Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

or indicted for criminal activities and corruption by independent press, but
prosecutions and resignations have rarely occurred, police investigators, justice
ministers and judges, and independent journalists give up more often.
According to a 2001 analysis by an international nongovernmental organization,
“both the fighting in Macedonia and the move by the Croatian
Democratic Community in Bosnia highlight the strong link between nationalist
forces and criminal activity.” 52
International faith-based conflict management, reconciliation efforts, religious
relief, and interfaith understanding have made noticeable progress,
but, as noted in chapter 10, have generated ambiguous outcomes. It would
be fair to acknowledge, however, that “religious statecraft” has become an
established and welcome “missing dimension” of international diplomacy.
After all, international diplomacy has always lacked a moral dimension, so
any kind of moral support should be welcome. At the same time, religious
organizations, like any group or individual, merit an opportunity to redeem
religion for the centuries-old grim record of conflict and mass crime rooted
in religion or aggravated by religion, and often incited by religious organizations.
Regarding the concrete post-1991 religious peacebuilding effort in
what used to be Yugoslavia, according to a 2001 analysis released by United
States Institute of Peace, numerous religious relief missions, programs for
promoting interfaith dialogue, and concrete peace and development programs
funded by American and other western NGOs, private groups, individuals,
and governments have been implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. 53 It must be
noted that U.S. Christian denominations have been, as always, the most
active: Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists, Baptists, and others have established
themselves as a relevant global factor in conflict management and
peace-building. 54 These American religious peace-builders merit gratitude for
their good will and effort, although their Balkan operation was based on the
mistaken assumption that local mainstream faiths need help as victims of
Marxist atheism instead of as people pushed into the excessive worship of
ethnic nations by, among others, religious institutions. Thus, in the words
of William Vendley, of the World Conference for Religion and Peace, “some
conflicts derive from too little religion rather than too much, from spirituality
that has been enfeebled by such forces as communist rule in Yugoslavia.” 55
By now these benevolent foreigners may have realized (although they do
not say it in public and on conferences) that the local established faiths and
their hierarchies pose the major problem in peace-building, as opposed to
the many helpful and cooperative individual clergy and believers who are
otherwise attacked by ethnic nationalists as the old regime’s “fellow travelers.”
Bosnian Franciscans such as Marko Orsˇolić and Ivo Marković, who
have contributed remarkably to the international peace process in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, have been targets of attacks from their own church leaders,
such as Cardinal Vinko Puljić and others, not to mention the Muslim reis
Mustafa Cerić and his militant clerics and the nationalist Serb clerics of the
conclusions 239