Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

Serb Republic. According to the Bosnian author Ivan Lovrenović, Cerić accused
Orsˇolić of founding a “private multireligion” in cooperation with the
West by which he helps “Serbs, Muslims, and children of the communists.” 56
I also recall that during my 1997 tenure at United States Institute of Peace
some Catholic Church leaders from Croatia and Bosnia who visited Washington
denounced to their American hosts the peace-making Friar Orsˇolić
as “Marxist.” If only there had been more Marxists like him.
Speaking further of the religious contribution to peace-building, it must
be acknowledged that the Catholic Church also has contributed a great deal,
especially American Catholic organizations and the Vatican-based Community
of St. Egidio. 57 Unfortunately, contribution from the Orthodox Church,
otherwise critical for the Balkans, remains unsatisfactory. Some representatives
from the Orthodox Church took part in an international “Truth and
Reconciliation Conference” in May 2001 in Belgrade, but no self-criticisms
have been heard so far from the hierarchy. Consequently, while foreign religious
mediators with cooperative domestic lower clergy struggle for Balkan
peace, the leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and most of the Muslim ulema in Bosnia
and Herzegovina remain hostile to each other and linked with ethnic nationalistic
parties all pursuing the ideal of sectlike states. As I showed in
chapter 11, the Catholic Church in Croatia launched a full-fledged war
against a liberal government in order to bring back the ethnonationalistic
HDZ to power. The same church continued lobbying on behalf of Croatian
military and paramilitary leaders wanted by the Hague war crimes tribunal.
For that matter, the Croatian Catholic hierarchy does not differ from that of
the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose leaders never supported the international
prosecution of Radovan Kardzˇić, Ratko Mladić, and other Serb war
crimes suspects. In a 2001 regional report, the Institute for War and Peace
Reporting quoted Serbian Orthodox scholar Mirko Djordjević as saying, “Our
Church has been inconsistent in this matter, blinded by nationalist feelings.
Thus it takes the view that we all sinned equally, but the Serbian side suffered
more.” According to the same report, another inside critic has been
discovered in the Serbian Church, by the name of Mirko Tomović, who said
as follows: “I’d like to see Patriarch Pavle (the head of the Orthodox Church),
accompanied by a crowd of Serb people and oxen, candles in hand, travel
200 kilometer to Srebrenica on foot, in an effort to beg for forgiveness for
everything the Serbian people did to others in this war. That is what Christ
would have done, it is a Christian thing to do. Then let others consider what
was done to us.” 58
Accordingly, it seems that the theory about good lower clergy and “citizens
of faith” but problematic leaders and hierarchies of mainstream religious
organizations that originated in the liberal phase of the communist
era was not a mere product of the old regime’s failure to exploit religious
leaders as champions of brotherhood and unity. Ever since the 1930s, the
most difficult problems in interfaith relations as well as church-state rela-
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