks in the Bosnian civil war, which could legitimize the claim for the establishment of the Bosniak nation-state (Cerić 2011a).14 Although the Bosniak Assembly of 1993 set the stage for the export of the Bosniak national idea to other Muslims in former Yugoslavia, the pronounced political strategies in this direction only took concrete shape in the 2000s. At this stage of the Bosniak Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Nationalities Papers 207 nation-building project, the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its influential Reis-Ul-Ulema began to play a decisive role. It was the period in which the pan-Bosniak concept, previously driven by clerics, intellectuals close to the IC and some parts of the Bosniak political elites, progressively evolved into a pan-Bosniak movement, gradually penetrating secular circles and popular discourses. These developments make it useful to set a distinction between this phase and previous phases of Bosniak nation building for analytical purposes. The Renewal Meeting of 1992 abolished the Institutions of the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia in order to constitute the new IC for B&H and to pave the way for the autonomous national organization of other Islamic Communities in the ex-Yugoslav republics. However, not all official national Islamic Communities were established on the principles of full autonomy cum full sovereignty in the newly established nation-states. The IC in Bosnia and Herzegovina retained control over the official ICs in Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia (with its seat in Sanžak, Novi Pazar), which were established as early as 1992 as the subunits (Mešihat) of the Islamic Community in B&H, thus being, both de facto and de jure, under the jurisdiction of the IC in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its Reis-Ul-Ulema as “constitutive parts of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Constitution 2007, Article 1). Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo established autonomous national ICs, each of them endowed with its own Rijaset and Reis-Ul-Ulema. Simultaneously with the establishment of the Islamic Community in Serbia (as the subunit/Mešihat of the IC in B&H in Sandžak, Novi Pazar) another competing official Islamic Community of Serbia was established in Niš (the seat later moved to Belgrade). This competing IC was endowed with its own Rijaset and its own Reis-Ul-Ulema, Adem Zilkić. The troubled history of the two competing ICs in Serbia, and later also Slovenia and Kosovo, reveals not only the internal frictions within the successor institutions of the IC of Yugoslavia, but also the struggle over the national identification of Muslims in former Yugoslavia. Whereas ethnic Albanian Kosovo Muslims already had their fixed national identities as Albanians long before the export of the Bosniak national identity had begun – entrenched in both a longer history of nation building and a different language – the national identity of the tiny Slavic Muslim minority group in Kosovo called Goranci, as well as those of Muslims from Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, has not yet been firmly established. Whereas the majority of the Muslim populations of Slovenia and Croatia are of relatively recent Bosnian origin – they settled there as a result of the inner-Yugoslav (economic) migration of the post-World War II period – the majority of the Muslim populations of Montenegro and Serbia are autochthonous to these regions and, with the exception of Sandžak, hitherto hardly ever identified themselves with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both Serbia and Montenegro have had their own official Islamic institutions since 1878, in Niš (Serbia) and in Podgorica (Montenegro), both endowed with great Muftis at their head. The struggle over the spiritual leadership of Muslims in Serbia, Slovenia, and Kosovo has, at the same time, been a battle over their national identification. Unlike the Reis-Ul-Ulema of the IC of Serbia in Belgrade, Adem Zilkić, the charismatic young head of the IC in Novi Pazar (Mešihat of the IC B&H), Mufti Muamer Zukorlić is a fervent advocate of the Bosniak nation-state. Together with Mustafa Cerić he recently (29 December 2012) founded the World Bosniak Congress (Svjetski bošnjacki kongres), which again defines B&H as the “motherland of all Bosniaks” emphasizing that Bosniaks want “what all other peoples of Balkans already have, a self-confident nation and a sovereign state” (Declaration 2012). Mustafa Cerić describes his younger colleague Zukorlić as “the leader I follow in the awakening of Bosniakdom and in the pan-Bosniak movement” (2011b). 208 D. Larise By the early 2000s the debates around the extension of Bosniak national identity had reached secular circles. The subsequent struggles over the national identity of the Muslims of ex-Yugoslavia are best exemplified by the case of Montenegro. In 2003 a long-announced census of the population took place in Montenegro. On that occasion, the group of Montenegrin Muslim intellectuals and Sandžak-based clerics gathered around the journal Almanah, which since the mid-1990s has bolstered Bosniak national identity building by Montenegrin and Sandžak Muslims, and issued a declaration calling for Bosniak nation building in this country.15 The first article of the Declaration explains: Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 The Muslims from all other former Yugoslav republics have already declared themselves in favor of the return of the traditional popular name Bosniak. We regard the name Bosniak as historically founded and suitable for the part of this people who live in Montenegro. (Almanah 2003, 13). The declaration pledged the substitution of the designation Muslim (with a capital M from Yugoslav times) in favor of the designation Bosniak for the coming census. Not all Muslims in Montenegro, however, shared their enthusiasm for entry into the Bosniak nation. Another group gathered around “Muslimanska Matica” issued a call against, as they called it, an attempt “to assimilate Montenegrin Muslim people” and urged Montenegrin Muslims to repudiate this endeavor to, as they called it, “annihilate the Montenegrin-Muslim nation in favour of introducing some Bosniak nation” (Declaration 2003). They added that the promotion of the Bosniak nation means “pricking a thorn into a healthy foot on which our only motherland Montenegro stands (…) by promoting Bosnia and not Montenegro as our motherland” (Declaration 2003). The entire project of Bosniak nation building in Montenegro was qualified as the “greater Bosniak nationalist assimilation of Montenegrin Muslims” (Matica Muslimanska 2002). The results of the census revealed deep divisions regarding the Bosniak nation-building project in Montenegro. In all, 17.7% of the Montenegrin population declared themselves as adhering to Islam in 2003. In a national sense, 7.77% declared themselves as Bosniaks and 3.97% as Muslims. The census of 2011 also included – besides Muslims (3.31%) and Bosniaks (8.65%) – the following national categories: Bosnians (0.07%), Muslims–Montenegrins (0.04), Montenegrins–Muslims (0.03%), Muslims–Bosniaks (0.03%), and Bosniaks–Muslims (0.03). On the eve of this census, Cerić and Zukorlić issued a Fatwa urging the Muslims in Montenegro to declare themselves as Bosniaks (2011). Concerning the national identities of Muslims/Bosniaks in B&H built over the last 20 years, the long overdue census in this country,16 which was initially set up for April 2013, shall give us more accurate information. This census, however, has already been postponed due to the pressure exercised on the National Statistics Agency by the joint initiative “Popis 2013” to eliminate the categories “Muslim” and “Bosnian and Herzegovinian” as possible national categories, with the aim of leaving the Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak population no alternative to the choice of Bosniak national identity. “Popis 2013,” a joint initiative of the Islamic Community in B&H and four other Bosniak cultural institutions, declared its readiness to take all available legal action to achieve this goal (http://www.bosnjaci.net/ prilog.php?pid=48835). In October 2012 Mustafa Cerić unwillingly resigned from the position of Reis-Ul-Ulema of the IC in B&H after almost 20 years in office. He was succeeded by Husein Kavazović, Mufti of Tuzla; according to the assessment of the Bosnian press, a man of less political and more spiritual ambition than his predecessor. Nevertheless, the structures and the institutions of the IC in B&H and its adjoining international Mešihats, created during the long and Nationalities Papers 209 decisive era of Reis Mustafa Cerić, are likely to survive him. One thing above all others will probably remain his most enduring legacy: the pan-Bosniak nation-building project. Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 Conclusion After the Danish Jiiyands Posten (2012) published the sensationalist news about the woman from Zagreb, Croatia, who allegedly converted from Catholicism to Islam to marry the alQaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki as part of the CIA forged plan to kill Al-Awlaki, the bulk of the Bosnian media hurried to designate her as a Bosniak. A short-lived media debate circulated around the question of what makes a Croatian woman from Zagreb who happens to convert to Islam a Bosniak. True or imagined, the story of the convert Croatian woman who married the leader of alQaeda reveals one reality: 22 years after the Bosniak idea was dismissed by the large majority of Muslim intellectuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it seems quite natural for leading Bosniak media sources to ascribe every Muslim living in the territories of the former Yugoslavia to the Bosniak nation, merely by the fact of their being Muslims living in one of the former Yugoslav republics. It seems that Bosniak, Croat, and Serb national identities are now, more than ever, firmly entrenched in the national identity pattern in B&H. Although there were some attempts (Radio Sarajevo 2012) to promote a supra-ethnic national identity on the eve of the approaching census, it seems that the prospects for both supra-ethnical nation building and a civic national project are rather unpromising in the foreseeable future. Judging, however, from the vehement reactions of the ethnic nationalist elites in B&H against the civic national Facebook initiative “Be a civic citizen” (https://www.facebook. com/Budi.gradjanin.ka), which urged the citizens of B&H to declare themselves as Bosnian and Herzegovinian in terms of national belonging at the forthcoming census, like “Popis 2013” initiative or Milorad Dodik’s call to Serbs not to declare as Bosnian and Herzegovinian (http://www.starmo.ba/bosnaihercegovina/item/14340-dodik-izjasnitese-kao-srbi-a-ne-bosanci.html), the dominant ethnic national elites in both entities still seem to fear the possibility of an eventual turn to a supra-ethnic national identity or even to a civic national identity in the future. A civic national idea is indeed not likely to disappear from the Bosnian agenda entirely. The Dayton Constitution, still in force in B&H, made vast concessions to the dominant ethnic nationalisms in B&H (Bosniak, Croat, and Serb) in order to stop the civil war and to forestall a possible new ethnic conflict. It introduced the ethnic key in political powersharing, according to which power is shared exclusively between the dominant ethnic groups in B&H. This constitutional discrimination of the other citizens of B&H prevents them from being appointed to political offices in the state. It has already been effectively contested by the leaders of the Roma and Jewish national communities17 in B&H and that is not likely to remain the last challenge, not only to the future of the ethnic key but maybe also to the future of the hegemonic ethno-centrist approach to the state, the nation, and political power in both entities of B&H. Notes 1. Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the Association of the Citizens of Sandžak origin living in the Federation of B&H, Sarajevo: Narodno pozorište, 20 April 2011. 2. Zulfikarpašić recounted the reaction of Alija Izetbegović to the speech of Prof. Mujagić at a conference taking place in Sarajevo in 1990, in which Mujagić declared himself in favor of the Bosniakdom: 210 D. Larise Izetbegović sat beside me and said: “This is what he has from you, you have taught him this.” I laughed and said: “What nonsense you are saying.” He replied: “By God, you and I, we will split on this question.” (Đilas and Gaće 1996, 161) Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 3. In the circles close to Salih Č olaković it is still remembered that the president of the Presidency of B&H Alija Izetbegović never sent his congratulations on the election as the new leader of Islam, whereas he did attend the inaugurations of the religious leaders of other religious communities. 4. The group included the following persons: Rešid Bilalić, Senahid Bistrić, Nusret Č ančar, Prof. Dr Enes Duraković, Hadžem Hajdarević, Nihad Halilbegović, Prof. Dr Kemal Hrelja, Prof. Dr Mustafa Imamović, Alija Isaković, Mustafa Jahić, Prof. Dr Enes Karić, Zijad Ljevaković, Šemsudin Musić, Prof. Dr Muhamed Nezirović, Mustafa Spahić, Mustafa Sušić, Ismet ef. Spahić, Mahmut Traljić, Ismet Veladžić. The president of this committee was Šemsudin Musić. 5. A group of citizens, some of whom are employed in the Islamic Community, but who are not its representatives, decided to organize the Islamic Community from outside of its institutions. (…) What is especially irritating for the Muslim public is the fact that this meeting abolished all previous legal acts and institutions of the IC of B&H, beginning with the High Committee, Rijaset, Reis-ul-Ulema even to the Committees and Meshihats of the other (former Yugoslav) Republics. What that group did contains all the elements of a classical coup. (Mehtić 1993) 6. Emphasis by the author. 7. In the words of Mustafa Spahić, one of the founding members of the SDA and the new IC in B&H, who was also one of the co-defenders of Alija Izebegović in the trial against the “Islamic group” in the 1980s: “Assimilation through mixed marriages was a reliable and effective way to fulfil this, in its core fascist and genocidal goal – the annihilation of an entire nation.” And further: “Although all these rapes [referring to war crimes] are hard, insupportable and unpardonable, they are, from the point of reference of Islam, easier and less painful than mixed marriages, the children and the friendships which resulted from them” (Spahić 1994, 120). 8. Supra-ethnic political parties, which explicitly advocated civic and supra-ethnic nationhood in B&H gained between 15% and 25% (depending on the region) of the total vote at the first multiparty elections in B&H in 1990 (Agencija 2007). 9. “Serbia and Croatia are nation states. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not and it can only be a civic republic” (Izetbegović 1990). 10. I have considered it and I ask of you, please consider it too, and by the next round of talks, what shall we do. Consider it. If the Croat community does not participate in the referendum, the referendum has failed. Do not gamble with it by any means. (…) We have to go through with the referendum, if not, we will stay stuck in the well and there will be nothing to get us out for the next thirty years.(…) Later I think that we have persuaded the Croat element about this referendum. They want to vote (for it) now because they hope that in this Bosnia and Herzegovina they will get some sovereignty, some national recognition, some regions etc., because that is part of this consent. Meeting of the General Assembly of the SDA held on 25 February 1992 (Hečimović 2008). 11. Voting paper for the referendum on the autonomy of Sanžak held on 25 October 1991, printed in the daily newspaper Borba on the same day. 12. The historical truth is in fact the following: the Muslims of B&H are autochthonous (i.e. born on their own land/country) Bosnian people, who actually have all the proper and specific elements of its own peoplehood (narodnosti) and nationality (nacionalnosti): soil: Bosnia and Sandžak (regional name of Herzegovina was added first by the arrival of the Austro-Hungarian empire … . (Latić 1993, 29) Nationalities Papers 211 Downloaded by [Dunja Larise] at 12:08 19 March 2015 13. In a furious reaction to the announcement of Milorad Dodik about a possible referendum on secession of the Republika Srbska, known as the “Blagaj speech,” Cerić states Anyone can say this or that, but no one can take away our holy land. This is our holy land, Bosnia and Herzegovina. God has guaranteed it to us. We were born here and here shall we die. And not only that. We also call all the Bosniaks across Europe, Australia, America, Kosovo, Mazedonia, Serbia and Croatia to come back: This is your holy land! (…) There are 8 to 10 million of us in the Balkans and 4 millions are in Turkey. They resettled us, dispersed us all around the Balkans so that we cannot be the majority anywhere, because those from Zagreb announce that we are too many. (2011a) 14. This parallel is especially remarkable given the fact that Mustafa Cerić is one of the leading figures of the Council for Fatwa and Research in Dublin, the supreme legislative body of the European Muslim Brotherhood (under the leadership of Sheikh Jusuf al-Quaradawi), for which unconditional support for Palestine, including Hamas, which calls for the abolition of Israel, remains one of the central agendas. 15. For the complete list of the signatories of the declaration and the full text of the declaration, see: Almanah (2003, 13–16). 16. Last census was conducted in 1991. 17. 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