Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

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religion as hallmark of
nationhood
Popovi pa topovi.
“First came priests, then guns.”
Headline in the Montenegrin weekly Monitor, alluding
to the genesis of the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s
F rom 1991 to 1995, for a second time in six decades, the Yugoslav
peoples were drawn into a bloody fratricidal war fought in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Wars would continue in 1998 between
Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and between Albanians and Macedonians in
2001 in Macedonia. While other eastern and central European nations, liberated
from Soviet hegemony, were starting a new happier era, the golden
age for the Yugoslav peoples came to an end. The 1991–95 war came as a
result of ethnic nationalistic revolutions aimed at destroying the multiethnic
federation founded by the communists and establishing independent ethnically
homogenous states in its stead. In 1995 at an international conference
in Paris, the Croatian sociologist Stipe S ˇ uvar presented the following data
about casualties and war damage: at least 150,000 people had died, and the
relatively largest number of the killed were Bosnian Muslims, followed by
ethnic Serbs and Croats; 250,000 were injured; two and a half million people
were expelled from their homes; at least half a million mostly highly educated
people moved out of the territory of the former Yugoslavia to western
countries; the number of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been brought
down from the prewar 1.3 million to 700,000, and Croats from 750,000 to
400,000; the number of employed in the whole territory of former Yugoslavia
has been reduced from 6.7 million in the late 1980s to 3 million in the
mid-1990s, of which 900,000 belonged to armies and police forces engaged
in some forms of combat. 1 According to the following data about the war
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