The Dubrovnik and Bosnia-Hercegovina Deception

The following is a book review and testimony from American professor and veteran of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), John Peter Maher, who visited the former Yugoslavia several times during the 1990s, both before the wars there began and during them. His observations remain essential for any truthful historical review on what really went on over there, as opposed to the "facts" that were fed to the public via the media. Ravnagora.

Here’s a novelty. An honest book on the Yugoslav war has managed to get into print. An Irish Army officer Brendan O’Shea has published “The Modern Yugoslav Conflict 1991-1995; Perception, Deception and Dishonesty”. He shreds the propaganda put out by the U.S. and its allies, that their war was a noble intervention for humanitarian ideals. On this Walter J. Rockler, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, quoted Ibsen: “Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’ ”

O’Shea’s is not the only book to focus on propaganda and deception, but one of the few that deal with “Western” war propaganda in Yugoslavia. Another book. contrariwise, omits the war in Yugoslavia, though its author was all over the place during the war. This is “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006), by NY Times man Stephen Kinzer. His book is currently (January 2009) being promoted, courtesy of the Pritzker Military Library in a series broadcast on TV station WYCC in Chicago. Kinzer’s work would be quite a decent primer if re-issued with two caveats:

a) Everything in Kinzer’s book is known to everyone literate in the history of US diplomacy, and

b) Kinzer does not once mention the biggest U.S. Overthrow previous to the Shock & Awe and Mission Accomplished in Iraq.

The Irish soldier O’Shea concentrates precisely on what the newsperson Kinzer omits. O’Shea experienced the war in Yugoslavia in 1991-1995 and concluded that the whole mess was a Big Lie. The Irish well know Perfidious Albion. See O’Shea’s works on the Irish War of Independence.

If ever there was a CNN war, this was it. I was a Fulbright linguistics lecturer in Yugoslavia from February to July 1990, which put me in a position to follow developments before the press declared war in 1991. Really, the war had begun when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In 1990 the propaganda mills were revving up on Yugoslavia. I was observing things and reading the local papers, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian.

On Bosnia and Herzegovina: Early that summer I went on my own nickel to Sarajevo. I took a room in a Muslim house in the old Turkish center. Since I knew the language I illegally avoided paying the price for foreigners. I did observe and overhear a young girl being tutored in Arabic in the mosque of Bas Carsija (the old Turkish center), but there was otherwise little sign of what was to come. Nowadays Sarajevo is “Little Teheran”, streets flowing with burqas and hijabs, de rigueur for chaste women. Schools now ban Christmas observances and require Koranic instruction, but in 1990 “modest” Muslim female dress was a rarity, even in Muslim parts of town. I noticed just one head scarf. Incongruously, the young lady wearing it was a flirt. From Sarajevo I took the train to Herzegovina. It was a short hop to Mostar, where the beautiful old Turkish bridge still stood. Croatian artillery pulverized it. Here, too, my hosts were Muslim. I got a haircut there. My jovial barber, avoiding mention of her own religion, told me her husband was Catholic. In 1990 there were 30, 000 Serbs living in Mostar, but not now. They fled for their lives in the Croatian “ethnic cleansing” of 1992. This was barely noticed in the free press.

On Dubrovnik: This legendary city has been part of Croatia for less than seventy years. O’Shea’s treatment is excellent. What I personally know is that in the summer 1990 Dubrovnik was empty of tourists. That should itself have been newsworthy, as the place was a prime tourist destination, but the newshawks were flapping their wings elsewhere.

Yugoslav newspapers in 1990 were reporting that Dubrovnik was swarming with Croatian irregular soldiers. No reports of that in the “free press”. And they were reporting that Croatian irregulars were setting up road blocks on roads south to Montenegro, harassing business people whose “lichna karta” (personal ID card) revealed probable Serb ethnicity. The papers also reported that in Croatian towns along the coast very scared Serb travelers heard the blood-curdling old World War II songs howling for Serbian and Jewish blood. One example “Mi ne pijemo vina, samo krvi Srbina iz Knina" –"We don’t drink wine, just the blood of the Serb from Knin". In 1995, after Muslims and their patrons staged the Sarajevo market place bombing in August for a casus belli, US air forces bombed Knin’s military and civilians – TV, hospitals, school. All of Krajina in Croatia was “cleansed” of a quarter of a million Serb subsistence farmers who had inhabited the region since settled there by imperial Austria before 1700.

In Zagreb, Croatia in July 1990 I read press reports about arson and demolition of non-Croatian houses on the Adriatic coast, not only Serbian, but also homes belonging to Croatian communists and even to the “westward-leaning” Catholic Slovenes. Serbs were always the biggest contingent of vacationers on the Adriatic coast, since there are twice as many Serbs as Croats in Yugoslavia anyway, and all Yugoslavs then owned the coast. No more. Slovenia now has a coast line just a few kilometers long, and Slovene fisherman have been arrested and jailed by the Croatian coast guard for violating sovereign Croatia’s waters.

Back in Chicago in the summer of 1990 a Croatian student of mine told me that her parents had just warned her that war was coming and she must stay in Chicago. She said her mother told her what was unreported in “the West” - that Croats were attacking cars with Serbian license plate numbers, sometimes pushing them into the sea. Riding in one such car, as he himself told me a couple of years ago, was the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett. Yet another Croatian student told me her family fled to safe haven in Chicago: “They (the Croatian fascists) blew up our house.” Her family wasn't "Croatian enough".

In September 1991 Croatian propaganda, in unison with the world press, was beating the war drums. German, Dutch and Austrian papers were the most strident, claiming that the “Pearl of the Adriatic” was being reduced to rubble by the “Serb-dominated” Yugoslav navy. The commander of this Serb-dominated force was Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene. In Dubrovnik the first to die, a native (refugee) later told me, were a Serb couple incinerated in their car.

The German press had published a photo of a Catholic nun standing by the damaged porch railing and a festoon of St. Blaise’s cathedral in September of 1991. On March 25th, 1992 I filmed a spot on the pavement in front of St Blaise’s marked with blue spray paint. This was an instruction where street crews were to patch up a pothole where a mortar round had landed. Whose mortar I do not know. JNA units were on the sea; the mortar is an infantry weapon, not navy. Other JNA units were on some heights over the city. Croatian units were directly overhead at the old Napoleonic fort of St Sergius.

In November 1991 a dramatic photo attributed to Peter Northall (I haven’t located him) is a real prize winner. A huge black pillar of smoke towers over the customs house on the old harbor (outside the walls, of course). When I later showed a Chicago fireman a copy of the famous picture and asked him what kind of fire it was, his verdict was immediate; “a petroleum fire, oil; maybe tires, too”. I photographed the quay there on my 1992 walk-about, no traces of fire to be seen. So I tentatively consider that the blaze was aboard a boat or barge that was then towed to sea and sunk.

To flatten the Old City it would have taken the JNA (Yugoslav Peoples Army) two hours. If the “port of Dubrovnik” was being shelled, I – as a translator – was immediately aware of the ambiguity that a monoglot might not notice: I had to ask myself, “the whole city (which is a port) or the port area of the city?”. Only one way to find out. Go there. So I did, just three months after the alleged destruction. O’Shea mentions that I did a little walk-about there, on 25 March 1992, with a professional cameraman to film the Old City and environs. I immediately offered my tape to Chicago Tribune editor Richard Longworth; he sniffed, before he hung up, “That contradicts our information”.

I filmed decorations from Christmas and Epiphany (January 6, 1991) that were still up in March 1992. Presumably not much house-keeping had been done to change appearances since December. Had a ruined city been restored in just three months?

Fluff travelogues and Voice of America chat about new red or pink roof tiles. They can’t agree which. Travelers may tell you they saw roof tiles missing, but they took their pictures years later, when renovations were starting up. In 1992 the roof tiles were old and weathered, as my films attest. New Zealand’s star journalist Martin Fletcher launched the “Buy A Tile” scam that was run by the Ruder Finn PR firm. This was shut down and a Washington source has leaked confidential information that that an FBI investigation of Ruder Finn was ordered closed by the Clinton Administration.

The day before I walked through Dubrovnik, a fake air raid alarm sounded and Dubrovnik citizens ran for cover in their cellars to wait out a bombing that never came. The scare was a smoke screen, figuratively speaking: Yugoslav military intelligence, one of their number told me, observed a German freighter docked at the industrial port at Gruz, off-loading a consignment of tanks from stores of the defunct East German Army. This can only mean there was a fix in and that the army was being held back from crushing the Croat rebels against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia.

Outside Dubrovnik’s Old City at the so-called Little Belgrade – Beogradsko Naselje, literally “Belgrade Settlement”, I saw 19 substantial vacation houses of masonry construction, all blown up by explosive charges in a regular pattern. In the countryside I photographed a tiny stone-built Serb Orthodox chapel at a little known locality called “Bosanka” (Bosnian Woman). The interior was burnt out and the icon screen hacked to pieces. A little window in the apse had been plugged with stones. To prevent someone from escaping? I wondered. An empty steel barrel that had contained acid lay tipped over next to a heap of burnt organic remains. Human? There was a powerful stench.

In the Old City there was sparse damage, for example, a burnt out bar with interior walls pocked from machinegun bullets. This damage had been inflicted by rival armed Croatian gangs on the ground who were everywhere in the city. Since I am a veteran of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) trained in Serbo-Croatian, I read the language. On the front walls of the buildings along Dubrovnik’s main street (Stradun, Venetian dialect ‘big street’) I photographed graffiti reading “Srbe na vrbe, zhidove na zidove”. Meaning? “Lynch the Serbs, Jews to the Walls" (that is, to the firing squad).

Minimal damage to the Old City was also reported by Serbophobe journalist Maggie O’Kane (Guardian, BBC, Irish Times), by Stephen Kinzer (NY Times August 1992), by EU (then EEC) observers and many others.

In and around Dubrovnik I talked with various Yugoslavs, Croat and Serb, and more. A young Dubrovniker told me at lunch (risotto) how he and his neighbors – Muslim, Croat, Serb – had put out a fire set one night by Croatian fascists in the car of a neighbor. The next night they came back and finished the job. “Why’d they do it?“ I asked him. The young man’s answer: “Because he’s Serb. And I’m a Muslim.”

Dubrovnik is very Italian, not only in culinary, but also in architectural matters. A palazzo belonging to the Croat artist Ivo Grbic was the only destroyed building in Dubrovnik’s Old City. First reports erroneously said it was the Serbian church library. It was actually the Grbic house and that's where the photographer took me. The Grbic house stands several storeys high; it was gutted. Adjacent buildings were unscathed. A business shingle advertising Mr. Grbic’s studio was prominent, reading "ICONS" in English and "IKONE" in Serbian Cyrillic capitals. He had had a clientele of Yugoslavs interested in owning an Orthodox icon. The artist was subsequently summoned to the Hague to testify at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia). That was in December of 1993. At that time my videotape of Mr. Grbic’s house, made in March 1992, was screened in the court during the trial of President Milosevic. The justices and prosecutors were perplexed: “Who is this person?” Ivo Grbic’s health, alas, did not permit the rigors of travel to the Hague. Mine did. In February of 2006 I was summoned to the Hague to testify at the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic regarding what I had seen in Dubrovnik in 1992.

The Dutch authorities had less compunction about the health of the kidnapped president of a sovereign country than with artist Grbic. Not many days after President Milosevic and I conferred, his health ran out. He was found dead in his cell. Like Grbic, I didn’t get to testify in the Hague.

Wrong address, Hip-Hop (light). Wasn’t me who dreamed up the 30k story. Meanwhile the CROckpots were claiming the same number for their fearsome foes. — In the link below you can see clips from my 25 March 92 walk about in Dubrovnik. They got the name wrong (Peter Maas WP). Note the miraculous reconstruction of the utterly levelled Old City in 3 months!!!. Did you buy a tile?
Note also the account of Scot journalist Phil Davidson (q.v.) complaining to the hotel desk clerk about the heavy CRO machine firing from his defenseless Dubrovnik hotel to provoke return fire from Yugo Army. Like Hamas the CRO tactic is to use human shields. UNESCO reported that Croat forces kept 200 women and children from leaving Dubrovnik on a UNICEF vessel, to keep as human shields and for propaganda purposes (Dan Stets. Knight-Ridder papers USA.
5 December 1991). Gun positions by churches also a prefferred location.
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tuoym5z1Qw&feature=related

Ave Diocletiane, te correcturus saluto.
1. The literature on forced conversion to Catholicism of Orthodox people is copious. Austria (Holy Roman Empire, Austrian Empire); Union of Brest-Litovsk for the Urainians, Maria Theresa for Slavonia. Not to speak of forced conversion of Protestants in the Counter-Reformation. Do your homework (Google or a library). A Sokac named JOVANCIC has an umnistakable base form JOVAN, Earlier Serbian and Croatian have IVAN, but JOVAN is (guess what).
2. VLAHO. Your folk etymology is charmingly innocent. There is no “Saint Vlach” in any church calendar, but only BLASIUS (Latin), Biagio (Italian) Blaz(h)(Croatian. Look up Blaise in any reference work when you reach the age of reason. Cf. Russian Vivliya, varvari: Latin Biblia, barbari... Or if you’re that insdolent:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Saint-Blaise

Church of St. Blasius in Dubrovnik.
Blaise is the patron saint of the city of Dubrovnik (where he is known as Sveti Vlaho) and formerly the protector of the independent Republic of Ragusa. At Dubrovnik his feast is celebrated yearly on 3 February, when relics of the saint, his head, a bit of bone from his throat, his right hand and his left, are paraded in reliquaries. The festivities begin the previous day, Candlemas, when white doves are released. Chroniclers of Dubrovnik such as Rastic and Ranjina attribute his veneration there to a vision in 971 to warn the inhabitants of an impending attack by the Venetians, whose galleys had dropped anchor in Gruz and near Lokrum, ostensibly to resupply their water but furtively to spy out the city’s defenses. St. Blaise (Blasius) revealed their pernicious plan to Stojko, a canon of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The Senate summoned Stojko, who told them in detail how St. Blaise had appeared before him as an old man with a long beard and a bishop’s mitre and staff. In this form the effigy of Blaise remained on Dubrovnik’s state seal and coinage until the Napoleonic era.

Bilic; Bijelic Belic; are dialect variants; etymology ‘whitey, blond’ or Sniješko Bijelic ‘snowman’. “Entirely Croatian” are only the dialects in which the neuter imterrogative pronoun is KAJ ‘what?” (e.g. in Zagreb, as well as in Slovenia) and CHA, on the islands). In Serbian that pronoun is SHTO (što). Except to chauvinist Croatianists it is unquestionable that literary Croatian is at base the west Serbian IJE variant of the SHTO dialect. Croatian Catholic Archbishop Strossmayer, the great Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj, and the Austrian Empire needed that to facilitate missionization of the people whose native language it was — the Orthodox Serbs. See the Vienna Language Agreement /Becki Književni Dogovor 1850).-Just consider the literary Croatian words: ISUS “Jesus”. Catholic Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovenes) use the medieval Latin form JESUS (Jesus, Jezus, Ježiš). One word for ‘wedding’ in (literary) Croatian is Vijenchanje’ - derived from Vijenac ‘wreath’ In the Orthodox wedding rite the priest places a wreath (crown) on the head of bride and groom. Not so in the Catholic ceremony.
Diocletian, get out of your palace once in a while and get thee to a library, or Google. You can learn something new every day.

Diocletian recites and recites. He recites the Ustasha schoolboy primer about “Vlachs”, not Serbs, being the settlers in Austria’s Military Frontier /Militaergrenze/ Vojna Krajina. How these Latin-Speakers became Serbianized Dio does not explain. (He recites.) Although Krajina Serbian and Croatian dialects have loads of Venetian words, I’d be interested to see the internal evidence from there that reflects Vlach language. After Dio finishes reciting, let’s wait for him to adduce the scholarly evidence. — Latin-speaking populations bear the same name, from Wales to Wallachia (Rumania) — the Romanized. In Greece the Vlakhi are ‘hillbillies , shepherds”. VLACH ~VLAH is a Slavic word, borrowing of a Germanic word, itself the borrowing of the name of a Romanized Celtic tribe (VOLCAE, singular VOLCA) then bordering the Germani to the south. The name was laid on other Romanized peoples in the course of Germanic migrations. In Britain the term covered both Romanized and un-Romanized Britons, the Welsh. —In Ireland Walsh and Welch are descendants of the Anglicized Normans who invaded Ireland from Wales. In Scotland there’s Wallace. Anglo-Saxon wealh meant ‘foreigner, slave, Briton (Welshman)’. In Austria and Switzerland it means ‘Italian’. In Serbia it includes Rumanians. Hungarians took it over from the Serbs: Olasz-orszag is ‘Vlach-land’ = Italy; Czech Vlachy, Polish Wlochy mean ‘Italy’. Serbian placenames near Sarajevo reflect Serbianized Roman populations (Vlasotince, Vlasenica, Romanija). —
Is my little scribble mere Serbian or Serbophile propaganda? Read the scoop on the following Austrian site.

http://aeiou.iicm.tugraz.at/aeiou.encyclop.m/m638216.htm;internal&action=_setlanguage.action?LANGUAGE=en

The Danube is not the Volga, Dio. I’m keen to see your bibliography on Serb claims of an empire extending to the Volga. Serbs joke about Austria-Hungary’s WMD of “Greater Serbia” as “Srbija do Tokija” Serbia all the way to Tokyo!” —
See Encyclopedia Americana, Edition 1993, Vol 24, page 572: “[During Tsar Stefan Dushan’s reign] the Serbian empire stretched from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth and from the Aegean to the Adriatic. The economic and cultural progress of Serbia at this period was above the average European level. Many monasteries of Serbian-Byzantine architectural style - including Studenica, Decani and Grachanica - founded by several kings, bear witnesss to this highly developed Serbian culture. Dusan’s code of laws (Zakonik), formulated in 1349-1354, shows the advanced social structure of the Serbian state.”-—

The Serbian Empire 1346 was bordered by Byzantium, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Adriatic. That’s where Dubrovnik is. Croatia was a few counties around Zagreb a.k.a. Agram and belonged to Hungary. After Greater Croatia’s phoney “Vaterland War” of of the 1990s — drafted and executed by Bill Clinton’s MPRI, with Austrian, Slovenian, German, Vatican, and Saudi collusion — Art restorers in Dubrovnik found Byzantine painting beneath the later Catholic, not Croatian, but Italian murals.

See excellent (and cheap) historical atlases by Colin MacEvedy...

In ancient Greek HOPLITES [3 syllables: hop-plee-tace] meant’ heavily armed warrior’, root word HOPLA ‘arms’. Does Freeper HOPLITE mean this as a translation of Serbo-Croat USTASHA (singular)/USTASHE (plural)?
— I don’t know, but for Freepers who don’t know the language and history here’s the etymology:

-stati means ‘to stand, rise;
-stanem means ‘I stand, rise’;
-ustati means ‘rise up; ustanem ‘I rise up’;
-USTANAK means ‘Rising’;
-USTASA meant ‘rebel’ (oo-stah-shah; plural oo-stah-shay).

Even before the “First Rising” of 1804, Serbs, Christians, had risen several times against the Muslim Turks, who held non-Muslims in slavery. The German scholar Ranke termed the Serb Rising of 1804 a revolution. In an Ustanak the Serb soldiers were Ustashe. Around 1929 the Fuehrer-in-waiting of “Independent” Croatia, Ante Pavelic, wrote of “Hrvatske Ustashe — Croatian Rebels”. Only since the 1930s-1940s is this formulation pleonastic (redundant, tautologous), and today a Serbian Ustasha would be a contradiction. After Croatia’s warm welcoming of Germans to Yugoslavia in 1941, an Ustasha was by default a Croatian fascist soldier, wearing the SS helmet and uniform. — After WW II Ustasha became a term for contemporary Croat chauvinists. After the battle of Vukovar 1991 war criminal Branimir Glavas greeted as proud “Ustashe” his CRO insurrectionist fighters — not soldiers of a sovereign state — who had been captured by the army of the recognized, sovereign Yugoslav state. These wanna-be SS troopers were released on orders of the dimwit US puppet Milan Panic. Another 200 of them ditched their uniforms and tried to pass themselves off as patient in the hospital. They had murdered, often in ritualistic fashion, Serbs, including children. Serb irregulars made these heroes run the gauntlet and shot them. Yugoslav Army officers were arrested by the quisling Serbian government and packed off to the ICTY, the Hague’s delightfully named CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL.

See YouTube http://www.yidio.com/branimir-glavas-—hdz-ustasa/id/2976230262

More on VLACHs
“Serbs are really Vlachs.” – “Diocletian”, who is an intelligent person, has been educated by ignoramuses. I hope he hasn’t paid too dear a price for the stupidity of his teachers.

Austria’s law of the Wallachians STATUTA VALACHORUM of 1630 is purely a geographic term, referring loosely to a territory called Wallachia. Jews from there often bear the surname WALLACH, e.g. actors Eli Wallach and Mike WALLACE, ne’ WALLACH.

Just so, SLAVONIA in medieval Europe meant the SLAV LAND stretching from Villach in Austria to Belgrade, the Slovenes to the Serbs in today’s terms.

Nation states are creatures of the 19th century. Anybody posting on history ought to know that. If they don’t, they should step down from their soap box.
Ethnic names, national tags are labile.
“Indians” – I needn’t go into Columbus and all that. When thousands of US historians and history buffs of non-English descent say “we” in regard to the War of Independence, they would be laughed off the stage if a time machine could transport them back to 1776. Virginians and Londoners in the 1700s called Englishmen in the Virginia colony “Americans”. They called the English in Ireland “Irish”. The Scotch-Irish in the Appalachians were called “Irish’ in the early 19th century, then “Scotch-Irish, Hillbillies” and in PC “Appalachians”; in today’s reigning stupidity they’re re-baptized “Scots-Irish”; to which I prefer “Scots-Iris”. What we call the “Irish” were called “the Celtic Irish” in books of 1900. In the 6 Counties Protestants call themselves “British”, though to the rest of the world they are Irish. “Palestinians” in 1930 were Jews. All subjects of Istanbul were called “Turks”, as Muslims still are in Balkan villages — by Christian and Muslim alike — regardless of language or nation. In the first Byzantine records of “Turks” (Tourkoi) the tribes are actually Hungarians, “Hungarian” is from Turkish “Onu-gor / ten arrows (tribes)”. Slovaks called themselves “Hungarians” before Magyar nationalism erupted. “Illyrian” in Napoleonic times meant “Serbo-Croatian”. Now Sqipetari (Albanians) style themselves “Illyrian” and name their sons “Ilir”. The Caucasian place ALBANIA in the Caucasus that we find in Ptolemy’s atlas has nothing to do with the Adriatic coast now so-called. “Albanians” in Greek and Venetian records can be Greeks, Albanians, or Serbs.

Now –-

Vlachs and “Vlachs”

From the Serbophobic Noel Malcolm:
http://www.farsarotul.org/nl16_1.htm
www.camo.ch/povijestbih07.htm

“...there is little sense today in saying that the Bosnian Serbs are “really” Vlachs. Over the centuries many ordinary members of the Serbian Orthodox Church would have crossed the Drina into Bosnia or moved north from Hercegovina; a Serb merchant class also became important in Bosnian towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not all the people who were sent to populate northern Bosnia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Vlach, and since then there have been so many influxes and exoduses in Bosnian history that we cannot possibly calculate precise percentages for the “Vlach” ancestry of the Bosnian Serbs. Nor did the Vlachs contribute only to the Serb population; some (mainly in Croatia) became Catholics, and quite a few were Islamicized in Bosnia.”

From
Serbia and the Bulgarian Revival (1762-1872). James F. Clarke. American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 4, No. 3/4. (Dec., 1945), pp. 141-162.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1049-7544%28194512%294%3A3%2F4%3C141%3ASATBR%28%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

“Serbs and “Serbs”, Rumanians and Bulgarians.
“At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century Bulgarians in Rumania were officially known as ‘Sarbi.’”

Incorrect. Wallachia never stretched into the area past Srijem, while the Statuta Walachorum stretched all the way to Karlovac.

Secondly, Tsar Dushan himself forbade Serbs from marrying Vlachs during the Medieval era.

Yes, nations did arise in their present form during the 19th century. The Serbs themselves Serbianized the Vlachs by law in the Kingdom of Serbia by legally obligating them to change their names into Serbian ones and culturally in non-Serb lands through the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The most well known Serbianized Vlach of the 20th century was Serbian Royalist Premier Dragisa Cvetkovic aka Cincar (Vlach).

Some Catholic Vlachs were Croatianized (especially in my region).

Take a look at this map to see the names of the Vlach tribes that later would become Serbians and Croatians:

link

I will continue more on this theme later.

Dio,
You haven’t a clue about linguistics. You couldn’t for the life of you explain what “codified language” means or what “codification” is. (Not Bakala.)... Again you are reciting U-catechism.
—
GOOGLE these terms. “standard language”, “local dialect”. Where on the map do you locate “Vlach language”?

Please explain for us the term and the mechanisms of linguistic “assimilation”. “Assimilation” in linguistics (areal or general) does not mean “absorption”.

Oh yes, don’t forget to give your select bibliography on Vlach history and language when you have time.

Don’t forget to say a prayer to (Serbian) Sveti VLAHO
(= Croatian BLAZ^). His feast day is Feb 3 (Gregorian calendar).

Srdacan pozdrav, Pagliaccio/Bajaco...

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