Written by Petrit Latifi
“In Bosnia-Herzegovina, there was no equivalent to the resistance being waged in Macedonia and Kosovo. But there was widespread violence all the same. In the first months of 1919, Bosnian Serbs repeatedly attacked Muslims across Bosnia, setting their homes on fire, seizing their land, and shouting at them to “go back” to Asia. Just in the months through July 1919, some 4,281 Muslim farmers were driven from their land, losing 400,072 hectares of land to Serbs.
Even Stepa Stepanović, commanding the Second Serbian Army, was unable to put a stop to the violence. Altogether, between December 1918 and September 1920, about 2,000 Muslims were killed by local Serbs. There were also persecutions of Bosniaks in the Sandžak, a strip of land which had been separated from Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 but garrisoned by Austrian troops until 1909.
The bloodletting and persecutions continued through 1924, in November of which year about 2,000 armed Montenegrins descended on Šahoviće and Pavino Polje, killing about 600 Bosnian Muslim men, women, and children. By July 1926, about 500 Bosniak village cooperatives had been burned to the ground. Some of the violence had a class nature, with Serbian peasants seizing land from Muslim estate-owners.
But Muslim peasants were also targeted, because they were Muslims. Most of Serbia’s troops had had “no experience of living among Muslims, and had been brought up to think of Muslims as such almost as mythical symbols of the enemies of Serbia.” In addition, such sentiments were reportedly fanned by the Serbian boulevard press. This was not the case with Bosnian Serb villagers, however, “who had lived at peace with their Muslim neighbours for forty years or more.”
Reference
Balkan Academia 