Bosnian Muslims suffered wartime losses rivaling Serbs yet bore Nazi stigma
Evidence
The Bosnian Muslims were also targeted with the generic blame of Serb nationalism. During World War II, Bosnian Muslims were caught on all sides of the battle lines; some fought with the Ustashe, many with the Partisans, and many others were massacred by both Ustashe and Chetniks. Indeed, the proportion of Bosnian Muslims killed in World War II rivaled that of the Bosnian Serbs. The Nazis recruited Bosnian Muslims into two divisions of the SS. Those two divisions have been used as an emblem to identify Bosnian Muslims with Nazi atrocities of World War II, ignoring the major role played by other Bosnian Muslims in the Partisan resistance and in saving the lives of Jewish and Serb neighbors. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 188
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the mechanics of collective blame and how a minority’s own victimhood gets inverted into guilt.
Related
- Bosnian Muslims suffered uniquely methodical persecution from both nationalist sides (similarity 0.86)
- The Muslim label trapped Bosnians between Western and Islamic stereotyping (similarity 0.80)
- Many Serbs resisted the genocide by helping Muslims escape and evading service (similarity 0.79)
- Croat and Serb militias jointly dynamited mosques across eastern Bosnia (similarity 0.79)
- Serb nationalist ideology fuses religious identity with race-traitor charges against Muslims (similarity 0.78)