Why Serb Nationalism Still Inspires Europe’s Far Right

Central to Tarrant's worldview appears to have been a commitment to the so-called "Great Replacement" theory.

This conspiracy theory posits that Muslim immigration to Western countries is a secret plot to "outbreed" white Christians of European ancestry and thus take over their "homelands". A peculiar brand of Islamophobia, it is rooted in anti-Ottoman sentiment.

Tarrant's arrival at these beliefs appears to have occurred through one specific ideological prism - his familiarity with and interest in Serbian ultra-nationalism.

In the 1990s, the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic engineered a series of wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and, finally, in Kosovo.

From 1987 to 1990, he had attempted to seize control of Yugoslavia's complex federal state. When this failed, he shifted to carving a "Greater Serbia" out of the wreckage of the Yugoslav federation.

His regime spent much of the decade from 1991 to 1999 at war, trying to ethnically cleanse non-Serb communities from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, and to absorb these lands into Serbia.

The high-water mark of this project was the Bosnian Genocide, a campaign of extermination and expulsion that targeted Bosnia's Bosniak Muslim community in particular.

Bosniaks, and later ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, were targeted because, in the Serb ultra-nationalist mythology that Milosevic's regime embraced, they were Muslims whose religious ancestry dated back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the 15th century.

Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, 1996. Photo: EPA PHOTO EPA SRDJAN SUKI

In this narrative, Bosniaks were, in fact, ethnic Serbs who had "abandoned" or "betrayed" their ancestors by converting to Islam. They were, therefore, traitors...

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