Illusions of Justice

In 1941, the Independent State of Croatia nationalized a small forest in Bosnia, sparking a legal dispute with local community organizers.1 Amid the countless examples of expropriated property in the radical Right states of Hitler’s Europe, a mundane legal complaint over a forest deep in the Balkans would hardly seem significant.2 But this particular forest contained a few graves — Muslim graves — and the organization responsible for their maintenance felt wronged. Many Bosnian Muslim leaders had welcomed their incorporation into Hitler’s ‘New European Order’ and viewed their accommodation of the Croat Ustasha regime as an acceptable concession in exchange for religious autonomy.3 But they had not anticipated the expropriation of their property, particularly not the nationalization of their ancestors’ burial grounds. The Muslim Religious Council (Muslimanska vjerska općina) petitioned the local court, pointing out that, owing to an error, the state had misappropriated the forest, which was, in effect, a Muslim cemetery. Although no ownership documentation existed, the council wanted the land returned. But the Croatian state treasury (Državni erar) defended its claim to the forest, arguing that ‘the government’ had assumed control of the land more than three years earlier, beyond the statute of limitations for challenging the acquisition. That the Independent State of Croatia had existed for only eighteen months indicates that the treasury assumed a continuity of state ownership from inter-war Yugoslavia. The treasury also referred to Islamic property norms, noting that the land in question was a forest with a few graves, not a cemetery. The argument implies some understanding that, according to Islamic tradition, cemeteries were understood as collective religious spaces belonging to the Muslim community.4

Archaeology · Islam · Jurisdiction · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Statute · Treasury · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · History · Law

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  Darryl Li, Anne-Hélène Kerbiriou•Anthropologie et Sociétés•2021

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