Bosnian Croat speaks out: the moral strength of true faith.

EDITOR:

Bosnia consists of three groups, Serbs, Muslims and Croats. The Bosnian Serbs and Croats should not be readily identified with the Serbs of Serbia (Yugoslavia) or the Croats in Croatia.

Outsiders may not be aware that many of the Bosnian Croats and at least some of the Bosnian Serbs did not, and do not, share the expansionist plans of the leaders in Croatia or Serbia respectively.

The author is a Bosnian Croat who hails the moral strength of the Catholic Church and her leaders for saving the concept of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state in the heart of the Balkans.

All my adult life, I considered myself a liberal intellectual and in the end I had the extreme good fortune to convert to Christianity five minutes before Doomsday. This Doomsday was the collapse of civilisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Only through the values maintained by the Catholic Church, and through a Christian point of view, was I able to recognise and understand the ugly face of evil that exterminated about 150,000 of her inhabitants and sent the other half of the population into exile.

Youth

Apart from altar boy duties in my early school years, I cannot describe myself as a regular churchgoer during the greater part of my life. This was nothing unusual for a boy raised in a Communist state like the former Yugoslavia, which proclaimed atheism as its official doctrine. Nobody was persecuted for his private religious beliefs, but the believer was held in contempt by his peers. It was not dangerous to be religious; it was simply shameful and looked on with amused contempt. What is more, my life was spent in Sarajevo, where Moslems and Orthodox prevailed and only 7.5 per cent of the population were Catholics. And I never met an Orthodox Serb who admitted visiting a church, and among hundreds of Moslems I knew I can remember only three or four who had been at the mosque.

Despite all this, I remember my early years spent near the altar with love and affection. Priests were quiet and discreet men who genuinely loved their flock. Through the Church, we could glimpse some glorious and soul-shaking world outside the drab reality of this industrial and administrative town. My spiritual career, however, was the usual one. I lost my childhood faith in my twenties and returned to the Church fifteen years later after a deep spiritual crisis. I became an atheist through reason and lack of a genuine religious gift. With a scientific background and a thirsty mind searching all kinds of sciences, I became certain that all human activities could be explained scientifically and that religion was unnecessary - a redundant trace from a mythological past.

The death knell for my religious beliefs was sounded by Richard Dawkins' book Selfish Gene, which described all human affections, including altruism and love, as simple calculations of gene-survival interests.

Many years before the war broke out in 1992, I entered a period of crisis and unrest. After two or three years of terrible wrestling with inner obstacles, I quietly converted to Christianity and made my general confession. For some time I thought that I was going crazy, because there was no outer influence to provoke this crisis; and I still cannot explain how I succeeded in shedding my straightjacket of rigid rationality. Faith is a gift and for me this episode was God's direct intervention in my life. The miracle was that I accepted everything, from Genesis and the Ten Commandments to the Gospels and the Apocalypse. Outwardly nothing changed for me, except that I had begun to attend Sunday Mass and read religious literature. In my professional life, nothing else was different.

Silent omens of the tragedy

There was very little in the air to announce the impending tragedy. My private experience of again finding the Christian religion happened two to three years before the start of the terrible war which tore Bosnia-Herzegovina asunder and cut its population in half. Still I was unprepared for it, like everybody else.

For those in Bosnia, who were soon to become members of the "sub-human" strains destined for extermination, everything began pretty innocuously. There were the ridiculous manifestations held by the Serbian nationalistic parties and the Orthodox Church. We witnessed, without real comprehension, the mass gatherings in Belgrade where the crowd screamed for Serbian unity and hailed their leader, who promised them a superior position in the common state through any means whatever, a military putsch or civil war if necessary. We witnessed, with disbelief, a million Serbs gathering in the southern province of Kosovo where they commemorated the six-hundred-year-old terrible rout against the Turks when they lost their medieval state. Their adored leader promised them new battles on the spot, and the crowd was frantically rapturous.

Other sinister events included the year-long excavation of mass graves from World War II with the ostensible explanations that the Serbs wanted to rebury the dead bones. These were not pious or sad events, but manifestations reported on TV as revivals of the past. They included frequent admonishments, directed at onlookers, to remember who did it to them 50 years ago and frequent vows never to let such a thing happen again.

In these days I heard for the first time, "We shall forgive, but never forget." Some people went further: "We are reverting from the Gospel to the Old Testament. There will be no more offering the other cheek to our enemies, but from now on it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

Nationalism and racism

Other aspects of this age of unrest and preparation belonged to the world of the mind, and they were even more sinister and dangerous. In the Serbian press we read that Croats were genetically Fascists and mass murderers - it is in their blood; as for the "quiet and tame Bosnia Moslems," they were "proliferating like rats," with the goal of dominating Serbs in the near future through sheer numbers.

All the necessary pre-conditions for classical genocide were set. Concepts and words like "filthy race", "backward religion", "proliferating like rats", "fascists", imbedded themselves deeply within the average psyche. Predictably, for the Serbs a solution was found in the classical Serb warrior-myth, and through faith in the strength of Serb arms that had won them victory in two world wars. Desperate from years-long propaganda about worldwide conspiracies leading toward their destruction, and systematically frightened by the prospect that Moslems would rule the world by first conquering them before all other nations, Serbs accepted the idea that only victory in a new war would save them from impending doom.

The intellectuals

The question is: Who did it? The answer: Journalists, writers, poets and all kinds of liberal intellectuals. It is not pure chance that Serbian leaders in Croatia and Bosnia were clinical psychiatrists. Their leadership only illustrates how important the use of "art" was in creating mass hysteria and in the manipulation of ideas. They were not backward "shrinks" from the Balkans. They were, in part, educated in the West - London, for example. They corrupted their profession by making it the art of lying.

During the slow process of building momentum toward impending genocide, we Bosnian Moslems and Croats, destined to become inhabitants of new mass graves, went happily on with our lives, interests and follies. We were a little uneasy with the new Serbian mindset, but decided to ignore it. It was the easiest course of action. Besides, they were our friends and neighbours. The novelty would last for a time, we thought, and then this craze would lose its attraction and everything would be unchanged. We looked the same, spoke the same language, and shared the same interests. Even our legends and ballads from a mythical past were interchanged and swapped. All my close friends were Serbs. It was a crazy and impossible idea that they would harm us.

Age of bloodshed and lies

Then the war in Croatia, between Croats and Serbs, began. We looked with horror and awe at the burning towns in Croatia and the hellish and dirty course this new war was taking. Almost from the beginning, this war parted with any concept defined in the Geneva Convention. It was waged with cannons, tanks and aeroplanes, yes, but established practices, determined by Serbs from the onset, consisted in the horrible mutilation of corpses, the killing of the wounded, the knife-carving of elders in seized villages, the establishment of concentration camps and mass graves, the application of torture and the liquidation of prisoners.

In this situation, the single remaining authority among Serbs was their Orthodox Church. But it is a sad fact that Orthodox priests did not rise to the situation.

At Dalj, in Croatia, about 10 Croatia policemen fell as the first victims of the Serbian ambush. The police station was taken after a prolonged battle and was wiped out, with all Croats in it. Thus the rules of this war were established. For the first time, all inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia could see the cut off, horribly mutilated, heads of four Croatian policemen. On this very spot, hardly a week after the bloodshed, an Orthodox bishop consecrated the foundation for a new church. And so the Serbs marched through sections of Croatia.

The Orthodox

I know, and our priests explained to us, that the Orthodox religion is basically the same Christianity as Catholicism. Apart from one unresolved question in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and a few sacramental customs, everything else is the same. Sacraments taken in the Orthodox Church and from Orthodox priests are as valid as Catholic sacraments: baptism, Holy Communion, marriage - everything. We were told that we could freely join in the Orthodox Mass and sacraments should we not have the opportunity to attend our own church. Unfortunately, the Orthodox priests tragically neglected their own flock and their duty to educate them in the essence of Christianity.

Some facts are just appalling. It is estimated that about 90 per cent of Montenegrains (they also consider themselves Serbs) are not baptised. The proportion among native Serbs is approximately the same. Knowledge of Christian doctrine among those who are often still described as "Orthodox" is almost non-existent. Some real-life stories could make good anecdotes.

In my office, I worked with a young Serb. He was a nice, clever boy who began reading the Bible. (He is the first and the last I can remember who revealed interest in the Scripture.) One day, at home, he was reading aloud from the Gospel by Saint Luke and he proclaimed: "And to him that striketh thee on the one cheek, offer also the other."

His father, an honest and simple factory foreman, asked: "What kind of fool can say such stupidity?"

"It was Jesus," answered his son.

"Oh, what rubbish!" the father said, waving his hand contemptuously and hardly concealing his surprise.

Now this man happened to be the uncle of General Mladic, who is now second on the list among Serbs indicated by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal as the butcher of Srebrenica. Under his direct orders, 7,000 Bosnian Moslems were liquidated. General Mladic did not remember his father, who perished during WW II. His uncle performed the role of father for him. This war criminal, a regular army officer who left behind him a trail of massacres from Croatia to Bosnia, never had a chance to learn anything about Christianity. He learned nothing at home nor from the Orthodox Church, and much less about an officer's honour during his education in the former Yugoslav Army.

The closest step to forgiveness originating from the Orthodox Church that I can remember were words proclaimed by their patriarch, Paul, the highest church authority among Serbs. He was a frail and pious monk, a "living saint" as he was referred to by the Serbian press. A full two years after the beginning of the war, well-informed about the atrocities, rapes, death-camps and tortures, this Holy Man proclaimed with his trembling voice: "Brethren, let us die, but die as men."

He said nothing about stopping the tragedy, nothing about the immorality of genocide, only the call to die heroically - without committing massacres and crimes if possible. The old priest spoke not as a man of peace, but like some warrior from a mythic past who overlooked the mutilation of corpses, the slaughtering of immature boys and the raping of women.

Catholic doctrine in a doomsday scenario

Conversely, even the hardest and cruellest Croats with tribal traditions from the Herzegovina interior, were well taught by their priests as to where they stood, and what hatred and crime meant for the Catholic Church. I could hear them grumble: "Forgive, forgive, while they (the Serbs) are slaughtering and sacking all the time."

I could hear them balk and even swear against Catholic doctrine, but not one among them could say that he was ill-informed about what his religion stood for and deemed correct.

It is a well-known fact that the policy chosen by the Croatian president and his inner circle agreed with the Serbian plan of dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina, making the Moslem population powerless and encircled from all sides. The Pope opposed this policy, and intervened with all his authority to rescue the besieged state; the Catholic Church of Croatia, led by Cardinal Kuharic, stood firmly behind the papal policy, though this was not an easy decision to take. Lower-ranking clergy, shaken by the atrocities of war and influenced by the hatred of their people, were frequently inclined to accept the division of the state as a solution. But their superiors, true to the Gospels and Christian tradition, firmly declared that this apparently easy solution would amount to genocide. The hierarchy said clearly, "Defend yourself, but do not commit crimes and do not succumb to hatred."

On the other hand, the Serbian Orthodox clergy, who lacked a central authority like the papacy, succumbed to the role of servants of the state, accepting the doctrine of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They hailed the defeat and exile of Croatian Serbs as a historic chance to populate the Serbian interior and recapture the Albanian-populated province of Kosovo.

The Catholic Church against the might of the world

It is impossible to describe, in one article, everything the Catholic Church did for Bosnian Croats. In essence, we can say that the Church literally saved Bosnian Croats as a nation when they were on a one-way road to extermination.

The accepted policy of the state of Croatia was resettlement of all Croats in areas where they could be unified in one national state.

At the beginning of the war, the legally elected president of the Croatian Democratic Union (the branch of the party in Bosnia and Herzegovina) had been forcefully removed because he was a proponent of maintaining Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state. He represented the logical idea that Croats and Moslem Bosnians should reach a mutual defence alliance against the powerful Serbian war machine.

After that, nationalistic Croats from the southern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina promptly pronounced their own republic. They incarcerated the Moslem minority in their areas, or drove them away or put them in concentration camps, thus adopting the same methods as the Serbs. Soon after, just at the time when the Serbian blitzkrieg went awry, Croats from Herzegovina started a real and bloody war with Bosnian Moslems. As a result, all Croatian officials were swiftly withdrawn from the joint government in Sarajevo, and the Catholic Croats from the Bosnian interior embarked on a desperate struggle to separate their areas from Moslems. This struggle took an unusual form - defending the encircled Croats' enclaves against an enraged Moslem majority, while Croats frequently accepted Serbs as natural allies.

At this moment, the Bosnian Moslems reduced their military defence against the Serbs, directing all their remaining might against the Bosnian Croats, now seen as the potentially weakest enemy. The aim was to completely wipe them out.

Thus Catholics in Bosnia were sentenced to death. In encircled enclaves, they got orders to retreat toward Croatia. All who remained in Moslem-held areas were quietly written off by the president of all Croats in Zagreb. In the Serbian-held parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croats were fed into the classical machine of genocide. They were literally abandoned by all, save for their Catholic Church.

Catholic Church in Bosnia

Politically, the Catholic Church opposed the policy of resettlement (ethnic cleansing) and fought to keep people where they lived. This was a desperate time for the Croatian Catholics of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They had been left with only their Church and it became their single political representative: their mother, healer and saviour.

Archbishop Komarica, from the Serbian-held western part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, repeatedly rejected offers to lead his flock into permanent exile. High-ranking Western officials told him that, because of his persistence and success in saving the remainder of the Croat Catholics living in the middle of a lawless Serbian-held territory where they were prey to any criminal, the USA would make a final attempt to once again unite Bosnia and Herzegovina as a multicultural, multi-ethnic country.

Cardinal Puljic of Sarajevo did everything humanly possible to represent Bosnian Croats as a constitutive part of this state, and to summon international help for the survival of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He saw it as a place where all religious groups, including Catholics, could live in harmony. Politicians were the first to flee at the beginning of the war; intellectuals followed shortly after. It was the priests and bishops who stayed against all odds. It was not an easy choice. They were frequently criticised by their own Catholic parishioners and despised by the nationalist Croatian Croats as "Alija's Croats." (Alija Izetbegovic is the Moslem president of Bosnia and Herzegovina.)

Catholics in Bosnia will survive despite the best combined efforts of Croatia and Serbia to wipe them out through "human resettlement." The Catholic Church is the organization that made this possible.

Serbia's proclaimed war goal was the annexation of two-thirds of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They wanted the extermination of Moslems, with only five per cent maximum left in the population.

They were slightly more tolerant of Catholics, willing to leave a 10 per cent share in the overall population in any local community. At the same time, still locked in the middle of an indecisive struggle with the Serbs, the ruling circles at Zagreb decided to "take a historical chance" and annex one-third of Bosnia and Herzegovina with approximately 200,000 Catholics, leaving the remaining 600,000 to their fate.

If these plans had not been thwarted by the USA, and if the Catholic Church had not intervened to save her flock, Bosnia, a Catholic kingdom from the 13th century, able to survive 400 years of long and harsh Turkish rule, would not contain a single Catholic in its population today.

Ivan Music, 44-year-old, was born in Sarajevo where he lived until 1992. An engineer by training, with a postgraduate degree in production management, he spent all his career working in this field. He personally witnessed the first months of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the beginning of the thousand-day-long siege of his hometown. He has lived as a refugee for the last six years.

Editor's postscript. The latest reports on Bosnia are not encouraging. In February 1998, Sarajevo Cardinal Vinko Puljic reported in the Italian magazine Jesus that the exodus of Catholics has continued despite the attempted implementation of the Dayton peace accords. Of the 528,000 Catholics who once lived in Sarajevo (a city of 2.7 million) only about 200,000 remain today, he observed. In practice it is difficult for Catholics in Sarajevo to find a home or a job.

In April Bosnian Croats rioted in the city of Drvar which they control, after hearing about an attack on Cardinal Puljic by Bosnian Serbs in the Serb-controlled town of Derventa. The Cardinal was saying Mass in a church where Bosnian Croats had worshipped before the war when Bosnian Serbs laid siege to it and kept the 650 worshippers bottled up for hours.