Bosnians

Ahmetspahic, however, is unique; he is the only repatriated Bosnian fighter to be medically certified in court as 'deradicalised'.

Experts say his case offers hope for state efforts to 'deradicalise' returning fighters, but caution against over-optimism, saying that the process of radicalisation and deradicalisation are complex and unique to each individual.

Hector Gullan, a former member of British peacekeeping forces, has sent an open letter to the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, asking them to call on new Croatian President Zoran Milanovic and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic to address the issue of Zagreb's non-extradition of war crime indictees to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Adil Amanet and the Husic family. Photo: Klix.ba

In 2019, the migrant crisis hit Bosnia and Herzegovina more severely than it did four years ago when the whole of Europe was dealing with a vast number of people moving towards Western Europe along the so-called Balkan route.

A decade after the European Court of Human Rights first ruled that the Bosnian constitution violates the rights of minorities, Human Rights Watch, HRW, has said in a press release that Bosnia has done nothing to end second-class status for Jews, Roma, and other minorities.

That concern stems from a notion that a country full of people who are both Muslim and white must be an oxymoron: Bosnian Muslims may seem like good Westerners but they could be secret fanatics, all the more dangerous because they confound racial profiling measures.

Blanket demonisation

"Ethnicity should not be a constitutional category," she adds. "I won't identify with any of these groups out of principle."

A federation of six republics, the former Yugoslavia brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians Montenegrins and others under one socialist union, but it fell apart in a series of brutal wars in the 1990s.

Bosnians gathered in front of the Croatian embassy in Sarajevo on Monday, protesting over possible plans being mulled by neighbouring Croatia to build a landfill site for radioactive waste at Trgovska Gora, near the border with Bosnia.

Bosnia's overall population has shrunk significantly in the last 20 years, from 4.3 million in the last pre-war census in 1991 to 3.5 million today. Many of the leavers have been young.

Montenegro is offering expatriate card to members of its diaspora - but some Bosniaks whose ancestors migrated from today's Montenegro to Turkey fear the cards will undermine their identity.

Central to Tarrant's worldview appears to have been a commitment to the so-called "Great Replacement" theory.

This conspiracy theory posits that Muslim immigration to Western countries is a secret plot to "outbreed" white Christians of European ancestry and thus take over their "homelands". A peculiar brand of Islamophobia, it is rooted in anti-Ottoman sentiment.