AJITAROK

Don’t Use the Term “Bosniak”

„Bosniak“ is a loaded political and ideological term. People concerned with truth and civil rights should not be using it in its modern sense.

You will know Bosnia. Many nations and religions are mixed here, but the main three nations are Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. This has been our homeland for many centuries, since before the Slavs ever became Christian or Muslim.
And the peoples of Bosnia are all Bosniak, be we Muslim or Croat or Serb.
Bosniak (bošnjak) is a geographical term, deriving from the region of Bosnia, and the river Bosna for which it is named. In accordance with Slavic language, the suffix ,-ak‘ will denote the place where someone is from, as in warszawiak, a person from Warsaw, or krakowiak, a person from Krakow. So it is with bošnjak: for all the term’s history up until the 1990s, bošnjak referred to a person from the region of Bosnia; it did not specify religion nor national identity. People identified with their nation more than their region. A Dalmatian Croat was foremost a Croat; a Kosovo Serb was above all things a Serb; and someone from Bosnia would be either Serb, Croat, or Muslim, before Bosniak.

In the 1990s, when the Muslim people (muslimani) determined to secede from Yugoslavia and take all of Bosnia, they redefined themselves, changed their national name and took over the name ,Bosniak‘ for themselves, excluding Serbs and Croats from the term. So ,Bosniak‘, which means a person from Bosnia, now refers only to Muslims—and not even just Muslims from Bosnia, but all Yugoslav Muslims, including those in the Sandžak region between Montenegro and Serbia. The Serbs and Croats of Bosnia are no longer allowed to be Bosniaks; they must be outsiders.
Do you see what they are doing??

So this name change was not a natural, innocent development of language; rather it was an abrupt political imposition meant to manufacture legitimacy for this Muslim secessionist state, by presenting the Muslims as the only true people of Bosnia, while excluding and otherising Bosnian Serbs and Croats. „Bosniak“ meaning only Muslims is not a neutral term, but in fact a political statement. It is designed to erase and otherise half of the population! Whoever uses it in this sense is, inadvertently or not, furthering the narrative that Muslims are the rightful owners of Bosnia, and that Serbs and Croats are secondary, that we are only guests here in our land, or even invaders.

Muslim nationalists call everything Muslim ,Bosnian‘ and ,Bosniak‘, so that they can claim that all of Bosnia belongs to Muslims.

Karadžić understood this early on, and argued that „we Serbs and Croats are also Bosniaks, that we come from Bosnia, that Bosnia is our motherland“, and that we „will not permit anyone to appropriate the name ,Bosniak‘ for himself, because we are also Bosniaks. Nor the language, because we are here in Bosnia too. We will not leave Bosnia for anywhere.“