'Muslims must fight for their rights'
Ifet Mustafic is the imam of the Islamic Society of Footscray in Melbourne, where he has worked for the past one and a half years. A Bosnian Muslim, he graduated from the Islamic faculty in Sarajevo. He recently spoke to Green Left Weekly about the situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
"When one side is well armed [Serbs] and the other side is unarmed [Muslims], you cannot have talks. If you want to hold talks you have to let the weaker side have the same power and position. If you don't — and this is what the US government and the UN is doing now by not allowing Bosnian Muslims to have weapons to defend themselves — you help ethnic cleansing and the occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina by Serbia.
"Muslims were psychologically unprepared for the war because the former Yugoslav regime for 50 years was destroying any sense of national identity among Muslims and was attempting to convert them to Serb nationality. In Bosnia you had no real communism, but Serbian nationalism under a communist mask. They tried to convert Muslims to the orthodox religion. And a lot of Muslims began to believe them.
"Nobody will give you rights, that is the awful truth. Everyone must take their rights. Muslims also have to take their rights. Serbs are trying to divide Bosnia in two or three parts, but Muslims and Croatians for now have the same target.
"What [Croatian leader Franjo] Tudjman is doing now talking to the Serbian leader [Slobodan Milosevic] is against the interests of his own people in Croatia, and maybe he wants part of Bosnia just to satisfy himself after losing a third of Croatia held by Serbia."
Despite increasing media reports of Croatian forces turning against their Muslim allies, Mustafic says that "the recent fighting between Croatian and Muslim forces in Bosnia was only caused by a few local problems, but those are solved as far as I know. In all Bosnian towns there are different peoples and each wants to be on top and that causes some problems between Muslims and Croats. But the government now has things in hand.
"After World War Two, Serbian propaganda made up a lot of lies and disinformation and tried to establish the common thought that Croats and Muslims cannot live together, and cannot live with Serbs. They have used this to try to divide Bosnia in three parts.
"The best solution is to make such a situation that all people in all three nations can live peacefully together."
... Peter Anderson