Muslims furious at anthem and symbols adopted by Bosnian Serbs

BOSNIA: BOSNIA'S MUSLIMS are furious with the country's Serb republic for adopting an anthem and emblems that allegedly glorify Serb nationalism and undermine what precious little ethnic harmony still exists in the divided country.

The row comes at a tense time, after last week's commemoration of the 1995 Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica and a stand-off this week between police and Muslim women trying to visit a Serb village where their male relatives were murdered.

The Dayton peace deal that ended the 1992-5 war split Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska, both of which had their own anthems and coats of arms, and which remained deeply suspicious of each other and any attempt at reconciliation.

Amid Western efforts to integrate the two "entities" and strengthen a central, multi-ethnic administration in Sarajevo, a court ruled in 2006 that the anthems and symbols used by each should reflect equally Bosnia's Muslim, Croat and Serb communities.

The new anthem adopted by the local parliament in Republika Srpska makes no mention of Bosnia however, and on the coat of arms approved by legislators the traditional Serb eagle and lion tower over puny Muslim and Croatian emblems.

Muslim MPs accused their Serb colleagues of nationalism and discrimination, and vowed to challenge the adoption of the coat of arms and the anthem called "My Republic", which tells of a "country of the shining sun, where honourable and good people live".

Such sentiments deeply trouble Muslims, who were driven from swathes of Bosnia by Serbs who sought to create an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia".

On Tuesday, police, fearing ethnic clashes, stopped about 150 Muslim women from laying flowers at a warehouse in the Serb village of Kravica, near Srebrenica, where more than 1,000 Muslim men were executed in 1995.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times