² Rogers Brubaker (1995) calls attention to the non-congruency of ethnic and political boundaries, with special emphasis on the former Yugoslavia. He proposes a scenario of triadic power struggles in which elements of a diaspora are importantly involved. I agree but believe that the struggle is more than triadic.

³ Although the adoption of Turkish language and Islamic faith was largely restricted to urban centers, some dietary habits (e.g., coffee drinking, ways of preparing some foods, the use of sweets, etc.) did eventually extend to most rural areas, and non-Muslim rural costumes often show Turkish influence especially in military accoutrements. Production and consumption of alcohol, especially distilled alcohol, show a robust resistance to Islamic regulation in Muslim populations. Rural Muslim Slavic populations occur now only in Bosnia as a result of wholesale conversion (perhaps from Bogumilism) to Islam after the Turkish conquest, and in the Sandjak of Novi Pazar east of Montenegro.

⁴ Newscasters for the BBC, while they speak the Queen's English, not infrequently show phonological traces of Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. I do not know if this phenomenon is recent, but it is not restricted to broadcasts in Northern Ireland, Scotland, or Wales and thus different from an account of a soccer game given in Yorkshire accents in Yorkshire.

⁵ For example, a Croatian informant related to me that he had heard Serb newscasters from Knin, the capital of the breakaway Serbian Krajina, broadcasting in Croatian. What that statement means is that the Serb newscaster was speaking not in the core Serbian ekavian dialect but in the jekavian one spoken by most Croats and by most Croats, Serbs, and Muslims in the western regions along the spine of the Dinaric Alps.

[6] Major newspapers like Politika and Borba were published in the ekavian dialect in Serbia, although Borba was published in Latinic script while Politika was in Cyrillic. In Zagreb, Borba was published in jekavian and Latinic.

⁷ Literary works, for example poetry, are often published in the local dialect. Local papers often publish a column or a page in the local dialect, sometimes exaggerated, and frequently a source of mirth.

⁸ In earlier centuries the inhabitants of Dalmatia and Bosnia demonstrated their separateness by writing in yet another alphabet, the Glagolithic, especially if they were Protestants.

⁹ I have a report that Oslobodjenje was beginning to publish in ekavian, but I can neither confirm it nor can I understand the symbolism.

¹⁰ Some spoken idiolects are mixed. For example, it is quite common for a native jekavian speaker to employ ekavian pronunciation of words acquired through reading only.

¹¹ For example, the Turkish word for "clock" (from Arabic) is sahat. As a loan word in Serbian and generally in Bosnia, it appeared as sat (with a long "a"). Bosnian Muslims are now reported to be reverting to the original Turkish form, making the word disyllabic.

¹² The symbolic meaning of this is unclear, since kruh is also used by Orthodox Slavs in Hercegovina and is as much a regional as an ethnic variant form.

¹³ It should be noted in passing that the South Slavic dialects seem more transparently mutually intelligible than the dialects of some other areas. This is my experience and also that of Andrei Simic. Putatively different Slavic languages are also often mutually quite intelligible.

¹⁴ Gender, occupation, and other factors are of course also important but not in the context of this analysis.

¹⁵ The equating of Catholic and Croat, Orthodox and Serb, became a feature of Austrian policy primarily under Maria Theresa and later, and especially after the occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878.

¹⁶ Nevertheless, it is typical of Serbian and Croatian nationalist politics that each claims the Bosnian Muslims to be "truly" Serbian or Croatian, respectively, in an attempt to justify Serbian or Croatian claims to all or most of Bosnia-Hercegovina. The now infamous Independent State of Croatia, the Quisling government of Croatia under the Nazis, encompassed all of Bosnia-Hercegovina and went to special pains to stress the Croatian identity of the Muslim population.

¹⁷ Between 1521 and 1683 Slavonia contained large numbers of Muslim Slavs and Turks, as well as other ethnicities associated with the Ottoman Empire (Jews, Cincars, etc.). All of these fled the region after the Turkish defeat at Vienna in 1683 and subsequent defeats in Slavonia and Srem up to about 1700.

¹⁸ Artists, actors, and highly skilled workers who found employment abroad were able to amass considerable wealth, often held in stable foreign currencies and often (illegally) in foreign bank accounts.

¹⁹ For example, while the accentual features of the speech of a person from Knin might be virtually identical to those of a person from Zagreb, the Serb from Knin would never use the pronoun tko (who) but only ko as in standard Serbian. Neither would he or she use any of the Croatian neologisms (like brzoglas for telephone).

²⁰ In this essay I do not attempt to chronicle, analyze, or explain the ferocity of violence, especially that directed against civilians and especially against women. Olujic (1995a, b) gives vivid accounts and observes that systematic rape is a political weapon against the masculinity and competence of the enemy. Of course, in an internecine ethnic war there are no noncombatants, as the history of the American West and the conquest of the American Indian already showed. Strictly military wars seem to be a cultural convention or perhaps a myth, violated by events such as the bombing of Hiroshima or Dresden, or the rape of Nanking, not to mention the Holocaust.

²¹ See for example Murphy and Kasdan 1959, Sahlins 1961. Dinaric Slavic social structure is described in Hammel 1968.

²² The IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was active in resisting Serbian hegemonic pressure in Macedonia. The Serbs regard the Macedonians as Serbs who speak a variant dialect, the Bulgarians regard them as Bulgarians, and the Greeks regard them as the ancient descendants of the Empire of Alexander of Macedon who have abandoned their native Greek language and become unfortunately slavicized.

²³ The Yugoslav resistance was ineffectual, and collapse under the Axis blitzkrieg was a foregone conclusion even if the Yugoslavs had been better organized. Nevertheless, the military coup that diverted major German forces to the Balkans delayed their Russian offensive by about three weeks, placing them before Moscow at the onset of winter. That delay, resulting in the failure to take Moscow, may have been the deciding element in the Russo-German campaign. In that sense, the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army saved the world from the Axis. See the account by Tomasevich (1975).

²⁴ The Ustasa movement, a Croatian version of the agrarian fascist movements that emerged in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, began in the late 19th Century, especially among emigrés in Italy, Austria, Australia and the United States. Within Croatia itself it was especially strong in the poor karstic regions of the Dalmatian hinterland and Western Hercegovina, in part because these were the source regions for much of the migration to overseas locations.

²⁵ It is claimed by proponents of the Serbs and detractors of the Croats that the Croats joined the Partisans late in the game when the outcome was clear. Almost surely some Croats joined late, but some also joined early. It can also be claimed that most Serbs began as Royalists under Mihajlovic and flocked to the Partisans later. Some were early, some were late.

²⁶ For an account of World War II in Yugoslavia see Tomasevich 1975; for prewar history see Tomasevich 1955. Tomasevich's writings are in my view extraordinarily unbiased and uncompromising.

²⁷ See for example Hayden 1992.

²⁸ One should be careful not to be caught up in the continual accusations and counter-accusations about which ethnic group did what to some other ethnic group. There is no ethnic group in the Balkans that does not have a legitimate history of complaint, whether at the hands of imperial powers (including the Communists) or of other ethnic groups.

²⁹ The Albanian birthrate in Kosovo is the highest in Europe, and the Albanians in this region constitute a third of all Albanians in Europe and about ninety percent of the population of Kosovo. There were always some Albanians in this region, even in mediaeval times, but after the Turkish conquest of 1389 those that had become Muslim were favored under the Ottomans. After the Austrian defeat at Pec in 1689 and the massive emigration of Serbs to Habsburg territory in Hungary and Croatia, Albanians began to move into Kosovo in large numbers.

³⁰ The Party of Rights, headed by the dissident Dobrosav Paraga, is a lineal descendant of the original Ustasa movement founded by Ante Starcevic and Josip Frank in the 19th Century.

³¹ Macedonia is now facing difficulties with its large Albanian minority, among whom there are increasing demands for cultural autonomy, as in the use of Albanian and Turkish as languages of instruction.

³² The Ustasa program, as an expression of extreme Croatian nationalism, was to convert a third of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina to Catholicism, expel a third to Serbia, and kill the remaining third. The program began without delay, accounting for massive Serbian recruitment either to the royalist Chetniks or to the Communist Partisans.

³³ The mediaeval Croatian coat of arms was adopted, but it was rememberd by the Serbs as the official symbol of the Ustasa regime. Moves were instituted or at least threatened to forbid the use of Cyrillic, to urge conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, and in short to continue the pressures begun long ago by Maria Theresa and reintroduced by the Ustasa regime.

³⁴ To be fair about it, ethnicity emerges everywhere as a political force. Local politics in the United States, for example, is often fundamentally ethnically driven, and ethnic issues reverberate at the national level as well.

³⁵ Comparisons with white supremacist groups from the Klan to the Aryan Nation, with various private militias and the National Rifle Association, the Branch Davidians, and indeed the entire far right of Bible Belt Christianity and other nativistic dreamland movements in the U.S. come all to easily to mind. They are the white man's Ghost Dance.