ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the evolving Bosnian Muslim perception of self protection that changed from security, seen in terms of avoiding the war, to security requiring widening the war. It is based on analysis of Muslim imperatives for survival as reflected in the Izetbegovic government's responses to perpetually revised international peace plans. The Bosnian Muslims are the descendants of the South Slavs who entered the Balkans in the fifth and sixth centuries. The collaboration of some Bosnian Muslims with the World War II Ustase regime that undertook atrocities against Serb and Jewish inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina made all Bosnian Muslims a source of official suspicion in the post war period. However, in international politics, security is a function of how people, nations, and states define themselves and their national goals. The Muslim domination of South Slav inhabited lands was reduced when peasant rebellions expelled their Ottoman rulers from Serbia in the early nineteenth century.
