Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

and Herzegovina Franciscan monks, backed local HDZ leaders’ call for a
plebiscite on the independence of the Croat people. On 22 March in New
York, the UN Security Council issued a warning statement according to
which the HDZ of Bosnia-Herzegovina was planning to establish a so-called
Croatian self-administration in western Herzegovina that would constitute a
violation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. 53 In short, the situation in Croatia
in the fall of 2000 and early 2001 invoked a historic analogy with Spain in
the summer of 1936, or at least was nearing that. The return of the nationalists
to power in Croatia seemed to be only a matter of time. For that
matter, the church’s support seemed crucial and would presumably be
granted to the nationalist. Church leaders, in spite of their rhetoric, presumably
agreed that the pre-2000 regime was overall more favorable for the
Church. Small wonder that in the summer of 2001, the Croatian bishops’
conference announced a “dramatic” decrease in the numbers of Croat Catholics
who received holy baptisms and confirmations, accompanied by a significantly
decreased number of marriages in the Church during 2000. 54 The
church’s public campaign against the government was not the only form of
the new clerical politics. Concurrently, the church lobbied through prominent
laymen who occupied influential posts in important institutions to keep
HDZ members in positions of power and influence while also forging rightwing
coalitions in local administration in towns and provinces. Thus, Croatian
academic circles were shocked when in September 2001 a mediocre
theologian Tomislav Ivaničić (recently appointed, by conservative church
leaders, dean of Catholic Theological School in Zagreb) defeated in the elections
in the University Senate several Croatian scientists of world fame and
became new rector of the largest Croatian public institution of higher education,
the renowned University of Zagreb. Similar political trickery engineered
by clergy and Catholic laymen through lobbying and secret deals
took place in the coastal cities of S ˇ ibenik, Zadar, and Dubrovnik, where local
HDZ branches regained control over the local administration, although HDZ
did not win the necessary votes in the 2000 elections. The well-informed
Zagreb weekly Nacional wrote as follows: “Such a vehement antigovernment
activity as the Church has carried out since the 2000 elections in Croatia,
the clergy had never undertaken against the communists in Tito’s Yugoslavia.”
55 The same source revealed that President Mesić launched in August
2001 a vigorous diplomatic campaign against clerical interference in politics
in general and clerical support of right-wing groups in particular. Mesić
complained in a letter to Pope John Paul II and urged the European Union
to intervene. The intervention occurred in October in form of diplomatic
pressure on the Vatican, carried out by ambassadors of several leading western
European countries and backed by the United States. The Vatican urged
clerical restraint from politics, but the pope and the moderate Zagreb archbishop
Bozanić have encountered a stern opposition in the broad front of
radical nationalistic clergy led by militant rightist prelates, namely, the arch-
198 balkan idols