Are Serbs, Croatians, and Bosniaks really different ethnic groups?

[brentspeak]

Last edited Tue Jul 1, 2014, 01:30 PM - Edit history (6)

After reading how some Bosnian Serbs last week actually erected a statue in honor of Archduke Ferdinand's Serb assassin, I did some more reading about the 1990's Bosnian War and its terrible atrocities, the majority of which were committed by the Serbs. And it seems like the act of publicly honoring the murderer who triggered a war (WWI) which resulted in the deaths of 14 million people doesn't bode well for that part of the world not to eventually descend into ethnic genocide yet again.

But really, how different are the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) from one another, other than having differing religions? They consider each other to be genetically inferior sub-species of human beings, but don't they share a common heritage from that part of the world, and are, appearance-wise, indistinguishable from one another? (Not as though it should make a difference, anyway).

[leftstreet]

1. What difference does it make?

What are you asking?

[jberryhill]

2. .

[randome]

24. Subtle but effective.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]"If you're bored then you're boring." -Harvey Danger[/center][/font][hr]

[jberryhill]

30. People on the north side of my town don't like people on the south side of my town

I think you'd get unanimous agreement that people above the canal in Delaware are a different ethnic group that people from below the canal in Delaware.

Oh, and those people who live in the development across the highway... Have you SEEN the things they do?

It's fucking endless this shit.

[Coventina]

3. All humans are virtually indistinguishable to one another.

But, yes, the three groups you mention are all Slavic.
They exaggerate differences that are relatively small.

[clarice]

4. I think that it is more of a Religious thing than an ethnicity issue. Could be wrong. nt

[Coventina]

6. No, it's definitely ethnic. My husband is Slovenian-Croatian

and the two sides of the family hurl ethnic insults all the time.

It drives me crazy. I want to shout at them: Didn't you guys come here to get away from all that?

[clarice]

10. Coventina.... I'm not as informed...

as I should be on this subject but since you have a front row seat...
what ARE they fighting about in your opinion?

[Coventina]

16. Well, this is my opinion, and I don't claim expert status, just observations of my husband's

family and other people I have known from the region:

I think that it is a traditionally poor area of the world (quick! What is Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia famous for? Can't think of anything? Neither can I!) and also a region that has been conquered and re-conquered by its more powerful neighbors.

I think poverty and weakness breeds a sort of desperation that is most easily vented on one's neighbors. It's easy to blame the next village, especially if they speak a different language or practice a different religion, for colluding with the great powers, or under-cutting your industry, or taking your natural resources, etc..

[clarice]

25. Makes perfect sense. Thank you for your insight. PEACE nt

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. I was in Yugoslavia in 91 when it broke up

I stayed in Zagreb now the capital of Croatia and Belgrade the capital of then Yugoslavia.

Croatian speak another language and use the roman alphabet whereas Serbians speak another language and use the cyrillic alphabet. They couldn't read each others newspapers. Serbs look a little different than Croatians who look more Italian than slavic but like a mixture.

Yugoslavia was Very ethnically diverse

[brentspeak]

13. What about the Serbs and the Bosniaks?

I know the nationalist Serbs regard the Bosnian Muslims as some sort of inferior, sub-human species, but it seems like they're really just the same ethnic group, albeit having different religions. Not like sharing the same ethnic background or not (or any other difference) should matter in the least within any civilized society, but the fact that the Serbs imagine some genetic difference to the Bosniaks shows the truly twisted thinking there and why that region will never permanently be free of ethnic violence.

[Ichingcarpenter]

29. Try imagine a country that

was the crossroads to Europe for thousands of years back to the neolithic age and has been fought over since the beginning.



When I went to Yugoslavia it was like seeing ethic people that looked like arabs, Italians, vikings, germans, slavic, all in one small place with three alphabets, and many languages but all were Yugoslavian.

I stayed in Yugoslavia for a week because Yugoslavia was breaking up and needed the foreign currency, with a weeks stay and a flight to the states it was cheaper than anything I could find. in western europe. The tanks were moving when I left. The region has always been unstable.

[Hekate]

7. Are the Irish and the Irish different ethnic groups? What they are is honor societies.

Honor societies that demand an eye for an eye and hold grudges for centuries.

No kidding.

[DetlefK]

14. Those damn Scots.

[dawg]

8. As long as they think they are ...

that's all that really matters.

[JVS]

9. I don't see how Princip deserves the blame for 14 million just because the great powers flipped out

14 million died because the great powers all thought that they could benefit from the war. Princip was just shooting a foreign occupier.

[Coventina]

11. No, but erecting a statue to him is a slap in the face to Western Civilization, considering the

outcome of his actions.

At best, it's like honoring Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
But, the difference is, he did set out to do harm.
And he was part of a gang who threw bombs on a street crowded with his fellow countrymen and women.

Hardly deserving of hero status.

[JVS]

17. Serbs might feel he's more like John Brown or Nat Turner

And while Germany and Austria ended up losing out big, Serbians (and South Slavs in general, arguably) ended up better off.

1914 Serbia under King Peter I



1920 Yugoslavia under King Peter I

[Coventina]

18. Well, they would be wrong. Ultimately, the situation ended with them being part of the

Soviet Block, under the dictatorship of Tito.

It's only the collapse of the Soviet Block that has created the freedom they have now.

Nothing that loser Princip did.

[JVS]

32. Yugoslavia was never part of the Soviet bloc, they were non-aligned during the cold war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement

[Coventina]

35. OK, post 1948 call it what you want, but it wasn't freedom.

And again, nothing of Princip's design.

[brentspeak]

23. Princip was a puppet of the Black Hand

A clandestine Serbian ultra-nationalist terrorist group which operated with the full approval of the Serbian government. The Black Hand knew that assassinating Ferdinand would trigger a huge continental war, even if their only real goal revolved around unifying parts of the Balkans they considered "Serbian".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand_%28Serbia%29

[DetlefK]

12. Multicultural Europe is different from multicultural US.

For example, Germany was split into dozens of tiny fiefdoms in medieval times. And the split continues to this day in some ways.
* The state of Baden-Württemberg can be split east-vs-west in a half mainly populated by "Schwaben" (distant successors of an old german tribe called "Sueben" from ancient times) and "Badener". Each have their own dialect and each cracks jokes at the expense of the other, simply for being other. "Lieber tot als Schwob." ("Death before being a Schwabe.&quot
* The state of Bavaria can be split north-vs-south in a half mainly populated by "Franken" and "Bayern". Again, each has its own dialect and each cracks jokes at the expense of others.
* In southern Germany, in jokes the stupid person is traditionally from "Ostfriesland", an extremely remote and underdeveloped part of the northern coast of Germany. In northern Germany, in jokes the stupid person is traditionally from Bavaria, which lies in the south.

And even though the bavarian dialect and the austrian language have many similarities in pronunciation, Bavaria and Austria are completely different.


This is not about skin-color or looks. This is purely about inherited language, culture and traditions.


The melting-pot Europe is different from the melting-pot US: In Europe, culture is more heterogeneous: Lots of cultures but each has their well-defined spot. In the US, sub-cultures are much more evenly spread and tend to mix. In the US, if you want to experience a taste of a different culture, drive to another part of town. In Europe, culture is homogeneous on a local level, but heterogeneous on a larger scale: It changes more abruptly. Travel 12 hours and you are in a place that's absolutely different.

[BainsBane]

15. They see themselves as different

Which is why the former Yugoslovia erupted into conflict in the 1990s. Remember ethic cleansing?

They also speak different languages.

[KamaAina]

21. Serbo-Croatian is one language

But Orthodox Serbs write it with the Cyrillic alphabet, also used for Russian, while Catholic Croats write it with the Roman alphabet.

[KamaAina]

19. Bosniaks?

She's a Bosniak, Bosniak on the floor...

[leftstreet]

20. ...

You're old, too!

[KamaAina]

22. As a matter of fact, Jennifer Beals was a year behind me at Yale

not that I ever got to meet her or anything.

[TeeYiYi]

26. Would you ask the same question...

...of Native American Indian tribes? ie: Navaho, Paiute, Hopi, Apache, Cherokee, etc.

TYY

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

27. About as much as Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are ethnically different.

[Spider Jerusalem]

28. How different are the English and the Irish?

The answer is, not very.

Or Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims? The answer again is not very, especially for Sephardim and Mizrahim.

[jberryhill]

31. Chihuahuas are more like wolves than dachsunds are

They can still breed though.

My dog is a German Shepherd / Chihuahua mix.

Don't ask me how. That's what the DNA test said.

She's a brave guardian who hides in the bathtub during thunderstorms.

[Capt. Obvious]

33. How different are the Catalonians from the French and Spanish?

[Igel]

34. Yes and no.

Ethnic boundaries are squishy. It's like clan and tribe boundaries--now they matter, if there's competition between members; now they don't, if they're threatened from outside.

Same for language. Serbo-Croatian's a fine language. I learned it when it still existed. With minimal practice you get used to the predictable differences, like you do with the pronunciation of "car" in Boston, Baltimore, and Atlanta (and even London or Glasgow). You adapt to the different few hundred words that matter (khleb, kruh 'bread'). And you move on.

If the speakers want to make it easy to be understand, it's simple. If they stop and think about how to make the languages mutually unintelligible, they can, esp. E. Serbian and NW Croatian, the dialectal extremes.

But the areas were settled a long time ago by different Slavic tribes. So in principle differences could go back more than 1200 years. That long ago the French and Italians weren't so different. In 800, the Anglo-Saxons weren't that different from the Germanic tribes on the mainland. Even if they had been separating for hundreds of years before that.

The Bosnians are a special case. They're not an old tribe. They're a new tribe. They're Muslims because they converted--either because Turks married local women and their kids had to be Muslim or because they found profit and privilege in converting (avoiding the village-level child-tax, getting equal rights in the courts, being allowed to have certain jobs denied to the lesser Xians). In some cases they probably preferred the invader's and imperialist's religion on grounds that didn't involve coercion or money. Their dialect has more Turkish borrowings, and their surnames names are very often very much non-Slavic.

Now put on top of all of that the fact that they were separated for centuries by imperial divisions. By very old religious divisions. And more recently, Croatians fought more often on the side of the European western Nazis while the Serbs sided with the "Slavophile" and more eastern Orthodox Russians. And on top of that the fact that Tito kept power in part by the same technique Saddam Hussein used--keep your enemies divided by favoring one ethnicity over another, so that without that "strong hand" there'd be no unity but by perspicacious use of favoritism and economic/political bribes you can keep the peace *and* keep a tight hold on power.