In doing some post-graduate study at a university in Slovenia, I and other colleagues went to a pub Town, their we met up with our slovenian friends. During the late hours of the night, the owner slid a porno video into the v.c.r. (This is very common over there) I should mention that it was funny to watch these guys, their expressions were bizarre. Later that evening we found out that circumcision is not practiced in any parts of the former republic of Yugoslavia. We asked, "why not"? They replied that it is very uncommon, in fact people assume that there is only one type of penis, that is the one with a foreskin. Guys have never seen a circ’ed penis, and find it rather strange.
Some guys only learn about their body parts when they are recruited into the army. Prior to that, they have no idea. Here they learn how to care for themselves and provide proper hygiene.
Going back to the night when we were in the pub, I realized that a friend of our Slovenian colleague could not take his eyes off the couple having sex. He realized that the man had no skin at the end of his penis, He was amazed, we all laughed.
It is common to circumcise boys when they are 3 years old in Bosnia. Their Muslim neighbour, Turkey, usually circumcises children at an older age; around 10.
James
Onward, Christian soldiers by Paul Hockenos
"At least none of us are circumcised," a Slovenian journalist joked to me uneasily as we crossed the front line from Bosnian government-controlled to Bosnian Serb-controlled territory in the winter of 1994. At the time, foreign journalists were not above suspicion of being or sheltering Muslims.
The most common way to identify a person's ethnicity in Bosnia is by his or her name: Most family names are easily identified as Serbian, Muslim, or Croatian. But some names are common to two or all three groups, and many Bosnians are the offspring of mixed marriages. And since there are no immediately apparent physical differences between Bosnia's three major peoples, falsified papers could easily conceal a person's "real" ethnicity. There's only one sure way to tell a male Bosnian Muslim from an Orthodox Christian Serb or a Catholic Croat: by his penis. Muslims are circumcised, Christians (in the Balkans) aren't.
During the war, it was common practice for Bosnian Serb - or Bosnian Croat - troops to order men to drop their pants for purposes of ethnic identification. When I politely told my usually well-informed colleague that American men are routinely circumcised at birth, he couldn't conceal his shock. In European countries, which don't circumcise, the practice is seen as a foreign ritual performed by "non-Western peoples" like Muslims or Jews.
The importance of circumcision in the Bosnian war is telling, and not just as part of the link between gender and ethnic identity that has led to shocking sexual war crimes such as castration, mutilation, and rape. Technically, the term "ethnic cleansing" is a misnomer: Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians all belong to the same ethnic group. They're Slavs, descendants of Slavic tribes that migrated to the region in the sixth and seventh centuries. All three speak a common Slavic language. The defining difference between the three groups is religion: Serbs and Croats adopted Christianity in the ninth century, while the Muslims of Bosnia converted to Islam during Ottoman rule.
If the only factor that differentiates the Slavic inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina is religion, then it would seem logical to argue that the term "ethnic" in "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "religious." Indeed, the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat nationalists openly boasted that they were fighting to protect Christian Europe from fundamentalist Islam. Both armies went out of their way to destroy every mosque in territory they captured. In unspoken collusion, the Christian regimes in Croatia and Serbia singled out the Bosnian Muslims for elimination because of their faith.
Turkish Army Circumcising Muslim Kosovar Boys
By Jolyon Naegele
The multinational NATO-led force in Kosovo arrived in the province just over ten weeks ago to establish law and order and democracy in the province. RFE/RL correspondent Jolyon Naegele reports from the southwestern Kosovo town of Dragash that in addition to conducting standard peacekeeping duties, one Turkish KFOR battalion is engaged in circumcising young Muslim boys.
The Turkish KFOR battalion in the hill town of Dragash in Kosovo’s Gora region is engaged in the unlikely business of circumcising young Muslim boys between the ages of five and seven.
In the past month, a Turkish KFOR medical team has brought nearly 150 boys in the region—Muslim Albanians and members of the Muslim Goran minority -- under the knife in sterile conditions. Local parents in Gora and nearby Prizren, home to a sizable Turkish minority, have asked the Turkish Army medical team to circumcise another 300 young boys.
Circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis, is a traditional Muslim practice that in the Balkans and Turkey is performed on young boys in a ceremony preceded by a large family party. Over the weekend, at least two young boys in Prizren dressed up in special circumcision costumes were paraded around town on the roof of their father’s car.
Turkish battalion commander Izzet Cetingoz says the circumcision program constitutes about 10 percent of the total number of local residents whom the Turkish KFOR medical unit has treated so far.
"We have a medical team of a general surgeon under the command of a senior medical officer, a major. We have an ambulance vehicle and a nurse and every day they visit one village and they circumcise boys and the next day they come back, examine the boys and look after the other children too."
Commander Cetingoz says the medical team also provides emergency medical assistance.
"This is not the regular job of the Turkish Army. Normally we don’t do it in Turkey, but there was a need here requested of us. The children had not been circumcised up to a certain age and unfortunately we have learned that the barbers have been circumcising these boys and they were asking a price of 100 German marks. We know that these people do not have that kind of money. They are poor and we believe that we have done a very important public service."
Cetingoz says that for the past decade, circumcision was not available as a medical procedure in Kosovo. He notes that traditionally, circumcision is only performed on boys up to the age of five. But since so many Kosovar boys were unable to undergo the procedure in recent years, the Turkish Army medical team has given priority to boys between the ages of five and seven. Once they are done, the Turkish commander says, the team, if called upon, will perform the procedure on younger boys.
