How Bosnian Muslims view Christians 20 years after Srebrenica massacre | Pew Research Center
identification, outgroup trust and intergroup forgiveness as variables that would affect quantity present-day intergroup relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina - Cultural life: Diverse European and Turkish Oscar in for his film No Man's Land, about human relationships during the –95 war. .. Bosnian landowners, feeling that they could no longer trust the Ottoman. to do so would cost them the trust of important allies and leave them isolated. Unfortunately, when Austrians, Hungarians and Serbs made heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a Bosnian Serb high school It was the significance of this particular crime for Austro-Serbian relations that mattered.
He was Emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, and became the heir when Franz Joseph's son killed himself in his sisters could not take the throne.
Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie Chotek, was a Bohemian noblewoman, but not noble enough to be royal. She was scorned by many at court, and their children were out of the line of succession Franz Ferdinand's brother Otto was next.
Franz Ferdinand had strong opinions, a sharp tongue and many political enemies. He favored "trialism," adding a third Slavic component to the Dual Monarchy, in part to reduce the influence of the Hungarians. His relations with Budapest were so bad that gossips blamed the killing on Magyar politicians. There have been efforts to say that Serbian politicians had him killed to block his pro-Slav reform plans, but the evidence for this is thin.
Who was involved within Serbia, and why? The planning was secret, and most of the participants died without making reliable statements. Student groups like Mlada Bosna were capable of hatching murder plots on their own.
During several of the eventual participants talked about murdering General Oskar Potiorek, the provincial Governor or even Emperor Franz Joseph. Once identified as would-be assassins, however, the Bosnian students seem to have been directed toward Franz Ferdinand by Dimitrijevic-Apis, by now a colonel in charge of Serbian intelligence.
Princip returned from a trip to Belgrade early in with a plan to kill Franz Ferdinand, contacts in the Black Hand who later supplied the guns and bombs, and information about the planned June visit by the heir, which Princip would not have known without a leak or tip from within Serbian intelligence. InApis took credit for planning the killing, but his motives can be questioned: In fact, the Radical Party and the king were afraid of Apis and had him shot.
Those who believe Apis was at work point to "trialism" as his motive. Apis is supposed to have seen the heir as the only man capable of reviving Austria-Hungary. If Franz Ferdinand had reorganized the Habsburg Empire on a trialist basis, satisfying the Habsburg South Slavs, Serbian hopes to expand into Bosnia and Croatia would have been blocked. In early JuneApis is said to have decided to give guns and bombs to Princip and his accomplices, and arranged to get the students back over the border into Bosnia without passing through the border checkpoints.
Pasic and the state While Apis may or may not have been guilty of planning the murder, the murder did not necessarily mean war. There was no irresistable outburst of popular anger after the assassination: Austria-Hungary did not take revenge in hot blood, but waited almost two months. When the Habsburg state did react against Serbia, it was in a calculated manner as we will see in a moment. For now, suffice it to say that the Austrians chose to blame the Pasic government for the crime.
How culpable was the Serbian regime? There is no evidence to suggest that Pasic planned the crime. It is unlikely that the Black Hand officers were acting on behalf of the government, because the military and the Radical Party in fact were engaged in a bitter competition to control the state. After the Balkan Wars, both military and civilian figures claimed the right to administer the newly liberated lands the so-called Priority Question.
AfterPasic knew that Apis' clique would kill to get their way. Pasic's responsibility revolves around reports that he was warned of the intended crime, and took inadequate steps to warn Austrian authorities. Despite Pasic's denials, there is substantial testimony that someone alerted him to the plot, and that Pasic ordered the Serbian ambassador in Vienna to tell the Austrians that an attempt would be made on the life of the heir during his visit to Bosnia. However, when the Serbian ambassador passed on the warning, he appears to have been too discreet.
Instead of saying that he knew of an actual plot, he spoke in terms of a hypothetical assassination attempt, and suggested that a state visit by Franz Ferdinand on the day of Kosovo June 28 was too provocative.
Austrian diplomats failed to read between the lines of this vague comment. By the time the warning reached the Habsburg joint finance minister the man in charge of Bosnian affairs any sense of urgency had been lost, and he did nothing to increase security or cancel the heir's planned visit. After the murders, the Serbian government was even more reluctant to compromise itself by admitting any prior knowledge, hence Pasic's later denials.
If we agree that the Pasic government did not plan the killings, what can we say about their response to the crisis that followed? War in was not inevitable: Blame in Austria-Hungary Before we can answer that question, we must look at the official Austrian reaction to the killing. This took two forms. First, the police and the courts undertook a wide-ranging series of arrests and investigations.
Hundreds of people were arrested or questioned, sometimes violently. Twenty-five people were finally tried and convicted, though only a few were executed, because so many of the defendants were minors. Second, the Austrian foreign ministry and the emperor's closest advisors considered what to do about Serbia's role in the plot.
Investigators quickly learned that the murder weapons came from Serbian sources, but Austrian intelligence failed to distinguish between the roles of the Pasic administration and the unofficial nationalist groups: Austria's blame for the war attaches to its calculated response to the murders. Early councils were divided. The chief of staff, General Franz Baron Conrad von Hoetzendorf, wanted a military response from the beginning.
Conrad had previously argued that the Monarchy was surrounded by enemies who needed to be defeated individually, before they could combine. In other words, he wanted a war against the Serbs and Russians, followed later by a confrontation with Italy. Leopold Count von Berchtold, the Habsburg foreign minister, generally agreed with Conrad's analysis.
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Berchtold took no strong position in the crisis: The only real opposition to a policy of confrontation and war came from the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Stephan Tisza. Tisza was personally opposed to militarism and took the risks of war more seriously than Conrad. Also, as a Magyar, Tisza realized that a Habsburg victory would be a domestic defeat for Hungarians: Either the Slavic population of Hungary would increase, leaving the Magyars as a minority in their own country, or trialism would replace the dualist system, again discounting Magyar influence.
The early Austrian deliberations included another, calculated element that shows their limited interest in peace: The Austrian ambassador in Berlin found that the Germans, especially Kaiser Wilhelm, supported a war to punish Serbia and offered their full support. This was in clear contrast to events during the Balkan War ofwhen Berlin refused to back Vienna in any intervention. Like the Austrians, the Germans feared a future war with Russia, and preferred to fight soon, before their enemies grew stronger.
When the Austrian Council of Ministers met again on July 7, the majority favored war. To satisfy Tisza, the council agreed to present demands to Serbia, rather than declare war at once.
In the belief that a diplomatic victory alone would not be enough to destroy Serbia as a threat, the demands were deliberately to be written in such extreme terms that Serbia could not accept them.
Serbia's refusal to comply would then become the excuse for war. Within a week, Tisza himself consented to this plan: The final point ultimatum demanded the suppression of anti-Austrian newspapers and organizations including Narodna Odbranaa purge of anti-Austrian teachers and officers, and the arrest of certain named offenders.
Two points seriously interfered in Serbian sovereignty: Austrian police would help suppress subversives on Serbian territory, and Austrian courts would help prosecute accused conspirators inside Serbia. The document had a hour deadline. The council finalized the demands on July 19th and sent them to Belgrade on the 23rd. The war party in Vienna hoped that the Serbs would fail to agree, and that this could be an excuse for war.
The hour time limit is further evidence that the document was not meant as a negotiating proposal, but as an ultimatum. We can say three things about how the Austrian process of decision bears on Austria's responsibility: First, the majority in the Council of Ministers assumed from the first that war was the appropriate response. Only Count Tisza opposed it, and he did so largely for reasons of domestic politics.
His objections were overcome by the promise to seek no annexation of Serbia. The negotiations with Serbia were really a sham, to create a good impression: A second clue to Austria's intent is Vienna's approach to Berlin for Germany support in case of war.
After the Berlin government responded with the so-called "blank check," the war party saw no further reason to seek peace. Third, the terms of the ultimatum show that the Austrians came to a decision even though they were acting on incomplete information.
The ultimatum was issued well before the trial of the assassins could establish the facts of the crime. Vienna knew nothing about the Black Hand or its role, but it made no difference: The Serb reply The Serbs in turn failed to do their utmost to defuse the crisis. When Serbia first received the ultimatum, Pasic indicated that he could accept its terms, with a few reservations and requests for clarification. As time passed, however, it became clear that Russia would support Serbia regardless of the situation.
After that, Pasic gave up seeking peace. While a long reply was written and sent, Serbia rejected the key points about Austrian interference in domestic judicial and police work. Pasic knew that this meant war, and the Serbian army began to mobilize even before the reply was complete. While mobilization was prudent, it did not imply a strong commitment to peace.
Because the Serbian reply did not accept every point, Austria broke off relations on July The tough positions taken by both Austria and Serbia brought the situation too close to the brink to step back, and in a few days matters were out of control.
Again, the specific arguments raised by each side matter less than their mutual willingness to take risks. Why a Balkan war? This leads us to the last question: This is really two questions: First, why did the crisis led to a war between Austria and Serbia? In the first place, both governments believed that their prestige and credibility were on the line, not only in the international community, but at home.
For the Austrians, a personal attack on the royal family required a strong response, especially if the assassins were Serbs, who had defied the Dual Monarchy during the Pig War, been labelled as traitors during the Friedjung Trial, and recently destroyed southeastern Europe's other dynastic empire the Ottomans. Failure to act in the summer of invited greater turmoil later.
For the Serbian regime, the humiliating Austrian terms would have undone all the progress made since in achieving independence from Habsburg meddling. The economic Pig War, Austria's annexation of Bosnia inand now the demand to send police into Serbia, all implied renewed Austrian control.
In addition, Pasic and his ministers faced a real risk that right-wing extremists would kill them if they backed down. On the international stage, both sides were one defeat away from being marginalized: Austria-Hungary had no intention of replacing the Ottoman Empire as the "Sick Man of Europe" and Serbia refused to be treated as a protectorate.
Second, in both sides believed that they were in a strong position to win if war came. The Austrians had German backing; the Serbs had promises from Russia.
Neither side considered the chance that the war would spread across Europe. History Ancient and medieval periods When the Romans extended their conquests into the territory of modern Bosnia during the 2nd and 1st centuries bce, the people they encountered there belonged mainly to Illyrian tribes.
Most of the area of modern Bosnia was incorporated into the Roman province of Dalmatia. During the 4th and 5th centuries ce, Roman armies suffered heavy defeats in this region at the hands of invading Goths. When the Goths were eventually driven out of the Balkans by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the early 6th century, the Bosnian territory became, notionally at least, part of the Byzantine Empire. Prof saxx Slavs began to settle in this territory during the 6th century.
A second wave of Slavs in the 7th century included two powerful tribes, the Croats and the Serbs: Croats probably covered most of central, western, and northern Bosnia, while Serbs extended into the Drina River valley and modern Herzegovina. This area later became part of Croatia under King Tomislav. Soon after Constantine wrote those words, most of the modern territory of Bosnia reverted to Croatian rule. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Bosnia experienced rule by Byzantium through Croatian or Serbian intermediaries, incorporation into a Serbian kingdom that had expanded northward from the territory of modern Montenegro and Herzegovina, rule by Hungaryand a brief period of renewed Byzantine rule.
After the death of the emperor Manuel I Comnenus inByzantine rule fell away, and government by Croatia or Hungary was not restored: A Bosnian state of some kind existed during most of the period from todespite periodic intrusions from the neighbouring kingdom of Hungary, which maintained a theoretical claim to sovereignty over Bosnia. Bosnia enjoyed periods of power and independence, especially under three prominent rulers: Ban Kulin ruled c.
During the reign of Tvrtko I, Bosnia reached farther south and acquired a portion of the Dalmatian coast. For a brief period in the late 14th century, Bosnia was the most powerful state in the western Balkans.
One consequence of this isolation was the development of a distinctive Bosnian church. After the schism of divided Western Latin, or Roman Catholic and Eastern Eastern Orthodox Christianity, most of the Bosnian territory excluding modern Herzegovina was Latin, but during the long period of isolation from Rome the Bosnian church fell into its own de facto schism, electing its own leaders from among the heads of the monastic houses. A combination of poor theological training, lax observances, and Eastern Orthodox practices led to frequent complaints from neighbouring areas, beginning in the s, that the Bosnian church was infected with heresy.
In a papal legate was sent to investigate these charges, and Ban Kulin gathered a special council at Bilino Polje near modern Zenicawhere the church leaders signed a declaration promising to undertake a series of reforms. Most involved correcting lax religious practices; in addition, however, they promised not to shelter heretics in their monasteries.
The extent to which these reforms were observed is very uncertain, since over the following century the church in Bosnia became increasingly isolated. Beginning in the midth century, many historians argued that the Bosnian church had adopted the extreme dualist heresy of the Bulgarian Bogomils. Evidence for this view came from the papal denunciations of the Bosnians, which sometimes accused them of Manichaeismthe dualist theology on which Bogomil beliefs were based.
However, later scholarship suggested that the authors of those denunciations had little or no knowledge of the situation inside Bosnia and that confusion may have been caused by the existence of genuine dualist heretics on the Dalmatian coast.
Furthermore, the surviving evidence of the religious practices of the Bosnian church shows that its members accepted many things that Bogomils fiercely rejected, such as the sign of the crossthe Old Testamentthe mass, the use of church buildings, and the drinking of wine.
The Bosnian church should thus be considered an essentially nonheretical branch of the Roman Catholic Churchbased in monastic houses in which some Eastern Orthodox practices also were observed. During the 14th century the Franciscans established a network of friaries in Bosnia and spent more than a century trying to convert members of the Bosnian church to mainstream Catholicism. When most of the clergy converted, the back of the Bosnian church was broken.
The final decades of the medieval Bosnian state were troubled by civil war, Hungarian interference, and the threat of invasion by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Ottoman armies began raiding Serbia in the s and crossed into Bosnian-ruled Hum Herzegovina in King Tvrtko I sent a large force to fight against them alongside the Serbian army at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in the following year. Ottoman forces captured an important part of central Bosnia incentred on the settlement of Vrhbosna, which they developed into the city of Sarajevo.
In they conquered most of the rest of Bosnia proper, although parts of Herzegovina and some northern areas of Bosnia were taken over by Hungary and remained under Hungarian control until the s. In a broad area covering modern Bosnia and some surrounding areas of Croatia and Serbia was given the full status of an eyalet, or constituent province of the empire.
Bosnia enjoyed this status as a distinct entity throughout the rest of the Ottoman period. The Bosnian eyalet was governed by a vizier and administered through a network of junior pashas and local judges. Land was distributed according to the Ottoman feudal systemin which the holder of a timar estate had to report for military duty, bringing and supporting other soldiers.
In all these respects, conditions in Bosnia were similar to those in the other conquered areas of Europe. In one crucial way, however, Bosnia differed from the other Balkan lands except, later, Albania: This was a gradual development; it took more than a hundred years for Muslims to become an absolute majority. There was no mass conversion at the outset, nor mass immigration of Muslims from Anatolia.
The fundamental reason for the growth of such a large Muslim population in Bosnia may lie in the earlier religious history of the Bosnian state. Whereas neighbouring Serbia had benefited from a strong, territorially organized national church, Bosnia had seen competition in most areas between the Bosnian church and the Roman Catholic Church, both of which operated only out of monastic houses.
In Herzegovina a third church, the Serbian Orthodox, had competed.
Christianity was thus structurally weaker in Bosnia than in almost any other part of the Balkans. The motives that inclined Bosnians to adopt Islam were partly economic: Other motives included the privileged legal status enjoyed by Muslims and, possibly, a desire to avoid the poll tax on non-Muslims, though Muslims were subject, unlike Christians, both to the alms tax and to the duties of general military service.
Similarities and differences between Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian
But the traditional belief that Bosnian noblemen converted en masse to Islam in order to keep their estates has been largely disproved by modern historians. To fill up depopulated areas of northern and western Bosnia, the Ottomans encouraged the migration of large numbers of hardy settlers with military skills from Serbia and Herzegovina.
Some of these settlers were Vlachsmembers of a pre-Slav Balkan population that had acquired a Latinate language and specialized in stock breeding, horse raising, long-distance trade, and fighting. Most were members of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Before the Ottoman conquest, that church had had very few members in the Bosnian lands outside Herzegovina and the eastern strip of the Drina valley.
There is no definite evidence of any Orthodox church buildings in central, northern, or western Bosnia before During the 16th century, however, several Orthodox monasteries were built in those parts of Bosnia, apparently to serve the newly settled Orthodox population there.
Major wars affecting Bosnia took place almost every two generations throughout the Ottoman period. This war left Bosnia financially drained and militarily exhausted. A Venetian-Ottoman war, beginning in the s and lasting untilinvolved heavy fighting and destruction in parts of western Bosnia. In a small Austrian army under Prince Eugene of Savoy marched into the heart of Bosnia, put Sarajevo to the torch, and hurried back to Austrian territory, taking thousands of Roman Catholic Bosnians with it.
Austria invaded Bosnia again in but was repelled by local forces. In the subsequent peace settlement the Treaty of Belgrade, Austria gave up its claim to the territory south of the Sava River. This settlement formed the basis of the northern border of modern Bosnia.
Austria seized more territory after invading Bosnia again inbut it yielded up its gains at the peace settlement in Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum The chronic fighting weakened Bosnia. War necessitated increased taxation, causing tax revolts. Forced conscription and frequent plague epidemics led to a relative reduction in the Muslim population, which contributed its manpower to Ottoman campaigns throughout the empire and may have suffered disproportionately from the effects of plague in the cities.
In the 18th century there was strong growth in the Christian population; by the end of the century the Muslims were probably no longer in the majority. The social consequences of war also included a change in the system of land tenure: The conditions of work demanded of the peasants on these estates were usually much more severe, and these peasants tended increasingly to be Christians, since Muslim peasants were able to acquire smallholdings in their own right.
Nevertheless, Ottoman Bosnia was not permanently sunk in misery. Descriptions of Sarajevo by visiting travelers portray it as one of the wonders of the Balkans, with fountains, bridges, schools, libraries, and mosques.
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Many of these buildings were systematically demolished by Serb forces in — Numerous works of poetry, philosophy, and theology were written. The cities of Sarajevo and Mostar, where such urban culture flourished, enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under elected officials.
After war forced the Bosnian viziers to move out of Sarajevo in the s, they found it almost impossible to return, residing instead in the town of Travnik and exercising only limited power.
Real local power passed increasingly into the hands of a type of hereditary official unique to the Bosnian eyalet known as a kapetan.
The existence of these powerful local institutions meant that Bosnia was well equipped to resist the reforming measures that the Ottoman sultans began to issue in the early 19th century.
When Sultan Mahmud II reformed the military in and abolished the Janissary corps which had acquired the status of a privileged social institutionthe reform was fiercely resisted by local Janissaries in Bosnia.
In a charismatic young kapetan called Husein seized power in Bosnia, imprisoning the vizier in Travnik. With an army of 25, men, Husein then marched into Kosovo to negotiate with the Ottoman grand vizier, demanding local autonomy for Bosnia and an end to the reform process there. During these final decades of Ottoman rule, the rise of Serbia as a quasi-autonomous Christian province, from which Muslims were violently expelled, made Bosnian Muslims feel more isolated and vulnerable.
Bosnian landowners, feeling that they could no longer trust the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople now Istanbul to maintain their power, frequently turned to more repressive measures against their Christian subjects. He also built schools, roads, and a public hospital and allowed the two Christian communities to build new schools and churches of their own.
Yet the growing tax demands on Bosnian peasants revived local resistance. In a revolt against the state tax collectors began among Christian peasants in the Nevesinje region of Herzegovina. Unrest soon spread to other areas of Bosnia, and repressive force was applied both by the new Bosnian governor and by local landowners using their own irregular troops. The revolt aroused enormous popular sympathy in Serbia, which, along with Montenegro, declared war on the Ottoman Empire in Russia came into the war on their behalf in the following year.
The congress decided that Bosnia and Herzegovina, while remaining notionally under Turkish sovereignty, would be occupied and governed by Austria-Hungary. In Austro-Hungarian troops took control of Bosnia, overcoming vigorous resistance from local Bosnian forces.
They also occupied the neighbouring sanjak of Novi Pazar now in Serbiawhich had been one of the seven Bosnian sanjaks in the late Ottoman period. The Ottoman administrative division was preserved, and Ottoman laws were only gradually replaced or supplemented. Indeed, a common criticism of Austro-Hungarian rule was that little was done to resolve tensions between landlords and peasants.
A public works program was initiated, and by Bosnia and Herzegovina had a well-developed infrastructureincluding an extensive railway and road network.Croatian soldiers capture Serbian agressor soldier in Bosnia
Mines and factories were developed, and agriculture was promoted with model farms and training colleges. Three high schools and nearly primary schools were built, although compulsory education was not introduced until At the same time, Muslim intellectuals were campaigning for greater powers over the Islamic institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby becoming quasi-political representatives of a Muslim community with its own distinctive interests.
In October nationalist feeling was strongly aroused by the sudden announcement that Bosnia and Herzegovina would be fully annexed by Austria-Hungary. The decision, which caught other great powers by surprise and created a diplomatic crisis lasting many months, was prompted by the revolution of the Young Turks in Constantinople.
The Young Turks appeared ready to establish a more democratic regime in the Ottoman Empire, which could then plausibly reclaim Turkish rights over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, one effect of this change was beneficial: