They are attempting to continue what the Serbian nationalists in Yugoslavia tried to do: force the languages into one common "Serbo-Croatian". This is, of course, essentially linguistic nonsense; while the languages are closely related, in a small group, they are not the same.
They have actually proposed to vote on the suppression of the non-Serbian languages in the group. The offensive vote is here.
ISO has properly deleted the "sh" code for "Serbo-Croation", added at the insistence of Yugoslavia. The codes for Bosnian (bs), Croatian (hr), and of course Serbian (sr) continue, of course, to be perfectly valid. SIL/ISO do recognize "Serbo-Croatian" as a small group ("macrolanguage") with a group code (hbs).
The problem here is not with noting that the languages are closely related, it is with the attempted suppression of Croatian and Bosnian, depriving them of status as languages, while at the same time not representing Serbian itself (!) as a proper language. (The same "proposal" forces Montenegrin to be considered a subset of the Greater Serbian language; this makes more linguistic sense, but is equally offensive.)
You would think that with Serbian nationalists on trial in the Hague this would stop. But of course, the world doesn't work that way: freedom from tyranny and genocide requires eternal vigilance. It is time once again to stand up to "Greater Serbia", just as we have stood up before to neo-Nazis and hundreds of others and will again, as long as we desire freedom.
It is most important to note that this, like always, is a tiny minority. The Serbian people, culture, and language do not deserve this linguistic oppression any more than the Croatians and Bosnians.
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