Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

since the 1987 “Debts to God in Kosovo,” this time dedicated to Jasenovac.
The volume was entitled Ve čan pomen: Jasenovac: mjesto natopljeno krvlju
nevinih 1941/1985/1991—Eternal Memory—Jasenovac—the Place Soaked in the
Blood of Innocents, With Summaries in English. 126 In the monograph, one of
the editors, the Metropolitan Jovan Pavlović, concludes the introduction with
a quotation from a public statement released early in 1990 by Enriko Josif,
a Yugoslav intellectual of Jewish background and a member of the central
committee of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. The
statement reads as follows:
One of the horrible spiritual crimes is the fact that what happened to the
Serbs was hushed up in the whole world. This is a postwar continuation
of the horrible crime. ...Theworstservice to the West, and particularly
to the Roman Catholic Church of the Croats, was to hush up the religious
and biological crime of genocide committed against the Serbian people
during World War II. In the name of Christ and Christian love, the head
of the Roman Catholic church should have raised his voice and condemned
the eternal sin of Cain. This should be done as soon as possible. 127
In June 1990, the Holy Synod issued a church calendar dedicated to the
fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II in the Balkans, with
special emphasis on the Serbian Orthodox Church’s casualties during the
war in the Independent State of Croatia. 128 The calendar ran on its cover
page the previously banned text by Bishop Velimirović, “The Most Horrible
Inquisition,” written in exile in the 1950s. In this article Nikolaj accused the
Catholic Church of inciting numerous crimes, among which Ustasˇa genocide
is perhaps the most horrible. 129 In the Easter 1991 issue of the patriarchate’s
newspaper Pravoslavlje, Patriarch Pavle repeated Germanus’ words: “We
have to forgive, but we cannot forget,” and cited the figure of 700,000 Serbs
killed at Jasenovac. The calendar opened year-long commemorations at Jasenovac
and other sites of Ustasˇa massacres and mass graves in Croatia and
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Those commemorations involved excavations and reburial
of the Serb victims massacred by the Ustasˇas during World War II.
The church organized reburial and funerals and erected a number of monuments,
memorials, and chapels to mark Serbian mass graves.
While the Serbian Church’s activities drew broad popular support, a few
Serb voices of criticism are worth noting. A group of Serb intellectuals from
France wrote in an open letter to Serbian Church leaders that “calling for
revenge against the living descendants of those who committed the crimes—
cannot be justified. The World War II Ustasˇa terrorists were a minority
among the Croatian people!” 130 In the similar vein, the author Svetislav
Basara wrote in May 1991 in the Belgrade weekly NIN:
Maniacs are screaming all around: “Survival of our nation is at stake!”
Nonsense! There cannot be endangered nations and races. Only the indi-
the second strife 157