THE ROLE OF RELIGIONS AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

IN THE WARS IN EX-YUGOSLAVIA 1991-1999

Dr. Mitja Velikonja with

Željko MardeÅ¡iÄ? (alias Jakov JukiÄ?), Paul Mojzes, Radmila RadiÄ? and Esad ZgodiÄ?

Dr. Mitja Velikonjais Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published articles previously in REE. This series of written interviews with his introduction was published in Balcanis ,Vol. 2, No. 2, (2002), pp. 68-83in the Slovenian language, while the original responses were written in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages.

More than twelve years have passed since the beginning of the dramatic events in ex-Yugoslavia. Although the memories of these tragic processes are still very alive, it is today possible to observe them with much less burden than some years ago. Lately, social sciences offered much more complete and complex images than some years ago, which more accurately answer the questions of the causes, course, results, and consequences of the wars. Undoubtedly one of the most important dimensions of these events was religion in close connections with political, national and military ambitions and goals of certain groups, parties, and countries.

In a search for answers as to why and how this happened, who were the protagonists, and what were their interests, it seemed to me intriguing to pose seven questions to four experts who during the wars promptly and critically wrote about these issues. Their names - as well as their responses to my questions - follow in alphabetical order.

1. Dr. Željko MardeÅ¡iÄ? (pseudonym Jakov JukiÄ?) from Split, author of the studies BuduÄ?nost religije: sveto u vremenu svjetovnosti [The Future of Religion: The Holy in a Time of Secularity] (1991), Lica i maske svetog: ogledi iz druÅ¡tvene religiologije [Faces and Masks of the Holy: Explorations in Social Religiology](1997) and Povratak svetog: rasprava o pučkoj religiji [The Return of the Holy: Discussion about Public Theology] (1998). Among other texts, he contributed to the anthologies "Konfesije i rat" [Confessions and War](1995) and "MeÄ?ureligijski dijalog u Europi: izazovi za krÅ¡Ä?ane i muslimane u Republici Hrvatskoj i BiH" [ Interreligious Dialogue in Europe: Challenge for Christians and Muslims in the Republic of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina](2000).

2. Prof. Dr. Paul Mojzes, professor of religious studies and former Academic Dean and Provost of Rosemont College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is aYugoslavian born American expert on religious changes in eastern and central Europe. Among others, he is the author of the studies Church and State in Postwar Eastern Eu­rope (1987), Religious Liberty in Eastern Europe and the USSR: Before and After the Great Transformation (1992) and Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious War­fare in the Balkans (1994). He was the editor of the anthology Religion and the War in Bosnia (1998).

3. Dr. Radmila RadiÄ?, Serbian historian, researcher in the "Institute for Modern Serbian History" in Belgrade, author of the book Verom protiv vere: Država i verske zajednice u Srbiji 1945-1953 [Faith Against Faith: The state and religious communities in Serbia 1945-1953] and - among others - chapters in the anthologies Srpska strana rata. Trauma i katarza u istorijskom pamÄ?enju [Serbian View of the War: Trauma and Catharsis in Historical Memory] (1996), "Religion and the War in Bosnia" (1998) and "Dijalog povjesničara-istoričara 2" [Dialogue of historians 2](2000);

4. Prof. Dr. Esad ZgodiÄ?, Boshniak political scientist, lectures at the Sarajevo Univertsity School of Social Sciences, is the author of the studies "GraÄ?anska Bosna" [Civic Bosnia],(1996), "Kult suvereniteta" [Cult of Sovereignty] (1997), "Studije o politici" [Political Studies] (1997), "Država, nacija, demokratija" [State, Nation, and Democracy] (1998), "BoÅ¡njačko iskustvo politike" [Bosnian Experience of Politics](1998) and "Ideologija nacionalnog mesijanstva"[The Ideology of National Messianism](1999).

I followed their opinions, analyses and polemics about these events during and about this time by reading their books and texts, but also by means of personal contacts with all four of them. With this short inquiry, accomplished in the summer of 2001, I tried to present their views to the broader scholarly public in a very concrete, direct way. It was completely clear to me that these questions are extremely complex and that any of them would deserve an entire study. But yet, I asked them - for the sake of easier and more efficient comparison of their opinions - for short answers which would include only the most important features, phenomena, comparisons and eventually some examples. Their answers to my questions - which vary in their extent and style - are arranged in alphabetical order throughout this text. I deliberately did not draw any of my own conclusions or summary to this tetralogue, because my intention was to leave all the interpretations to the authors.

This tetralogue was first published under the title "Verstva in zverstva: Vloga religij in religijskih skupnosti v vojnah na tleh nekdanje Jugoslavije 1991-1999" [Beliefs and Bestialities: The Role of Religion and Religious Communities in the Wars on the Territory of Former Yugoslavia, 1991-1999] in the Slovenian language in the journal "Bal Canis", Ljubljana-Belgrade, 2002, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 68-83. It is available also in Serbian/Croatian/Bosniak language on the web-page http://www.balcanis.com/revija/stevilka2/shb/8.htm . I am thankful to the four authors for their kind cooperation.

Question:

What are your views about religious tradition in the Balkans? What are its main characteristics?

MardeÅ¡iÄ? :

If we look back into the past, it seems that the long process of deconstruction of medieval feudalism and creating conditions for development of civil society in all of Europe is coming to an end. Therefore, we can say that the Balkans was, at least we hope so, the last refuge and buttress of pre-modernity. By saying that, I don't mean that there were no brief penetrations and visits of civil ideas and positions in the Balkans in the last century. To the contrary, there were a lot of those experiences during periods of stability. However, those ideas and opinions did not develop gradually as a result of internal development, but through external influences, and that is why they remained at the level of barren ideology. Moreover, it is important to stress that political freedom of the individual as the inalienable essence of modernity was never present in all components of civil society in the Balkans. That was surely fateful and tragic for the people who lived there. Neither religious tradition, nor monarchist rule nor communist ideology allowed modernism to take roots. The process of modernism had been blocked until the most recent bloody conflict in the region. That is the first characteristic of religion in the Balkans.

The second characteristic is related to the influence of faith and is linked to the reasons described above for the lack of political freedom. Wherever there is no political freedom issues of nationality are being solved by religion. The best example is Macedonia where the church has been, for centuries, the only guardian of national consciousness. Everything else was hidden or erased. Therefore, compared to other western societies, there is a different path to national liberation in the Balkans. While in most European countries, civil society was responsible for promotion of national freedom, in the Balkans, that role was taken by premodern religious communities and churches in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and later in the Muslim part of the Balkans. For Eastern Orthodoxy, that was not surprising since it is nationalist in its nature and orientation. It is surprising, however, for Catholicism, which is explicitly universal and supra-national not only in its core and teaching, but also historically. It was created in this special way during the Middle Ages within the Austro - Hungarian Monarchy where religion was often linked to different nations. Therefore Catholicism sometimes plays the role of universal religion but in other cases the role of a national religion. This shows to what degree religion is functionally adaptable to the demands of the time and place in which it exists. That is the means by which it departs from its own holy beginnings.

I would also like to point out that since Christianity, as any other religion, is a precisely defined and closed worldview, we cannot solve national problems with its help. That is possible only by politics which is the art of rational negotiation and pragmatic discussion, and that is why politics is in complete opposition to any worldview that does not condone changes. In distinction from politics for them there cannot and must not be concessions. Therefore disputes are mostly solved by the defeat or victory of one of the confronting forces, but never by agreement. There is no other solution. People in the Balkans, despite strong ties to religious tradition, have been trying for centuries to get to national freedom through severe and exclusivist conflict of worldview espoused by different religions. The same was the case with socialism, which was also shaped as a worldview and continued with the same inefficiency. That is the reason why confrontational religions and later ideological communism were not able to do anything regarding the arrangement and reconciliation of national contradictions. That can be done only by political modernism. And because it did not exist in the Balkans, its role was taken by religion with bad and unsuccessful results. That is why, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, we remained social prisoners of the unhappy fate of premodernity which was forced to live and exist alongside modernity and postmodernity.

Mojzes:

My answers to the question are applicable to the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim religion and not the Jewish and Protestant. Generally speaking, religion in the Balkans is collectivist, traditional, hierarchical/priestly and protective.

By collectivist, I mean that the main relationship is not of the individual with God but the collective [in some cases regarded as "the people of God"] with God. The role of the individual is small compared to the interest of the whole religious community (I use this phrase since the word "church" does not apply to Islam.)

The reason for the term "traditional" is that these three religious communities underwent minimal or no reformation. All three communities have a doctrine that obligates them to take early periods of their history not only as source of inspiration, but as also doctrinally and canonically mandatory for their followers. All three religious communities consider that God's will was received in the early centuries and that they are being protected by God from making errors regarding that revelation. Therefore, the best is to follow tradition since new ideas can lead away from the right path.

At first it may seem that the third characteristic, the hierarchical/priestly, is not relevant to Islam, but when approached from the functional point of view, I think that all three religious traditions have leaders who speak authoritatively in the name of all followers. This characteristic was emphasized even more by the fact that most followers were not highly educated and did not have deep knowledge of their theology and religious (canon) law and therefore a small group of leaders had to take that role. Under priestly, I mean the situation in which the goal of religious leaders is the maintenance of their institution and not the prophetic role of self- criticism.

Promotion of institutional interests leads to the last characteristic, namely protective. The task of religious leaders from the top to the bottom is to play the role of pastor or shepherd who alertly takes care of the welfare of the flock. They are responsible for the flock's survival. This is even more prominent in times of crisis, when the flock is endangered by "wolves". Among "wolves" are, of course, rival religious communities. Therefore, when one religious community was trying to limit the influence of the other or even convert or proselytize, religious leaders became key protectors of their religion, which typically overlapped the boundaries of the nation. That led to circling of the compound with the intent to make the flock homogenous and obedient. Since the Balkans is in a permanently critical condition, the idea of danger from others is very present in the minds of people as well as leaders.

RadiÄ?:

Religious tradition in the Balkans is characterized by constant tensions and mistrust between the main religious communities, especially the Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox Church. When there was an attempt to bring together in the 19^th century these religious communities by joining into one state it actually seems as if the process of distancing started at the same time. The historical foundation for the last struggle for uniting the Yugoslav peoples was the aspiration to form a single ethnic community. The basis for that belief was the same as the one that began at the end of the 18th century according to which it is a common language that makes a nation and that the Yugoslavian territory was made such an entity in Europe. The role of religion was overlooked and there was an assumption that secularization was deeply rooted in the society and that it will proceed. The promoters of Yugoslavism believed that the Yugoslav idea was in the minds of Serbs and Croats and in minds of other south Slavic people. Contrary to that belief, it seems that religious identification was strong in most of the population. Promoters of ethnic unity of Serbs and Croats - Yugoslavs - were convinced in their historical mission and they did not accept warnings that a centralized state, which they wanted to create, was threatened by religious and cultural differences, different historical traditions, and so on.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes did not accept ethnic differences but did accept religious differences among Yugoslav people. In the Yugoslav state after 1918, however, there was no significant current which, as Josip Juraj Strossmayer [Catholic bishop] in an earlier period, would have propagated spiritual unity. Besides that, the idea of Yugoslavism was actually thinking of uniting Christians, while in regard to Muslims it was always believed that they will gradually return to their "real national identity," Serb or Croat.

Disagreements among religious communities started early, at the time of the Vidovdan [St. Vitus Day] Constitution [1921], and culminated at the time of the Concordat Crisis [1929]. In the background was a deep dissatisfaction that both the Serbian Orthodox Church (hereafter SOC) as well as the Roman Catholic Church (hereafter RCC) experienced in the newly established state. SOC had the position of a state church in the Kingdom of Serbia, and the RCC had a similar status in the Hapsburg Monarchy. From those positions, they were theoretically equal, but neither had the intention to renounce any rights nor influences it had previously held in society. The pressure they underwent after the Second World War did not bring them closer together because of the bloody experience in World War II. The relations between SOC and RCC were almost frozen until the beginning of the 1960s, when parallel with the temporary process of rapprochement (meetings of religious leaders, dialogues, visits by students, etc), more explicit requests began for the revision of the positions held by religious communities, alog with the first signs of nationalism and new conflicts. The process that began at that time culminated in the 1990s.

ZgodiÄ?:

It is almost mysterious, it is also part of mythology, that the religious composition, the internal relations between their confessional sub-identities, history and even trans-history of its rivalries and conflicts are contemporaneous in their intentionality and implication. Still functioning, mysteriously, are consequences of the epochal schism of the two churches, Eastern and Western. In historiography, there are cultural and customary reminiscences that the schism was not only religious but that through history it produced also geographical, conventional, spiritual, cultural, legal, political and above all antagonistic mentalities.

However, the history of war crimes on these territories shows that in this regard there are no differences. Among idolatrous claims and narcissistic nationalist claims belong the conventional notions of Western-Catholic cultural-civilizational superiority and Eastern Byzantine-Orthodox barbarism. On the one hand these war crimes range from Papal-Hungarian crusades in Bosnia to ustasha genocides over Serbs and Jews in Word War II, to the war crimes on Boshnyaks and culturecide in Bosnia after 1993. On the other hand, they range from the persecution of heretics in Dushan's empire to chetnik genocidal war crimes on Muslims in 1941-1945, to the state-sponsored war crime and genocide arranged by the Serbian-Montenegrin regime and its paralegal and paramilitary formations after 1992. In the history of these war crimes a contributing role was played by the hierarchies of both Churches.

By looking at Serbian authors who analyzed the history of Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans, it seems that the schism (especially in the Serbian version) resulted in the fact that Serbian Orthodoxy was never freed from pagan content, in other words, it was never completely Christianized and emancipated from the pre-Slavic and Slavic paganism.[1] Many Serbian critical intellectuals see in the pagan dimension of Serbian Orthodoxy the trans-historical source of Orthodox affection for state nationalism, worldly epic, irrational heroism, mythology, profane cults and ethno-idolatrous legitimation of genocidal crimes. The worldly, aggressive, ethno-statist character of Orthodoxy is also derived from this paganism.

But the thesis of the wider implications of the schism, no matter how controversial, has some productive aspects. In discussions about the Bogumil, Catholic, and Orthodox character of medieval Bosnia, I presented the unconventional position that medieval Bosnia was more pagan than Christian, which cannot be proven in detail here. However, that position challenges and irritates those who offer Croato-centric and Serbo-centric pseudo-legitimacy of their hegemonistic aspirations in B&H. I'll give a couple of illustrations. The medieval Bosnians--that is how they called themselves rather than Serbs and Croats--did not accept the Christian sacramentalization of marriage, but practiced it liberally and paganistically, as a matter of the will, a female-male promise and pledge to faithfulness. An exampled of Bosnian paganism was their tentative and unstable religious identification so that conversions from Orthodoxy to Bogumilism or Catholicism were very common, conventional, mostly motivated by pragmatism, through arranged marriages, political utilitarianism, war or peace, and other agreements. Secular pragmatism rather than holiness of the Christian religious identifications were dominant during those times. In any case, contemporary historical insight into this region's religious history must reflect the relation between pagan and Christian less dogmatically and without the projections of modern notions about the past.

However, the arrival and expansion of Islam was the major influence upon the Balkan religious mosaic. There are theses that Islam arrived in this region even before the Ottoman conquest, but unfortunately they are not at the center of critical reexamination. The discussion about whether Islam expanded voluntarily in the region of current B&H or with the aid of force continues. Those who are anti-Islamic and especially the Serbian-oriented insist on the predominance of oppression as the reason for Islamic expansion. Those who are pro-Ottoman or Turkophile, with idyllic orientation toward the Ottomans prefer the other explanation, that Islam was accepted voluntarily beginning with the Qur'anic revelation that faith is impossible under coercion. Those in Bosnia who hold a critical Ottoman view consider that the expansion of Islam, in different periods of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, was voluntary but that different forms of coercion were used by the conquering character of the Ottoman state. When force was not explicit it was replaced by economical and psychological coercion by the new occupying government. Most recently, this view has been espoused by the Academician Enver RedziÄ?. Considering the expansionist character of the Ottoman Turkish state and the contradictory, non-linear historical processes, he defends the view that the expansion of Islam in B&H was characterized by moments of external pressure, especially in the first periods of Ottoman stabilization in Bosnia. In that sense, by accepting and elaborating the views of Nedim FilipoviÄ?, who writes, for example, "The direct use of force was replaced by economic pressure. In fact, the process of Islamization was influenced by the presence of the real force of the occupying state, and parallel with it's shadow by tolerance."[2]

Independently from these controversies, the religious history was determined by the following: For the occupied people, Islam was both a reality and metaphor of slavery, domination, and non-freedom, so that the anti-Ottoman defensive wars were experienced in the conscience of the masses as wars against Islam rather than as wars for emancipation from the rule of the occupying government. This identification of B&H Muslims with the Ottoman state authorities determined all of the relations in B&H, especially after the Austro-Hungarians took over. The result was a policy of Croatization and Serbization of Muslims or Muslim self-Croatization or self-Serbization in B&H which certainly caused severe antagonistic conflicts between the religio-nationalist sub-identities in B&H. This was reflected in the ideology of aggression on B&H. The paradigm of this view was stated after the war crime of genocide in Srebrnica by the Serbian pseudo-general MladiÄ?: "After the rebellion against the dahije [local Turkish overlords] there came a time to avenge ourselves against the Turks." The original idea of emancipation from the Ottoman state was experienced in ethnocentric nationalist and genocidal notions such as a total anti-Islamic, i.e. anti-Muslim politics and practice. Norman Cigar showed concisely what was the content of the irrational anti-Islamism for ideologically legitimizing the genocide against the Boshnyaks in Bosnia.[3]

These relations of divergence, which were mostly imported into Bosnia, was just one side of historical reality. Along with it was also the other side, the side of tolerance, the ethos of "komÅ¡iluk" [neighborliness], the ideas and practices of convergence, the custom of a sense of balance, religious co-existence, and similar. Between Ivo AndriÄ?'s picture about B&H as a dark villayet and the [picture of an idyllic harmony as the paradigm of Bosnian tolerance, even during Ottoman rule there were those who offered a critical, non-disjunctive picture of Bosnia reflected in the works of Boshnyak intelligentsia of that time, for instance, Mula Mustafa Basheskiya, M. I. IseviÄ?, M. Prozorac, and others. Over the period of several centuries these intellectuals maintained a critical attitude toward Ottoman rule in Bosnia, containing a spirit of intra-Bosnian convergence and an apology on behalf of the socially inferior Boshnyaks, Catholics, and Orthodox.[4]

In Bosnian cultural-religious and ethnic polyphony one can see from these pictures that politics has simply transformed the religious sentiment into an energy or the simple matter of worldly conflicts. One should recognize that the Catholic Church up to Vatican II preached an anti-Islamic view with the conviction that Islam cannot be a revealed religion, and was striving at the same time for Islamic conversions to Catholicism. The politics of this proselytism is especially well known in Bosnia during the episcopacy of Josip Å tadler. In relation to Islam its interpreters stated, "One should remember that Å tadler in this respect followed the classical theology of his time, and it spoke about Muhammad and Islam mostly negatively."[5] TopiÄ? uses the subtitle of one of his works on theology, to claim that "Muhammedan Faith Cannot be God's Revelation."[6] The goal of such views was ". . . to prove that only the Christian faith is of divine origin."[7] Therefore, he represented contemporary "Catholic integrism."[8] "Nowadays we frequently forget that the theology of that time looked at other religions, including Islam, differently from today. The Second Vatican Council introduced into theology and then into Catholic practice a friendly and dialogical position toward other religions. Earlier they looked exclusively from the viewpoint that Catholicism is the true faith and the others are wrong."[9] But, regardless of these explanations, it is clear that the Vatican with its dogmatics, during one period of Bosnian-Herzegovinian history was the source of inter-religious antagonisms that were then reflected in the secular sphere. In the reconstruction of the history of the religious reality on these territories, which, of course, I do not aim to do here, one should start in my view, from the theoretical and conceptual position which differentiates the historical from dogmatic Christianity and the historical from revealed Islam. This differentiation leads to differentiation of concrete historical communities from their original theological identities. History of religion is not identical to the historical religious communities, which one can illustrate from the example of Russian Orthodoxy as viewed by Nicholas Berdyaev.[10]

Question:

What, in your opinion, was the religious dimension of the last fifteen dramatic years in the former Yugoslavia? In other words, how much was the religious factor involved?

MardeÅ¡iÄ? :

In the former Yugoslavia, five years after the fall of the socialist system, the religions, although very present in society, did not have any significant political influence. How did this happen? Right after WWII, the Communists openly persecuted religious communities, but did not succeed in acquiring the central role in regard to the national aspirations of common people. They did quite the opposite. They brought the nationalist and religious closer together. This period in the former Yugoslavia lasted for about twenty years. The increase in the standard of living, opening of borders, joining with and leading the countries of the Third World, as well as the availability of Western culture later played its role. The social system lost a lot of its seriousness and ideological severity. Systematically and permanently, the Communists prevented only political freedom. Even though they tried to replace it [political freedom] they substituted it by economic self-management. The hatred toward the church and religious communities ended, and they even established a rich dialogue that may be found in many, today completely forgotten books.

Mojzes:

The role of religion in the dramatic events at the end of the 20^th century in the Balkans is very controversial. Some argue that they were religious wars, and others believe that religion played no role at all. I think that religion played an important but not crucial role. In any case we cannot compare them with crusades nor with jihad. In most cases I see political manipulation of religious factors and considerably less conscious religious initiative that led to deteriorating relations. The thesis I developed in the article "Camouflaged Role of Religion in the War in B&H" was based on my assessment of the characteristics of religion in the Balkans. Religion in the Balkans is pre-Enlightenment. This means that religion is not a separate form of theory and practice which influences other human activities, but that the religion is an inseparable part of human consciousness which permeates human identity, including nationality. Therefore, when conflict arises between different nationalities, (especially when nationalism rises to the level of national chauvinism) and those nationalities are similar to each other, then religious differences play the role of the separator (therefore in the Albanian-Slavic conflicts religion plays a minor role whereas in B&H it's role was much larger).

RadiÄ?:

Although some authors think that the religious factor was one of the key elements of Yugoslav disintegration,[11] most researchers whose subject was the role of religion in the recent conflicts in the Balkans, consider that it was not of primary importance. They think that the religious communities were manipulated at the time of the fall of Communism by former communists turned nationalists. The religious conflicts, according to them, served primarily as substitutes for the national ones. The conflict therefore arose as a result of the failure of the Yugoslav idea for which many factors, such as cultural, political, and economic, were more important than religious (Gerard F. Powers, Paul Mojzes, Xavier Bougarel, Mitja Velikonja, et.). I completely agree with their opinion, but think that time needs to pass to arrive at the right answer. I don't think that the picture we have now will change entirely, but some details will need correction. As a historian, I think that we need to wait for some other sources to come forward to show what really was the role of the religious factor. We drew our conclusions by following the situation from the distance. The one thing that showed clearly is how fatal was the connection of religion and ethnos in the Balkan region not only in the case of the Serbian Orthodox community, but also, paradoxically, in the Catholic and Muslim communities.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia may be considered a result of the unsuccessful creation of a multicultural community that had a chance to integrate constitutive nations of different historical and cultural heritage. The nationalistic and separatist euphoria by which the republic and political oligarchy with the help of external factors destroyed the second Yugoslavia, took over all leading Yugoslav religious communities with its radical requests for national and ethnic homogenization. The identification of religion and nation cannot make peace with the universal religious principles and the need for church to remain a supra-national institution. Yugoslavia as a multiethnic and multinational state was especially sensitive to every attempt of identification between church and nation, but this process of identification was, indeed, a constant occurrence in the history of the Yugoslav state. As a result of specific Yugoslav religious pluralism, none of the religious communities could establish a dominant position in Yugoslavia. Therefore, they turned to "their" nations within which they expected to hold the dominant position and, most often, it ended in nationalism.

Religion in Yugoslavia never presented itself as a cohesive factor, but the fight of the church for national and cultural identity turned into intolerance and even open enmity. That was especially noticeable during the decomposition of Yugoslavia.

ZgodiÄ?:

I don't see any cause-and effect connection, as apparently perceived by one part of the public opinion, of how on the ground of post-socialism an earnest "return to religious identity" among the people of ex-Yugoslavia and "the emergence of intolerance," and especially of the aggression upon B&H could take place. That aggression par excellence is an extra-religious manifestation, namely that it is eminently the result of politics. True, the actors of aggression on BihaÄ? skillfully used religiosity but they did it in order to foster an "energy" of manipulating the consciousness, petrifying the xenophobia, and extending ethnic distancing. The aggression on B&H should be viewed as an act of state politics sui generis. But we should always distinguish authentic religiosity, as it is presented in the holy sources of religion, from religious communities as social institutions. As stated above, we distinguish original Islam, original Orthodoxy, original Catholicism from historical Islam, historical Orthodoxy, and historical Catholicism. This difference can undoubtedly be seen in the different behavior of religious communities during the aggression on B&H. Taking into account this difference and by the logic of polydeterminism it is useful to think about and explain the events during the last decade of the 20the Century in ex-Yugoslavia.

Question:

What is, in your opinion, the relationship between religious communities/churches and the main political orientations/parties, indeed between religion and politics?

MardeÅ¡iÄ?:

From all I wrote earlier it follows that from a sociological perspective for me there is ideological politics or politics as ideology that is the first and unbridgeable barrier to establishing truthful or non-ideological politics in the former Yugoslavia, regardless whether it is of religious or communist heredity. We always deal with distorted politics-- irrational, emotional, unreasonable, fanatic, exclusive, closed, extremist, suspicious-- which tends to constantly cause conflicts and long bloody wars. The one, who changes his ideology even a little bit, loses it. After the break up of the former Yugoslavia, and the creation of new states, most politicians came from one of two circles: religious and communist, which is the worst possible case. No part of society (neither the economy, art, science, law, nor the family) was so much inoculated with ideology as was politics. Politics should have developed into a healthy political life without any stiffness and claims to infallibility. Therefore all our post-war political parties had the specific mark of ideological seriousness and ideological inflexibility instead of political shrewdness and laid-back negotiations. It turns out that this unbearable seriousness of politics of a certain type of human metaphysics, was its greatest negation. Ideology and politics are actually extremely different. Nobody was greatly surprised by the fact that all the larger new political parties resembled mass political movements or collectivistic religious meetings more than they resembled modern political organizations. The most surprising for the uninformed was that idyllic and enthusiastic cooperation of former communists with the religious elite within certain parties by which they unintentionally combined the stiffness of both these world ideologies. In Croatia, Tudjman's HDZ [Croatian Democratic Union] was certainly such an example and not surprisingly it completely destroyed the remnants of healthy politics within itself and its vicinity. In that way nationalism became the only important ideology. Nevertheless, those big parties, some earlier and some later, experienced an expected crisis since they did not exercise real politics. They lived solely from ideological inspiration and enthusiasm. Those who played a double ideological game, hiding interest behind noble political rhetoric were obsessively getting rich, hidden from the public eye. Not many things were put on the agenda since the social mechanism remained undemocratic and autocratic. What else could be expected from people who had lead politics to become a fateful defense of the greatness of their ideology. Therefore, they hid everything dishonest since they were afraid to get dirty. New parties that came to power later faced a double task of secularizing politics from ideological weaknesses and cleaning-up abuse. The situation is such that it is surely not going to be easy and painless, since it is a pretty tough heritage.

Mojzes:

While the Communist Party had an aversion towards religion during Communism, in the post-communist era some parties stayed secular while others searched for closer relations with the main religious community. The more nationalist the party, the greater its desire to get close to the religious community. The politicians such as Tudjman, IzetbegoviÄ? , and KaradžiÄ? used photo-opportunities to attract believers to support their political solution. It was interesting to see pictures of the Parliament of the Republika Srpska [Bosnian Serb Republic] where priests sit in the front row. KaradžiÄ? claimed that he consulted God and religious leaders for everything he did. However, I don't believe him. He listened to neither God nor bishops.

RadiÄ?:

From the perspective of my professional interest I think it is still too early to correctly answer this question. The research shows close ties of religion and politics in both the First and in Second Yugoslavia. The relation between politics and religion went through different phases and was different in many ways in separate parts of various religious communities. If we talk about the time after WWII, we have to take into account that the relation of religious communities with state authorities greatly depended on their power, historical heritage, financial strength, etc. Some religious communities such as SOC or the Islamic Religious Community were, after the initial period of state pressure (1945-1954), basically kept under control and they cooperated without much resistance with the state, although they always opposed it internally, acting in secrecy. RCC had more opportunities to give stronger opposition and that opposition often created great concern among government leaders. There were some differences in the way RCC acted in the fifties and later. Also the RCC acted differently in Croatia than in Slovenia or Macedonia. At the beginning of the sixties, with the sudden increase in the number of religious publications, massive religious meetings, and the number of churches being built, the religious communities became more present in daily life, and their demands were more open and extensive. At that time, the government still held control over religious communities by different means (e.g. the selection of high religious officials, certain decisions at religious conferences, etc.). This control took place in different ways. During the eighties there was a more noticeable closeness of republican, federal, and party structures to certain groups within religious communities. It is early to talk about what really happened internally, but it seems to me that the religious communities turned toward those whom they considered able to meet their requests, some of which were not specifically religious.

ZgodiÄ?:

I think that the religious identification among Boshnyaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs are stable and unquestionable, and there is nothing dangerous about it. There is no religious community which expands its membership by conversions and that does not represent any danger, so that voluntary conversions to Islam in Europe is not scandalous; there is even talk about a new phenomenon of Euroislam. On the other hand, everything else is in upheaval in terms of movement and uncertainty. On the other hand no one in Europe's West is upset about the symbiotic relationship between political parties and religions. Only in our historical context is it upsetting, irritating, scandalous, creating panic, excited polemics, and controversial reflections about the actual relationship between certain ruling national parties and religious communities.

What is actually the issue? Are we not still prisoners, even unconsciously, of anachronistic pseudo-socialist conceptions about the relationship between the state, society, and religion? Or is it that in practice there are so many anomalies, antinomies, anachronisms, pathological deformations, that a rightly oriented thinker must more decisively begin with the demystification of the above-mentioned deformities? Firstly, we don't see anything problematic with some of the political parties in B&H that take the dogmas of Islam, Orthodoxy, or Catholicism as essential or as one of the more important dimensions of their moral-political identity. That is the right that emanates from a pluralistic essence of democracy.

Problems begin when out of such dogmatics one wants to project governmental and political programs, namely, when from the sphere of ethics one wants to go into the secular world of society and state. Of course, no one dares to openly and explicitly show up with a constitutional-legal project based on theocratic principles. In practice, however, one can foresee certain elements of a theocratization of the state's domain at least in its symbolically manifested expressions. Installation of religious content into state festivals, and festive obligations or vows, the religious sacralization of military and political personalities from national histories, or the current ritual dedication of state or military objects and even places where war crimes and genocides were carried out, the popular deification of state holidays, the integration of religious elites into secular or governmental rituals, curiously non-transparent, are actually informal and thereby a poorly discernible symbiosis of religious and state-party power. All of these are expressions of a certain form of theocratization of the state domain, each of which deserves a critical analysis. Although one should not exaggerate the strength of these manifestations, they nevertheless signify that some of the national parties base their relationship toward religion on politics, which is different from the Western European practice of preserving the secularism of the state.

But the theocratization of the state does not have a realistic chance because in B&H it is impossible to promote any one of the religions into the official religion and then proclaim its dogmas as the basis of the state ideology or its legal structure. Therefore it is impossible to even think that B&H could be based on the promotion of the shari'a or Christian canon law as the source and basis of the Bosnian legal system, because in that case the state would be destroyed from within due to the expected and understandable rebellion and subversion by the other, non-official religions.

Here I speak from the perspective of a Bosnian integrist. Of course, from the perspective of those political powers which would completely destroy B&H as a state or want to reconstruct it as a pseudo-state community of three separate and hence a discriminatory system of religiously established national mini-states, things look entirely different.

Question:

What was in your opinion the role of religious communities/churches and religious hierarchies in the promotion of nationalistic and chauvinistic demonstrations and actions which consequently lead to wars?

MardeÅ¡iÄ?:

The opinions are very different and contradictory. I have already addressed some of this and don't want to repeat myself. I think we have to be careful not to oversimplify things. There are always several factors in play. There are no signs that churches and religious communities are doing something different in recent times from what they did through their long history. For those who know history it is nothing new. It could be that the circumstances were worse and that therefore one had to respond with the help of strengthened action but always from the same starting points. In pre-modern times that was the customary position of the churches and religious communities. Unifying reactions and functions of religion are not only the matter of human striving - don't mind my use of this expression - but also the biological base of any socialization. It exists and should be taken into consideration.

Mojzes:

The members of all three hierarchies contributed in certain ways to the inciting of nationalistic feelings. Sending students to very conservative Islamic countries contributed to the identification of Boshnyak people (who were at that time called "Muslims") with Islam and to their increased identification with the Islamic world (especially the more militant one). This increased the fear of Christians that more significant changes will affect the status quo and perhaps return to the shari'ate law and other restrictions which would become mandatory for all.

The Orthodox hierarchs were gradually gaining independence from the domination by the Yugoslav regime and identified closer with the Serbian government specially over the issue of Kosovo. They were leaders in opposing anything that they considered to be a threat of Albanian domination in Kosovo. This was accompanied with the awakening of memories of being victims of the ustashas during WWII. As Croats and Slovenes (Catholics) distanced themselves from Yugoslavia, the more the Serbian hierarchy became afraid of repeated persecutions of Orthodox Christians, not to mention their concern over the likely break-up of the territory populated by Serbs into several states. That would have difficult consequences in regard to the question of the diocesan jurisdictional system of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Catholic bishops regarded the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) not only as a party that represents Croat interests, but as an all-Croat anticommunist movement that would provide much more freedom to the Catholic Church among Croats. By supporting the independence of Croatia and by creating a Croat political party in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Franjo KuhariÄ? and other bishops de facto supported the option which was leading toward the break up of Yugoslavia. By being against the official use of the Serbian language, and by supporting Croatian language as the only official language of the Republic of Croatia, as well as being reluctant to apologize for the abuses by the Catholic Church in the Independent State of Croatia during WWII, the Catholic Church gave signals to Serbs that they are endangered if they stay unprotected in Croatian areas.

RadiÄ?:

We can not talk about religious communities as a compact entity. Every community had representatives who thought differently, but during certain time periods a more radical trend dominated, often affecting the behavior of others. All religious communities had representatives who promoted inflammatory nationalistic and chauvinistic positions and actions, but I think one should take into account the possibility of their influence which was not always the same. Up until now no comparative analysis was made of the influence of various religious communities in the area of former Yugoslavia, but only such an analysis would truly show what really happened and who was to what extent responsible for the actions of the religious communities. The main focus was on the activities of the Serbian Orthodox Church that was often blamed as the main guilty party, which I don't think is true. At the beginning of the 1980s, as the result of the Kosovo crisis and the general crisis of society, the anti-western wing in the SOC started getting stronger, showing undisguised support for monarchism, anti-westernism, and a denial of the achievements of the modern world. Priests and part of the episcopate were nationally and patriotically oriented, though more and more in terms of medieval and isolationistic categories. Concepts such as democracy, liberalism, freedom of conscience, and western culture were simply treated as negative and anti-Orthodox.

It was more and more obvious that the Church not only wanted to free itself from tutorship by the state, but also to obtain some indirect role in the guidance of society, and eventually the role of the dominant state religion. Increasingly present were theses about the need to reorganize the Yugoslav state in a manner that was most advantageous to Serb national interests and the interests of SOC. The open support of the Vatican to the secession of some Yugoslav republics was received as proof of the thesis of a "Vatican Conspiracy" against Serbs and also against the Yugoslav state. Some recent research, (e.g. that of Vjekoslav PeriÄ?), shows that the RCC did play a very important role in the preparation for the conflict, but in distinction from SOC it did it more cautiously, without direct and public advocacy by the highest hierarchy. Concerning the Islamic Religious Community, one should pay attention to the works of Xavier Bougarel who covers the internal genesis of relations in this religious community and about their phases during the most recent years.

ZgodiÄ?:

There is no basis for a unifying view. But it is interesting that one can discern their role out of the traditional relationship of religious communities toward the ruling and even aggressive state policies. It is surprising, mystical, unfathomable. Without a priori apologetics, one must say that since the Boshnyak people were at the center of Serbian/Montenegrin and later Croat genocidal aggression, it is understandable that the leaders of the Islamic community involved themselves in the sphere of public politics. Thereby some of them occasionally became extremist. We are not saying that it was their only reaction, namely, that they did not have their own original, authentic conceptions. But it was nevertheless a response to the geopolitical concepts of MiloÅ¡eviÄ? and Tudjman about the creation - in case they could not divide Bosnia and annex its parts - of a Muslim mini-state that will end up under Europe's patronage; the messianic task of Croatia should be to Europeanize the Muslims. It is understandable, on the other hand, that the defenders of B&H also activated the emancipatory potentialities in the religious identity of the Boshnyaks. But under conditions of peace, such activation, especially within Islamic fractions, or in Bosnia the non-traditional mesheba, which work outside the official Islamic community of B&H, these take on controversial implications into which we cannot delve here.

Its true, that at the time, the elite of the Boshnyak power acceded to the option of the internal ethnic division of B&H. But later, under the pressure of the multinational powers of Bosnia-Herzegovinian integration, they had to give it up. In addition, with the radicalization of a part of the Islamic establishment also came into play the complex of prejudices toward Islamic public activity. In that respect what was allowed as the traditional form of address to the Zagreb or Bosnian Catholic cardinal was inhibited or proscribed to the Bosnian-Herzegovinian reis. Simply, in the mentalities there was and still exists a relationship of discrimination, of a piori aversion, and xenophobic anathemazation. But naturally one cannot deny the fact that leaders of the Islamic community, on their part, temporarily by their political statements, assisted in the artificial production of the view of advancing Islamic fundamentalism, which really, in our perception, did not have, nor does