The multiethnic and multireligious state of Bosnia and Herzegovina plunged into violence following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. Nationalist leaders emerged and stoked ethnic tensions. Pulled by Croa- tia to the west and Serbia to the east and south, Bosnia and Herzegovina ultimately declared independence from Yugoslavia, triggering a bitter internal battle that lasted for three years. By the time the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement ended hostilities in 1995, over 250,000 Bosnians were dead, thousands of women had been raped, and some two million people had been driven from their homes.
Friar Ivo Markovic, a Catholic Franciscan Bosnian Croat, was in the middle of a predominantly Orthodox Christian Serb area of Sarajevo when the hostilities erupted in the spring of 1992. Despite the anger and divisiveness of those days, he managed to maintain peaceful relations with his Orthodox neighbors until Serb paramilitary units from out- side the area stormed and ransacked his seminary. He narrowly escaped death.
In the midst of this turbulence, Friar Ivo tried to prevent and resolve conflicts through interfaith work among Croats (generally Catholics), Serbs (generally Orthodox Christians), and Bosniaks (generally Mus- lims). These efforts often put his life at risk. Once, in the midst of a battle, Friar Ivo approached a Bosniak Muslim village by crossing the Croat forces’ line of fire. Threatened with being shot if he went any fur- ther, Friar Ivo nonetheless continued on – and eventually was able to negotiate a meeting between the local commanders, who agreed that their respective armies would not fight each other.
Today, Friar Ivo continues his interfaith work with the organization he helped found, Interreligious Service Oci u Oci (“Face to Face”). Friar
Ivo’s story shows that religiously motivated action aimed at promoting a shared desire for peace and stability can be more effective than the often self-serving agendas of politicians.
Background: The Era of Empires
At the close of World War I in 1918, the former Austro-Hungarian territo- ries of the Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenes were cobbled together into one entity to function as a homeland for the region’s various Slavic groups. Renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, the country’s tenuous existence began against the backdrop of nearly six cen- turies of foreign intervention and outside cultural influences.1
Slavs first settled the areas comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia, in the sixth century. The political history of the west- ern Balkans from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, however, was punctuated by a succession of conquests and shifting alliances.2 Dur-
ing significant portions of these early centuries, the Byzantine Empire had nominal authority over the land, with little real control. The Serbian and Croatian Kingdoms exercised power at various points in the region, sometimes under the overall rule of the Byzantine Empire. Serbia’s great- est influence was in the geographic area of Herzegovina, whereas Croa- tia’s was in the area of Bosnia.3
During the eleventh to twelfth centuries, the Kingdom of Hungary consolidated control over Bosnia and Herzegovina. But Bosnia and Herzegovina fought for and gained its independence, thereafter exist- ing as an independent medieval state from the late thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century. This era was marked by frequent infighting and division among local noble families. Finally, in 1463, the Ottoman Turks conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina, beginning a prolonged occu- pation during which large numbers of Bosnians, particularly landown- ers, converted to Islam and absorbed much of the Islamic/Turkish culture.4
Under Ottoman rule, those Bosnians who became adherents of Islam also became the privileged class, both economically and politically. In contrast, the Serbs and Croats who remained Christian were largely rel- egated to the peasantry. By the nineteenth century, Ottoman control in the region had all but collapsed, and a final revolt by Bosnian Christians against the Turks in 1878 ushered in yet another foreign occupation: the Austro-Hungarian Empire.5
The World Wars
In 1914, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist became a catalyst for war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. The dis- pute quickly escalated into World War I. Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with the rest of the south Slav lands, became part of the wider European conflict that brought an end to the old empires and ushered in the first Yugoslav union.6
Two decades later, the Balkans was again shattered by outside forces. An invasion by Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria prompted Slovenes and Croats in the north of Yugoslavia to align with the Axis powers. To the south (including Bosnia and Herzegovina), German and Italian forces instituted control, but rival local militias constantly challenged them. Yugoslavs from all of the ethnic groups joined both the “Chetniks” (Serb nationalists) and the “Partisans” (Communists) led by strongman Josip Broz Tito, a Yugoslav of Croat and Slovene descent.7
These Yugoslav factions battled among themselves throughout the war, forming allegiances of convenience and switching back and forth between Axis and Allied powers. During the bloody conflict, many thou- sands fell victim to the same types of atrocities committed elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Soviet Union (including the mass killing of civilians, concentration camps, and forced expulsions). Yet these atroc- ities were primarily committed by Yugoslavs against one another, and not by Germans or Italians. Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Bosniaks, and Gypsies were put to death in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina by Croatia’s Nazi-inspired “Ustasha” movement. Widespread Serb retali- ation against Croatian and Bosniak civilians also took place, though four times as many Serbs were killed as Bosniaks.8
Communist Yugoslavia
Tito led the Partisans to victory in 1945, leading to the creation of the second Yugoslav nation of the twentieth century, the Federated Social- ist Republic of Yugoslavia. Tito then ruled as a dictator for thirty-five years, exercising absolute control and an unyielding resolve to main- tain a unified Communist state. Comprised of six republics – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia (including the two autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo) – the
new nation emerged largely independent of the Soviet Union, which expelled Yugoslavia from the Communist Soviet Bloc in 1948 as pun- ishment for Tito’s revolutionary policies.9
On the domestic front, Tito employed ruthless tactics and coercion to sustain his one-party control and was not above setting one group against another to retain power. For example, when the constitution was rewritten in 1974, it decentralized the regional governments, giving them greater administrative authority and raising them nearly to the level of fully independent republics. All of this was done in an attempt to balance ethnic influences by pitting different regions within Yugoslavia against one another using economic competition.10
Internationally, Tito maintained a policy of nonalignment with the superpowers, which proved highly successful. Simultaneously, he exploited fear of realignment with the Soviet Communist Bloc to secure large amounts of Western aid over the years. As a result, Yugoslavia ulti- mately achieved one of the highest standards of living among the world’s communist nations, though the country encountered serious problems following Tito’s death in 1980.11
The Disintegration of Yugoslavia
Tito neither groomed a strong successor nor planned for an alternative power structure, thus seriously undermining Yugoslavia’s long-term sta- bility. Attempts at joint presidency, with one representative from each of the republics, failed to produce a consensus. Furthermore, Yugoslavia’s economic policies proved to be inadequate during the 1980s, the same time that other communist economic systems in Eastern Europe were beginning to collapse.12 Inflation, debt crisis, and trade deficits plagued
the country, lowering the standard of living. The richer republics (Slove- nia and Croatia) resented that they were subsidizing the poorer ones (Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina), whereas the poorer republics in turn felt exploited by the richer ones. A lack of interest during the post–Cold War period also led the international com- munity to cease approving loans, which had previously bolstered the struggling Yugoslav economy.13
This economic and political stagnation led to the Yugoslav Commu- nist Party’s disintegration, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing along similar lines. Seizing the moment, former Communist Party apparatchik Slobodan Milosevic moved to fill the power vacuum that emerged. He exploited Serbian nationalism (the promise of a “Greater Serbia”) to fuel
ethnic tensions and consolidate his power base, and by mid-1989, con- trolled four out of eight votes in the Yugoslavian federal government. The four he did not control – Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina – would secede from Yugoslavia by the end of 1992 to form independent countries along ethnic and religious lines.14
The first to leave were Slovenia and Croatia, primarily Catholic republics that declared independence in June of 1991. In the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, Milosevic denounced the secessions. Claiming that the Serbian Orthodox Christian populations living outside the Serbian Republic in Yugoslavia were being isolated and threatened with destruc- tion, he called for the Yugoslav federation to be preserved by force.15
Events moved quickly. Under orders from Belgrade, the Yugoslav Peo- ple’s Army (JNA) attacked Slovenia.16 After ten days of skirmishes and
an embarrassing defeat, the JNA withdrew its forces, allowing Slovenia to assert its independence. Because there were few Serbian Orthodox Christians in Slovenia, Milosevic was willing to let the country go and dropped his efforts there.17
However, in Croatia, which had a sizable minority population, the resolve of the JNA and Croatian Serb militias was far greater. They were determined to protect the enclaves of Orthodox Christian Serbs within Croatia, claiming that the successors to the Ustasha movement would subject them to discrimination and repression if Croatia were to gain independence from Yugoslavia.18The fighting in Croatia reached a stale-
mate with regard to the territory held by Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, and the focus soon turned to its land-locked neighbor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mountainous republic completely surrounded by Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro.19
Bosnian Independence
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s leaders feared the impact of the independence declarations of Slovenia and Croatia and how they would affect ethnore- ligious dynamics at home. Unlike its neighbors, Bosnia and Herzegovina had existed as a multireligious, multiethnic entity since the Middle Ages. Of its roughly four million people, the religious breakdown was 40 per- cent Muslim, 31 percent Orthodox Christian, and 15 percent Catholic, whereas the ethnic breakdown was 48 percent Bosniak, 37 percent Serb, and 14 percent Croat.20
With the breakup of Yugoslavia looming, Bosnia and Herzegovina – with its patchwork quilt of ethnic/religious populations – was vulnerable
to the xenophobic motivations of its neighbors, especially Serbia and Croatia. The situation was complicated as new Bosnian political parties divided along ethnoreligious lines. Serbian Orthodox Christian and Croa- tian Roman Catholic nationalistic parties emerged and began to lay claim to lands historically considered part of Serbia and Croatia, respectively. In reaction, the Bosniak Muslims formed their own party.21
These nationalist parties participated in the 1990 elections held in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results were predictable. People from each ethnic group voted overwhelmingly for their own ethnoreligious nation- alist party out of fear that they would be at the mercy of the other parties if they did not support “their own.” In the wake of the election, a coalition government was formed.22
This government, composed of representatives from each of the par- ties, proved ineffective. It was unable to pass even a single law during the eighteen months before the Serbian Party pulled out of the coalition and declared the existence of a separate Bosnian Serb government. The leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina were left with three choices: continue as part of what remained of Yugoslavia, divide itself between Serbia and Croatia, or declare independence.23
Confronted with what seemed to be the inevitable – the United States and European Union had already recognized the independence of Slove- nia and Croatia – Bosnia and Herzegovina’s leaders held a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia early in 1992. The Serbian Ultra- Nationalist party feared that an independent, multiethnic nation no longer part of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia would put Bosnian Orthodox Christian Serbs at risk. Accordingly, they boycotted the vote and called for all Bosnian Serbs to do the same. With the boycott in place, the remaining voters chose independence. The results were announced in March and by late April 1992, the United States and most of the international community recognized an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina.24
The War over Bosnia and Herzegovina
As the events around the referendum for independence unfolded, Bosnia and Herzegovina slid into war. Serb and Croat forces took positions on opposite sides of the Neretva River, and the previously sporadic fight- ing between military reservists and residents became an everyday occur- rence. When the war in Croatia ended in early 1992, the JNA officially withdrew and moved into Bosnia and Herzegovina with the approval of the United Nations. Once there, the JNA placed heavy artillery around the
country’s major cities, including Sarajevo, to prevent the country from gaining independence.25
Then, on March 2, 1992, the day that the referendum results were announced, members of the Serb paramilitary forces set up barricades and sniper positions in Sarajevo, ostensibly in response to the shooting of a Serb at a wedding party the day before. In response, thousands of Sara- jevo citizens demonstrated in the streets, seeking to prevent a military coup. The people’s will prevailed. Barricades were removed, and Sara- jevans celebrated their “victory” over the paramilitary forces. It seemed that Sarajevo had been spared war.26
But the battle for that city was far from over. The Serbs initially took control of the surrounding areas. In the northern Posavina region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fierce Croat/Serb fighting broke out. People from all three ethnoreligious groups became refugees. And Serbian para- military forces – led by General Ratko Mladic – began a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Croats in northern and eastern Bosnia. The JNA laid siege to Mostar, a city south of Sarajevo, and in only six weeks, the Serb army and paramilitaries gained control of a majority of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.27
Although the capital of Sarajevo also endured fierce fighting, its fate was not so quickly determined. On April 6, 1992, the day Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognized as independent by the European Union, Serb paramilitary forces once again set up barricades in Sarajevo. As before, thousands of Bosnians from all national groups took to the streets. But this time, the Serb forces opened fire on the civilians, with deadly results. This was the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, a grueling three- and-a-half-year ordeal that pitted a well-armed Serb army against a rel- atively defenseless urban and mixed ethnoreligious (but predominantly Muslim) population.28
In May, Milosevic and the Montenegrin government announced the creation of a new federal state of Yugoslavia (made up of their two republics, Serbia and Montenegro). Milosevic withdrew the JNA sol- diers from Bosnia and Herzegovinia who were citizens of the new Yugoslav state, leaving behind eighty-thousand loyal and well-armed eth- nic Bosnian Serb soldiers. Under General Mladic (personally chosen by Milosevic), this Serb army carried out a campaign of mass killings of civilians, using concentration camps, systematic rape, and the forced dis- placement of millions as daily tactics. Quickly, they created the largest flow of refugees in Europe since World War II.29
In this atmosphere of violence, hostilities were not limited to Serbian attacks against Bosniaks and Croats. Some Bosniak paramilitary units
and Croat groups took the law into their own hands and began attacking innocent Serbs. Atrocities were committed on all sides, with more than two hundred thousand Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats estimated to have been killed by the end of the war.30
Meanwhile, beginning with the establishment of the Croat commu- nity of Herceg-Bosna in July 1992, nationalist pressures from Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), and from Croats inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, increasingly pitted Croats and Bosniaks against each other in western and central parts of the country. Croatian President Tudjman put great pressure on the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina to enter into a confederation with Croatia.31
By October, Bosnian Croat leaders had given up all pretext of an alliance with the Bosnia and Herzegovina government. Instead, they began to implement a plan to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina between Croat and Serb nationalists. Large-scale fighting between Bosniaks and Croats followed in early 1993, when both ethnoreligious communities sought to solidify the territories under their control and influence the map-drawing process of the developing Vance-Owen Peace Plan, which split Bosnia and Herzegovina into autonomous provinces defined by regional ethnic labels. Bosniak/Croat fighting throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina left ethnically cleansed regions, an enormous number of refugees, and the infamous Croat concentration camps. Bosnia and Herzegovina was being pushed toward destruction.32 It would take the
intense involvement of the international community to bring about a workable plan to end the conflict.
International Actors
As the war loomed over Yugoslavia, the international community res- ponded guardedly. One reason was a widely held perception in the West, during the summer of 1991, that conflict in the Balkans was inevitable and that nothing could be gained by becoming entangled in the region’s internal affairs. The Soviet Union had collapsed in Decem- ber of that year, bringing nearly a half-century Cold War to an end. Furthermore, given that Bosnia and Herzegovina was in Europe’s back- yard, the U.S. government believed that Europeans should handle the problem.
The actions that the international community did take were often not helpful. For example, the September 1991 decision of the UN Secu- rity Council to impose an arms embargo on Yugoslavia actually rein- forced an existing military imbalance between Serb and non-Serb units
in Bosnia and Herzegovina, because Serbia controlled the majority of the weaponry of the former Yugoslav Federal Army.33 Similarly, the West’s
hurried decisions to extend diplomatic recognition to Slovenia (June 25, 1991) and Croatia (January 15, 1992) and then to Bosnia and Herzegovina (April 6, 1992)34unintentionally contributed to the destabilization of the
region.
When the United Nations sent peacekeeping forces, its efforts were woefully understaffed and relegated throughout much of the war to mon- itoring arms supplies and troop movements, and to protecting aid con- voys and international troops. As such, the UN’s attempts to establish so-called safe havens in mid-1993 proved largely ineffective. The conse- quences were tragic. Over the ensuing years, entire communities were “cleansed” of Bosniak and Croat civilians while United Nations troops were temporarily detained by Serb forces.35
As the death toll mounted, calls for international military intervention became more vociferous. Graphic media coverage of mortar attacks on civilians in besieged cities, most notably Sarajevo, and Serb-run deten- tion camps in northern Bosnia began to galvanize Western public opinion against the Serbs, but not against the Croats whose war crimes went less