Abstract
Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) is a country of striking scenery—rugged and imposing mountains, lush verdant meadows, lakes and rivers which, according to the vagaries of the Balkan climate, can appear either crystal blue and serene or grey and menacing. If this natural beauty creates character and charm, so too do the vast number of mosques, cathedrals, churches, and monasteries that adorn the Bosnian landscape.1 One awakes to the sound of an imam calling his people to prayer or the ringing of church bells. Religion and its symbols are deeply interwoven into the tapestry of everyday life in BiH. According to one commentator, “Religion has apparently filled the vacuum created by the delegitimation of the communist project and provided an integrating framework for post-communist societies that have problems defining their new identities.”2 Religion, however, has not been a major focus of scholarly research in BiH. While various authors have explored how religion and religious leaders contributed to and fuelled the bloodshed in the country,3 some of the contemporary legacies of this religious involvement have received less attention. This research seeks to address this gap and to demonstrate that in post-conflict societies such as BiH, questions pertaining to transitional justice, security sector reform, reconstruction and development, returnees, and so on should not overshadow critical religious issues.
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Notes
Ivan Ivekovic, “Nationalism and the Political Use and Abuse of Religion: The Politicization of Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Islam in Yugoslav Successor States”, Social Compass 49 (2002): 534.
See, for example, Sabrina P. Ramet and Ljubiša. S. Adamovich, eds. Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics and Culture in a Shattered Economy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995)
Gerald F. Powers, “Religion, Conflict and Prospects for Reconciliation in Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia”, Journal of International Affairs 50 (1996): 221–252
Paul Mojzes, ed. Religion and the War in Bosnia (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998)
Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998)
Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina, trans. by Rang’ichi Ng’inja(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).
The results of this fieldwork are fully explored in a previous article. See Janine N. Clark, “Religion and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Are Religious Actors Doing Enough?” Europe-Asia Studies 62 (2010): 371–394.
Speaking on 28 March 1993, for example, the then US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, commented: “Let me put that situation in Bosnia in just a little broader framework. It’s really a tragic problem. The hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croats-is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell”. Cited in Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York: Random House, 1998), 243
Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (College Station, TX: A & M University Press, 1995)
James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (London: Hurst & Co., 2003).
Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books, 1993).
Vjekoslav Perica, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166.
Zoran Brajović, “The Potential of Inter-Religious Dialogue”, in Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ten Years after Dayton, ed. Martina Fischer (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007), 185–186.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 22 (1993): 22–49.
Sells, “Crosses of Blood”: 314. See also Velikonja, Religious Separation, 260–261; and Paula M. Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 29.
Alison Pargeter, The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 40.
See Ivana Maček, “‘Imitation of Life’: Negotiating Normality in Sarajevo under Siege”, in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, eds. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 46.
The term “religious actors” is borrowed from Appleby, for whom it denotes “people who have been formed by a religious community and who are acting with the intent to uphold, extend or defend its values and precepts”. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 9.
After the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared before a group of children in Međugorje in 1981, this small town in western Herzegovina has become a major pilgrimage centre for Catholics throughout the world. See, for example, Zlatko Skrbiš, “The Apparitions of the Virgin Mary of Mešugorje: The Convergence of Croatian Nationalism and Her Apparitions”, Nations and Nationalism 11 (2005): 443–461.
Sells, “Crosses of Blood”, 321. See also Mart Bax, “Warlords, Priests and the Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: A Case-Study from Rural Bosnia Herzegovina”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2000): 16–36.
Hoare, however, insists that “The presence of the mujahedin in BiH and their acquisition of Bosnian passports was a product of the collapse of the Bosnian state and the corruption of its institutions and officials, rather than of any alleged Islamist agenda on the part of the Izetbegović regime”. Marko Atilla Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: Saqi Books, 2004), 133.
David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), ix.
David H. Gray and Fred A. Tafoya, “Bosnia’s ‘Jihad’ and the Development of al Qaida: Past, Present and Future”, Research Journal of International Studies 7 (2008): 76. See also Ahmetasević, “Investigation: Emissaries of Militant Islam”.
Perica, Balkan Idols, 171. See also Bougarel, “The Role of Balkan Muslims”: 19; A. Stefansson, “Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo”, in The New Bosnian Mosaic, eds. Bougareletal., 73; N. Hawton, Europe’s Most Wanted Man: The Quest for Radovan Karadžić (London: Arrow Books, 2010), 153.
Chris Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 12.
See Evan F. Kohlman, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 219–222.
Delisso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate, 4. According to Alice, for example, “There is no evidence that the remaining Arab Muslims [in Bosnia] were or are an operational cell for potential terrorism”. Lynne C. Alice, “No Respect: Forging Democracy in Bosnia and Kosovo”, in Islam and Political Violence: Muslim Diaspora and Radicalism in the West, eds. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Fethi Mansouri (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 192.
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “Facing the Past and Access to Justice from a Public Perspective: Special Report” (2010), http://www.undp.ba/upload/publications/Facing%20the%20Past%20and%20 Access%20to%20Justice.pdf (accessed 30 April 2011). The fact that respondents in Brčko were particularly keen to forget the past is consistent with the findings of the author’s own research in the area. Fieldwork revealed, for example, that the past remains very much a taboo subject in Brčko; people do not want to talk about or discuss the war for fear of inciting new tensions and hatreds. Janine N. Clark, “Bosnia’s Success Story? Brčko District and the ‘View from Below’”, International Peacekeeping 17 (2010): 67–79.
David Bloomfield, “On Good Terms: Clarifying Reconciliation” Berghof Report 14 (2006): 13.
Vamik Volkan, “Bosnia-Herzegovina: Chosen Trauma and Its Transgenerational Transmission”, in Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 86.
See, for example, Janine N. Clark, “The Impact Question: The ICTY and the Restoration and Maintenance of Peace”, in The Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, eds. Bert Swart, Alexander Zahar and Göran Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 55–80.
It is noteworthy that while Smajic attributes to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) an acknowledgement of “the genocide” against Bosnian Muslims, the court’s judgement—given on 26 February 2007—was in fact far more circumscribed. In short, “the ICJ determined as the only ‘confirmed’ case of genocide the massacre at Srebrenica, disputing Bosnian claims that the genocide had begun in 1992 in eastern Bosnia”. Jelena Subotić, Highjacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 139.
Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History: Behind Truth and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 155.
Tania Wettach, “Religion and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, Religion in Eastern Europe 28 (2008): 2.
Author interview, Sarajevo, 17 May 2008. Stuebner, for her part, contends that “While the staff of the IRC is attempting to implement worthwhile programs, most of the top religious leaders are more interested in promoting the interests only of their own co-religionists or in furthering other political agendas”. Renata Stuebner, The Current Status of Religious Coexistence and Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina (New York: United States Institute of Peace, 2009), 13.
Halpern and Weinstein observe that “It is the interpersonal ruins, rather than the ruined buildings and institutions that pose the greatest challenge for rebuilding society”. Jodi Halpern and Harvey M. Weinstein, “Empathy and Rehumanization after Mass Violence”, in My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, eds. Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 304.
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© 2014 Janine Natalya Clark
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Clark, J.N. (2014). The Cross, the Crescent, and the War in Bosnia: The Legacy of Religious Involvement. In: Ramet, S.P. (eds) Religion and Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Religion, Politics, and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330727_7
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