The welcome speech was delivered by the new President of the SBK, Mirsad Čaušević
Academician Prof. Dr. Suad Kurtćehajić said that Bosnia must stand out more and more as one of the saving solutions for Bosnia and Herzegovina. On May 22, 1992, BiH became a member of the United Nations and not a nation. Even to this day, we have not affirmed our national identity.
In the Dayton Constitution, only the peoples Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats and others are mentioned as well as the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is no concept of nation anywhere, but people are deliberately translated into nation and the vital interest of the people into vital national interest. The term nation dates back to the French bourgeois revolution in 1789 and is linked to the existence of the state. Kurds are a people but they never became a nation because they don't have a state. If in BiH we accept the story of three nations, which is constantly being foisted upon us, then this is a prelude to the future division of BiH into three mini-states. There is no state in the world with two, let alone three nations, and it is no coincidence that the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina speaks of three peoples, not nations.
The majority of the population of Kosovo are Albanians and they were never attached to the name Kosovar, but they introduced it and it appears as a mark of nationality on their identity cards. They are aware of the enormous advantage of that name for the preservation and integration of their country rather than insisting that they are ethnically Albanian.
Unfortunately for us, everything is upside down in BiH. Even thirty-one years after the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we have not built a national identity, which in the modern interpretation of the term nation means a community of citizens of one state and which is determined by the state. The only possible term for belonging to the nation would be Bosnian because the name Bosnian and Herzegovinian is inappropriate because nationality is expressed in one word. And bearing in mind that until the Berlin Congress in 1878, for a full 930 years, the name Bosnia, which absorbed the term Herzegovina, was the only designation for our geopolitical space. Herzegovinians would have to understand this argument, which most often serves those who challenge Bosnian as a national designation to say that it is unacceptable for Herzegovinians.
Academician Kurtćehajić points out that they should emulate Rwanda. They had a much bigger conflict than us in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in just one hundred days over a million were killed in a terrible genocide and about 40% were expelled and fled. They had a conflict between two fraternal Hutu peoples - pure natives and Tutsi who were a mixture with the European colonizer. After gaining independence from Belgium in 1962, the majority Hutu (about 85%) dissatisfied with their position in relation to the minority Tutsi started a genocide against them, and the reason was the downing of the plane with their president, for which they accused the Tutsi. When everything calmed down, President Paul Kagame came to the head of Rwanda in 2000, who legally banned the names Tutsi and Hutu and proclaimed the names Rwandans and Rwandans. In just ten years until 2010, Rwanda increased its annual gross product fourteen times, and revenues from internal taxes increased twenty times. It was a boom and today Rwanda is the second country in terms of safety of foreign capital investment in Africa and the thirty-ninth in the world. And Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though it is a European country on the periphery, we are constantly spinning in circles due to ethnic separation and putting Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats in the foreground. The affirmation of Bosnia as a national consciousness and its gradual acceptance could lead Bosnia and Herzegovina out of the vicious circle.
Kurtćehajić points out that Bosnian has two meanings. Wider in the national sense and narrower in the ethnic sense as a synonym for the name Bosniak, he points out that throughout medieval Bosnia the term Bosniak was used in all the Charters of the Bosnian rulers except at the beginning of the 15th century in one Charter of King Tvrtko II Kotromanić to the people of Dubrovnik where he uses the term Bosniak.
With the arrival of the Ottomans, who were the occupiers of Bosnia and Herzegovina from a legal point of view, the name Bosniak changed to Bosniak. One can ask why it is not in Bosanac. The reason may be that Ottoman linguistics did not have the letter C, and in today's Turkey, even though there is a letter C, it is read as dž or đe, so a Bosnian would be Bosanadž or Bosanađe. Until the second half of the 19th century, the name Bosniak was used to refer to the entire population of the Bosnian pashaluka, from 1865 to the Bosnian vilayet, when the Orthodox priest Bogoljub Petranović began the process of Serbizing the Orthodox Bosniaks and Božić Klement the Croatization of the Catholic Bosniaks. In 1906, the name Bosniak was abolished by the Austro-Hungarian government, and in 1907, the Bosnian language was abolished as well. Bosnian Muslims slowly became a religious group until, in AVNOJ's Yugoslavia, in 1968, the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina returned their identity as Muslim with a capital "M". Tito's desire to establish the name Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian communists did not want to accept either. for a living head. Dobrica Ćosić declared in SAN in 1989 that "Serbs have nothing more to ask for in Bosnia if the Bosnian nation is adopted and declared".
After the multi-party elections in 1990, the SDA was able, in coalition with the SDP and the reformists and only a few pro-Bosnian MPs from other parties that were present at the time, to replace the term Muslim with the name Bosnian as a label for all those who accept and love this identity, regardless of confession. Probably the fate of BiH would have been much better in the Yugoslav crisis than in a sharp division into three nations with ethnically different interests. Even in 1993, it would have been much better for the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the long term if the term Bosnian had been defined and was completely open to members of all religions, rather than Bosniak, which was 99% associated with members of the Islamic religion. Many Bosniaks from Bosnia and Herzegovina love the term Bosnian in the ethnic sense, and a few percent decided that way even though they entered the category of others, and a large number were written as Bosniaks because they did not want to be left behind. That is why it is necessary to consider that, considering the fact that Bosniak and Bosnian are synonymous names in the ethnic sense and not only for citizens, but also for all those who are not citizens of BiH and whose culture, history and tradition are associated with Bosnia, which signifies ethnic identity, that in the future census, put Bosniak/Bosnian in the same category, because that's the only way to see what the name of a Bosnian man is. Bosniaks outside Bosnia and Herzegovina prefer the name Bosniak because they were part of Bosnia until 02.02. In 1877, when the Ottomans separated the Sandžak of Novopazar and annexed it to the Vilayet of Kosovo. But regardless of that, they could choose what they want to be because both terms are synonymous and related to belonging to Bosnia not only through citizenship but also through historical ties with Bosnia. Today, many people in BiH call themselves Bosniaks because they don't want to be left, and if they were offered this opportunity, it would be clear how much and whether the name Bosnian is closer to a Bosnian person than the name Bosniak, which is the Ottoman name for a Bosnian.
In his presentation, academician prof.dr. Dževad Jahić pointed out that Bosniak, Bosniak and Bosnian are synonyms in the linguistic sense and thereby confirmed the correctness of Kurtćehajić's thesis that these terms denote belonging to Bosnia not only in the state-forming (national) sense but also in every other sense: cultural, customary, territorial throughout the history of Bosnia, which makes a feature of ethnic identity.
This Public Debate is only an initial one and should be a prelude to the opening to a wide scientific discussion, but also to the citizens what they think about all this and about the idea of affirming all Bosniaks not only in the national but also in the ethnic sense as a synonym for the name Bosniak. Life and reality are more important than imposition, and it should be the way everyone feels in their heart that the best name for their ethnic identity is Bosniak or Bosnian, and it doesn't have to be the others. If these ideas about Bosnia find a place in the heart of the Bosnian people, they will take root, and if not, then they will remain only as reflections of individual intellectuals. But they should not be stifled at the start, SBK announced.
