South Slavs

Huseyin Agovic and his friends in Istanbul's so-called 'Bosniak ghetto' publish Turkey's only Bosniak diaspora newspaper - so helping to preserve its identity and the connections between Bosnia, Sandzak and Turkey.

Under the slogan "We won't give up holy places", Serbian Orthodox clergy, right-wing and conservative movements and other citizens marched on Wednesday from the centre of Belgrade to the largest church in the city, the St Sava Church.

During the walk, described as a prayer gathering, traffic in the city centre and the main streets was closed, while the police secured the event.

Vucic added that "few world statesmen" called Serbia and Serbs "a handful of misery", as the newly elected Croatian President Zoran Milanovic once did.
Asked what he expects in relations between Serbia and Croatia, Vucic said that Serbia would be delighted to welcome any improvement in relations towards the Serbs in Croatia.

Vucic recalled that 28.73 percent of Serbs and less than 45 percent of Montenegrins officially live in Montenegro, referring to "the intention of part of the Podgorica regime".

The Montenegrin parliament passed the controversial Freedom of Religious Law amid chaotic scenes on Friday, despite fierce objections from the Serbian Orthodox Church, its supporters and pro-Serbian opposition parties.

Adil Amanet and the Husic family. Photo: Klix.ba

In 2019, the migrant crisis hit Bosnia and Herzegovina more severely than it did four years ago when the whole of Europe was dealing with a vast number of people moving towards Western Europe along the so-called Balkan route.

A decade after the European Court of Human Rights first ruled that the Bosnian constitution violates the rights of minorities, Human Rights Watch, HRW, has said in a press release that Bosnia has done nothing to end second-class status for Jews, Roma, and other minorities.

That concern stems from a notion that a country full of people who are both Muslim and white must be an oxymoron: Bosnian Muslims may seem like good Westerners but they could be secret fanatics, all the more dangerous because they confound racial profiling measures.

Blanket demonisation

The mainly Muslim Bosniak region of Sandzak has felt little benefit from Turkey's growing investment and trade ties with Serbia. Might a new highway herald a change?

"Ethnicity should not be a constitutional category," she adds. "I won't identify with any of these groups out of principle."

A federation of six republics, the former Yugoslavia brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians Montenegrins and others under one socialist union, but it fell apart in a series of brutal wars in the 1990s.