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Sandžak: identity and recent past
Sarajevo) and during the Bosnian war that thesis played a crucial role in priming
for genocide in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sandžak
was included in the broader plan, which had as one of its goals, a massive
expulsion or ethnic-cleansing of Muslims from the region. ¹⁷ Developments in
Sandžak, notably in 1992-1995 period fit into the policy of ethnic-cleansing of
Bosniak population. The following was noted in the 1994 Report of the Sandžak
Committee for Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms: “In Sandžak, there
is a lot of threatening military hardware. The psychosis of fear and uncertainty
has been spreading for some time. Thousands of frightened Bosniak-Muslim
families left beseiged Sandžak towns in the spring of 1992 and made their way
to the European refugee camps. After long-running Bosniak and Muslim-media
bashing campaign and intentional launching of misinformation about their
intention to secede and engage in Jihad. Police searches, persecutions and arrests
became commonplace. Synchronized actions covered by tv cameras and the
accompanying negative publicity were intended to provide the general public
with arguments attesting to the presence of yet another, enemy, but enemy which
was luckily detected –on time. Similar police actions in recent past, accompanied
by other forms of repression, resulted in mass emigration of Bosniaks to
Turkey. Numerous negative developments in Sandžak, ethnic-cleasning in the
shadow of Bosniak developments, unsolved murders, abductions, torchings of
houses, arrests, detentions and the policy of legalized brutality, preventive or
pre-emptive repression, and double standards produced the desired effects (...)
Statements that “co-habitation is no longer possible in Bosnia and Hercegovina”
resonate also in Sandžak, as does the fear of spreading of the war flames.”¹⁸
War in Bosnia is interpreted as a consequence of an age-old confrontation
between Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Serbs, even as the “conflict of
civilizations’’. Darko Tanasković stressed that the religious dimension of the conflict
in Bosnia was hushed up, for its tackling would have complicated the ‘veracity’
of fiction about “the Chetnik aggression” and would have called into question
the very basis of the whole concept of the tack to the Yugoslav crisis and similar
ocurrences in other parts of this world in turmoil. For him the war in Bosnia was
a religious war, which means that many Muslims perceive it as –Jihad. ¹⁹ Dominant
thesis on the Serb side, which was first articulated by Milorad Ekmečić, is
SANDŽAK: IDENTITY AND RECENT PAST
15
17 Then the guiding idea was that “the jump-started process of (re)islamization of Yugoslav
Muslims was in keeping with the global, pan-Islamist project of Islamic revival, whose
Bosnian political manifests was Alija Izetbegović’s “Islamic Declaration.”
18 “Sandžak, A Chronicle of Evil (II)”, Sandžak Committee for Protection of
Human Rights and Freedoms Novi Pazar, Novi Pazar, 1994.
19 Darko Tanasković, Islam and We, “Jihad in Bosnia and Hercegovina: an
illusion or a reality ”, Partenon, Beograd, 2006., page 62.