Ustasha ideology absorbed Bosnian Muslims into the Croatian nation.

Evidence

The Ustashas pursued a genocidal policy also against Orthodox Serbs— but not against Muslims, as the policy of the Ustashas was to treat Bosnian Muslims as Islamic Croats. The Ustasha newspaper Hrvatska Krajina, published in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, stated in April 1941 that the ‘little Croat nation is divided between two worlds, a majority Western and Catholic and a minority Eastern and Islamic. We are the only nation in Europe that embraces two such different cultural and religious elements.’ Of these two wings of the Croat nation, the Muslim part was the ‘most pure-blooded, for while the Catholic part of the Croats was considerably infiltrated by the influx of foreign elements—German, Czech, Magyar, Italian, Slovene and so forth—the Bosnian-Hercegovinian Muslims intermarried exclusively among themselves’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1062

Categorization

• XREF: This assimilationist embrace of Muslims as racially pure Croats mirrors the Ottoman millet logic read in earlier chapters where religious identity was ethnicized.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone working on Balkan nationalism or the historiography of Ustasha Muslim relations — the claim of Muslims as the ‘purest’ Croats against Catholic ‘infiltration’ is a striking inversion of usual racial narratives.