Religion and Justice in the War Over Bosnia

G. Scott Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415915205
• eBook ISBN: 9781136668067
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume brings together a distinguished group of thinkers, working in ethics, religion and history, to explore moral and religious issues that underlie the violence in Bosnia. ********************************************************* This volume brings together a distinguished group of thinkers to explore the moral and religious issues that underlie the violence and atrocities in Bosnia. From diverse academic and philosophical perspectives, the works of Jean Bethke Elshtain, James Turner Johnson, Michael Sells, John Kelsay, and G. Scott Davis will inform not just scholars of ethics, politics and religion, but everyone concerned with the prospects for justice in the post Cold War world.

1

Religion, History,
and Genocide in
Bosnia-Herzegovinal¹

Michael Sells

“It’s tragic, it’s terrible,” bemoaned President Clinton, in a June 1995 interview with Larry King. “But their enmities go back five hundred years, some would say almost a thousand years.” (Larry King Live, June 5, 1995) A month after those words were spoken, the United States government, along with the other governments of the UN Security Council and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, refused to respond as the Serb army overran the UN-Declared “safe haven” of Srebrenica. The next week, at a meeting in London, the same group of leaders declared that a second “safe haven,” Zepa, would not be protected. From six to seven thousand of the approximately fifty thousand inhabitants of Srebenica and Zepa are missing. Amnesty International and the International Red Cross estimate that thousands have been killed. Although leaders of NATO countries expressed surprise at the atrocities, these events surprised no one familiar with the documented behavior of the Serb army and Serb irregular militias in Bosnia.²

There is a critical relationship between the facts on the ground in Bosnia (the genocide known as “ethnic cleansing”) and the statements of Western leaders such as President Bill Clinton about “age-old antagonisms,” “ancient hatreds,” and “Balkan ghosts.” Such phrases have been used to portray the people of Bosnia as alien, and as historically or even genetically fated to kill one another. The “age-old antagonisms” refrain, as used by UN and NATO officials, served as the primary excuse for the four-year policy that culminated at Srebenica.

In Belgrade, the notion of age-old antagonism is operative in a more primary manner. Serb nationalists used the martyrdom of the Serb prince Lazar at the battle in Kosovo in 1389 as a central compo- nent of the ideology of “ethnic cleansing.” In the passion play commemorating the battle of 1389, Lazar is portrayed as a Christ figure with disciples (sometimes explicitly twelve), one of whom is a traitor. The Turks are Christ-killers, and the Judas figure, Vuk Brankovic, becomes the ancestral curse of all Slavic Muslims. The ways in which the power of the Kosovo myth and ritual has been harnessed to promote genocide are partially concealed within a symbolic code, but occasionally the ideology is expressed in completely transparent terms. Thus Norris cites the Belgrade acade- mic Miroljub Jevtic:

Because of this [the battle of Kosovo and the conversion of Bosnians to Islam], the hands of the Muslims who are with us are stained and polluted with the blood of their ancestors from among the inhabitants of Bosnia at that time, namely those who did not embrace Islam. (Norris 1993: 297–98)

This study will show each step in the appropriation and radicalizing of the Kosovo myth to create an ideology of genocide. It should be pointed out at the very beginning that such an analysis is not meant to indict the role of Kosovo in Serb culture as such. Indeed, those who used Kosovo to justify the crimes described below may ultimately be considered by Serbs as betrayers of the values of Kosovo and as having dragged the most cherished themes of Serb culture through internationally recognized crimes against humanity. If that is the case, and Serb tradition is to be retrieved, then difficult theological and cultural issues about the interpretation and place of certain themes from the Kosovo myth will need to be seriously addressed. Yet the same tradition may offer resources for such a retrieval; as the Kosovo legend was taken over by ethno-nationalist militants, the deeper, more human aspects of the Kosovo tradition were submerged, namely those works that managed, through the Kosovo theme, to present the sorrow and loss of the figures portrayed not as the property of Serb militancy, but as Serbia’s distinctive contribution to a shared human understanding.³

What is “Ethnic Cleansing”?

To understand the nature and goals of the “ethnic cleansing,” it helps to begin with the burning of the National Library, a collection of 1.2 million volumes, and Sarajevo’s major example of Austrian neo-Moorish architecture, and the events that preceded it. The army of General Mladic systematically targeted the major libraries, manuscript collections, museums, and other cultural institutions in Sarajevo, Mostar, and other besieged cities. Eastern Mostar, with its priceless heritage of ancient Bosnian culture, was leveled by Serb artillery. What the Serb artillery missed, the Croat Defense Force (HVO) hit. The HVO has shelled cultural institutions in Mostar and other cities under siege.

On May 17, 1992, General Mladic targeted the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in South Eastern Europe. Over five thousand priceless manuscripts, in South Slav Aljamiado, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, went up in flames. Mladicrs forces then targeted the National Museum for destruction. It burned in August.⁴

Behind Serb and HVO lines, the destruction was even more systematic. HVO forces expelled Serbs and Muslims, and dynamited Orthodox churches and Muslim mosques throughout the region, including the centuries-old mosques in Stolac and Pocitelj, two of the more ancient and beautiful towns in Herzegovina. Most Catholic churches and all mosques (over six hundred) have been methodically dynamited or vandalized by Serb militias, including masterworks of South Slavic culture such as the sixteenth-century Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the “Colored Mosque” in Foca, built in 1551. Graveyards, birth records, work records, and every other trace of the people “cleansed” have been destroyed. (cf. Riedlmayer 1994a, 1994b; Detling 1993; Bollage 1995)

What General Mladic and his Croat extremist imitators destroyed was the graphic and palpable evidence of over 500 years of interreligiously shared life in Bosnia. And despite conflicts in the past, this methodical destruction is new. The art, manuscripts, and artistic monuments being burned and dynamited have existed for centuries, and in cities such as Mostar and Sarajevo, the religious monuments are built next to one another. After all the mosques in the formerly Muslim-majority city of Zvornik were systematically destroyed, the warlord Branko Grujic declared, “There never were any mosques in Zvornik.” Once destroyed, the banalities about “age-old antagonism” become irrefutable. History is recreated in the image of the destroyer. What was destroyed was the evidence not only of the five-hundred-year-old Bosnian Muslim civilization of Zvornik, but also of five hundred years of shared living between the two major populations groups in Zvornik, Muslim and Serb. In addition, the names used for such acts can and have been manipulated and abused. Indeed, a premise of this study is that it was the original manipulation of such names in the decade of the 1980s that led to the ideology that fostered the most extreme Serb-nationalist violence in Bosnia in 1992. How are we to name the various components of the “ethnic cleansing” strategy of Serb regular and irregular militias in the spring and summer of 1992? And how are we to properly name what has been called “ethnic cleansing” despite the fact that the alleged “ethnicity” is based merely and solely upon one’s religious identification? This latter question can only be answered properly once the individual components of the “ethnic cleansing” program have been properly described.⁵

In each area occupied by the Serb military, killing camps and killing centers were established, and individual massacres were carried out. Such centers included the Drina River Bridge at Visegrad, the Drina Bridge at Foca, the stadium at Bratunac, and schools, mosques, stadiums, and roadsides throughout Serb-army occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina. In such places the killing went on for weeks. Thus the famous Visegrad Drina Bridge, built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, was used for nightly killing “sport festivals” by Serb soldiers who would torture their victims, throw them off the bridge, and try to see if they could shoot them as they tumbled down into the Drina River.

After the Serb army had consolidated the seventy percent of Bosnian territory it controlled, the killing switched to controlled intimidation, with a pattern of localized killings and rapes in cities such as Banja Luka and Bijeljina, where significant non-Serb population remained. Various camps, off-limits to all International Red Cross inspection, continued to operate to the time of this writing. Especially notorious is the Lopare camp near Brcko.

The International Red Cross made an extraordinary appeal to the NATO nations to stop the “ethnic cleansings” in Banja Luka and Bijeljina. The appeal was ignored. The first victims were intellectual and cultural leaders: teachers, lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, religious leaders, artists, poets, and musicians. The object of such “eliticide” was to destroy the cultural memory. Gradually, the killing slipped over into something more random as the acts of cruelty and massacre took on an interior momentum and logic of their own.

Those who survived the killings were subjected to a final ritual: the stripping of all property and possession. Buses of refugees were continually stopped by militias and army units. Everything of possible value was taken: not only hard currency, but even shoes and jewelry of little financial value. The stealing of wedding rings (with threats to cut off the finger of anyone whose ring did not come off easily) was a special part of the ritual. From the pervasive nature of this ritual, an interpretation can be made. The stolen wedding rings—of a trivial value in relation to the enormous booty taken by the Serb army and militias—represent the last symbol of a cultural group identity, as well as a symbol of a future procreative possibility. The strange fixation with which militia members persisted in stealing weddings rings, and often in presenting them to their own girlfriends, can only be explained through such deeper symbolism.

The term “genocide” was coined by Rafael Lemkin as part of an effort to learn from the experience of the Holocaust and to develop an international legal consensus about certain kinds of systematic atrocities. The “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 9, 1948, makes the following key provisions:

Article I: The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There can be little doubt that the “ethnic cleansing” practiced by the regular and irregular Serb militias in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 constitutes genocide. These practices were a systematic effort to destroy Bosnian multireligious culture and Bosnian Muslim culture, and to destroy the Bosnian and Bosnian Muslim peoples as a people.⁶

Christoslavism: Slavic Muslims as Christ-Killers

The antagonism between nationalist Serbs and Bosnian Muslims is, as they say, “old.” But it is also recent. While historians dispute the significance of the Kosovo battle of 1389, in which both the Serbian Prince Lazar and the Ottoman Sultan Murat were killed, in Serbian mythology the battle entailed the loss of Serb independence, a loss that was represented in cosmic terms. Yet despite the cliché about “age-old antagonisms,” the marshaling of the Lazar legend to place an unbridgeable gap between Slavic Muslim and Serb was achieved only in the nationalistic literature of the nineteenth century. It is in the literature of the nineteenth century that the Lazar Christ-character takes on explicit form. Lazar is now a Christ figure, with knight disciples, who is slain, and with him dies the Serb nation, to rise again only with the resurrection of Lazar. (cf. Emmert 1990; Vucinich 1991) Turks are thus equated with Christ-killers and Vuk Brankovic, the “Turk within,” becomes a symbol, and the ancestral curse, of all Slavic Muslims.⁷

The classic illustration of this is The Mountain Wreath, written by Prince-Bishop Petar II (known by the pen name of Njegos), which portrays the eighteenth-century Montenegrin extermination of slavic Muslims, the Istraga Poturica. The drama opens with Bishop Danilo, the play’s protagonist, brooding on the evil of Islam, the tragedy of Kosovo, and the treason of Vuk Brankovic. Danilo’s warriors suggest celebrating the holy day (Pentecost) by “cleansing” (cistimo) the land of non-Christians. The chorus chants: “The high mountains reek with the stench of non-Christians.” One of Danilo’s men proclaims that struggle will not come to an end until “we or the Turks are exterminated.” The reference to the Slavic Muslims as “Turks” crystallizes the view that by converting to Islam the Muslims have changed their racial identity and have become the Turks who killed the Christ-Prince Lazar.

The conflict is explicitly placed outside the category of the blood- feud, common to the Balkans. In tribal Montenegro and Serbia a blood-feud, however ruthless and fatal, could be reconciled; it was not interminable. (Boehm 1984) The godfather (Kum) ceremony was used to reconcile clans who had fallen into blood-feud. In The Mountain Wreath, when the Muslims suggest a Kuma reconciliation, 1 Danilo’s men object that the Kum ceremony requires baptism. The Muslims offer an ecumenical analogy, suggesting that the Muslim hair-cutting ceremony is a parallel in their tradition to baptism. Danilo’s men respond with a stream of scatological insults against Islam, its prophet, and Muslims. With each set of insults, the chorus chants “Tako, Vec nikako” (this way; there is no other) to indicate the “act” that must be taken. The play ends with the triumphant Christmas Eve extermination of Slavic Muslims as a formal initiation of Serb nationhood.

By moving the conflict from the realm of blood-feud into a cosmic duality of good and evil, Njegos placed Slavic Muslims in a permanent state of otherness. The sympathetic qualities of the Muslims are the last temptation of Danilo. However sympathetic in person, Muslims are Christ-killers, “blasphemers,” “spitters on the cross.” After slaughtering the Muslims—man, woman, and child—the Serb warriors take communion without the confession that was mandatory after blood-vengeance.⁸

The explicitly Christological patterning of Njegos’s portrayal of the Kosovo myth was echoed in other art and literature produced or collected during the Romantic period, in particular a fragment of poetry, known as the “Last Supper,” which depicts Lazar’s banquet on the eve of the battle. Lazar knows that he will be betrayed, and he suspects Milos, his most faithful knight, who had been slandered earlier. The prince proposes a toast to Milos in which he accuses him. Extremely hurt, Milos promises to prove his loyalty by killing the sultan before the battle. He then points the finger to the real traitor, Vuk Brankovic. (Vucinich 1991: 113) Lazar’s last supper is represented in Adam Stefanovic’s lithograph “The Feast of the Prince (Lazar)” with Lazar in the center of the banquet table, surrounded by knights in the pose of a thousand depictions of Christ’s disciples, with light suffusing the countenance of the prince, and traitor Vuk brooding silently in the background. (Vucinich 1991: 287, Fig. 21)

As part of the preparations for the six-hundredth anniversary of Kosovo, there was a revival of interest in Njegos. The importance of Njegos, the fact that his verses are memorized by a great many Serbs, and the notion that Njegos, himself the poet of Serb crucifixion and future resurrection, was being resurrected, were all part of the Kosovo memorials of 1989. “Throughout Serbia, Vojvodina and Montenegro, people at gatherings carried Njegos’s picture and posters with his verses,” wrote Pavle Zoric, going on to intone that “this was an unforgettable sight. Is there anything more beautiful, more sincere and more profound…. Njegos was resurrected in the memory of people.” (Vukadinovic, 1989: 79)

“Race-betrayal” is a major theme of The Mountain Wreath and the strand of Serbian literature it represents. By converting to Islam, Njegos insisted, slavic Muslims became “Turks.” No Andric, Yugoslavia’s Nobel laureate in literature, writes that:

Njegos, who can always be counted on for the truest expression of the people’s mode of thinking and apprehending, portrays in his terse and plastic manner the process of conversion thus: “The lions [those who remained Christian] turned into tillers of the soil, / the cowardly and covetous turned into Turks.” (Andric 1990: 20)

If this is the message of “the people,” Bosnian Muslims are by definition not part of the people, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Language
• A Chronological Sketch
• Introduction Interpreting Contemporary Conflicts
• 1. Religion, History, and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 2. Nationalism and Self-Determination: The Bosnian Tragedy
• 3. War for Cities and Noncombatant Immunity in the Bosnian Conflict
• 4. Bosnia, the United States, and the Just War Tradition
• 5. Bosnia and the Muslim Critique of Modernity
• Notes
• References
• Contributors
• Index