In the Instapundit live coverage of the excellent Palin/Biden debate last night there was this:

Reader David Rensin emails: "He didn’t just call the citizens of Bosnia ‘Bosniacs’, did he?" Yeah, he did…

… Plus, Stephen Green emails: "Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay use the word ‘Bosniaks’ in reference in Moslem Bosnians." So give that one to Biden. Though if I thought he actually read Dunnigan and Bay I’d give him two points.

In case anyone is interested. Thus.

The word ‘Bosnians’ is the best available term to describe all citizens of Bosnia, regardless of ethnicity, even though few of them actually use the term themselves. For a speech I gave in Sarajevo in 1998 on whether there can be a Bosnia without Bosnians, see here.

For decades the Turkified Slavs of that part of the world did not have an officially accepted name ans status of their own. Thus even Alija Izetbegovic himself in his early years was listed at one point as being a Serb.

Eventually in the 1970s the Tito regime gave them an official title as a Yugoslav people (narod), namely Muslims.

This caused horrible confusion to outsiders, as all (religious) muslims were (ethnic) Muslims, but not all Muslims were muslims (as many were obliged to be atheists to get jobs in the communist era).

As Yugoslavia broke up, the Muslims decided to call themselves by the more inclusive (they hoped) word ‘Bosniacs’, recalling an earlier regional terminology. This word did not apply only to the ‘muslim’ Bosnians – the Catholic Cathedral in central Sarajevo lists Bosniacs among the people interred there.

And this nomenclature was built into the Dayton Peace Accords, particularly the new BH Constitution. See eg Article V on the new BH Presidency:

The Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina shall consist of three Members: one Bosniac and one Croat, each directly elected from the territory of the Federation, and one Serb directly elected from the territory of the Republika Srpska…

So if you watch the exchange concerned last night where Joe Biden supports the Western intervention in Bosnia, he gets it exactly correct in referring to "Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs".

Simple, huh?