Синдромът No Man’s Land и националното съзнание на босненско-херцеговинските мюсюлмани в края на XX – началото на XXI век
The No Man’s Land Syndrome and the National Consciousness of the Bosnian and Hercegovinian Moslems at the End of the 20th and the Beginning of the 21s

Summary/Abstract: Bosnia and Hercegovina emerged as a buffer zone between the Serbian and the Croatian lands which fact attached to it exceptional importance for both the Serbian and the Croatian side. Situated on the borderline between two civilizations, the Christian and the Moslem one, and bearing characteristics belonging to both the one and the other civilization, the Bosnian Moslems had before them two possibilities: to turn into a bridge uniting the two worlds or to fall into a position between them of „double isolation“. The Moslems in Bosnia and Hercegovina developed as a kind of „contact group“ on whose national self-identification contradictory tendencies — proSerbian, pro-Croatian, pro-Yugoslav, pro-Bosnian, pro-Moslem ones — brought influence to bear, with none of them growing clear and getting the upper hand. The consciousness of being a Moslem community was uppermost but it could not be described as Moslem national consciousness. The preponderance of a particular tendency was directly connected with the particular historical situation and the condition of the national processes in the Yugoslav state and the Balkans in general. The disintegration of the Yugoslav federation at the beginning of the 1990s incited the inhabitants of Bosnia and Hercegovina to seek security in their own ethno-religious community, which fact accelerated the process of disintegration and intensified confrontation and separatism. Along with the war traumas and the contrasting interests of external factors and forces, the unwillingness of the Moslem population to share a multicultural community with the Christians emerged as a not readily surmountable disintegrating factor. This diminished the limited as it was chances of stabilizing post-war Bosnia and Hercegovina. The „battle for Bosnia“ among Serbs, Croats and Moslems which continued for almost a century failed to lead to finding that niche which would have allowed the three confessional groups to reconcile the different religions professed by them with their common ethnic origin. The aspirations (manipulated by a multitude of external factors and forces) of each one of the three groups to dominate over the others and to appropriate the identity of Bosnia and Hercegovina, turned it from a „motherland“ into a No Man’s Land — a creation devoid of political and financial sovereignty, without the potential for economic survival, divided by ethnic and religious hatred, intensified by the war traumas, incapable of ensuring the co-existence of Serbs, Croats and Moslems without foreign military presence.

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