Europe's scrambled egg
Broun, Janice
BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA EUROPE'S SCRAMBLED EGG MODERN, MODERATE MUSLIMS Bosnia-Herzegovina has been variously described as an ethnic cocktail, a scrambled egg, and a patchwork quilt. It is the only...
...Much ink has been spilt on the major protagonists of the Yugoslav civil war, the Serbs and Croats...
...Although such developments scare the majority of Bosnia's Westernized Muslims, Islam could become a rallying force in a rapidly disintegrating society...
...The post-Tito decade was an uneasy one for Bosnian religious activists, Muslim and Christian alike...
...As Rajko Dukiv, a Bosnian Serb, put it not long before the recent escalation of hostilities, "If the Gordian knot of Bosnia is not untied to the satisfaction of all three communities, we'll have another Beirut...
...It is the only former Yugoslav republic where no single ethnic group dominates...
...Neither the Austrians nor the Serbs who dominated interwar Yugoslavia tried to alleviate the chronic poverty of Bosnia's peasants...
...All are fellow Slays and all speak Serbo-Croat...
...Traditionally, they have been flexible pragmatists who, in contrast to Serbs and Croats, have preferred skillful bargaining and negotiations to brandishing a gun...
...A further sinister development is that houses of worship are now becoming targets for fire bombs, and militant Ustasas and Cetniks have resurfaced...
...As a result of centuries during which its Muslims, Serbs, and Croats generally existed in remarkable peace, intermarriage has been common...
...The real divisions among Bosnian's are cultural and religious differences that stem from Bosnia's history, its terrain of isolated river basins, and its geopolitical position as a cockpit for national and religious rivalry...
...But they perpetuated injustice to such an extent that World War I was sparked there...
...While international recognition of independent Bosnia may now preclude that radical eventuality, the ongoing civil war might wreck Bosnian hopes for a permanent multiethnic peace in Bosnia and throw its relatively defenseless Muslim rump into the arms of militant Islamic forces, within or without...
...The Serbs were the first victims, but every group—Serbian Cetniks, pro-Axis Muslims, and Tito's partisans—wreaked vengeance on each other...
...But the majority of Bosnian Muslims have been moderate, even irenic...
...Their suspicions that Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and Croat President Franjo Tudjman want to carve up most of Bosnia between themselves may be well-founded...
...In Bosnia, resurgent Islam is rapidly filling the vacuum left by communism...
...When Bosnia fell to the Ottoman Empire (1463), Islam found ready converts among the Bogomils, whose nobles were allowed to retain their lands...
...If the Serbs were to be believed and experience has taught outsiders to take most of their allegations with a pinch of salt—the Balkan Orthodox nations (Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Greeks) are being threatened by a resurgence of militant Islam...
...In 1970, he enhanced Muslim status by recognizing "Muslim" as a distinct nationality, Yugoslavia's third largest, and Muslims came to enjoy greater tolerance than in any other Communist state...
...But they have a shadow side too...
...Despite this, state atheism and secularism reduced the proportion of practicing Muslims in Bosnia to below 40 percent...
...Doctor Alia lzetbegovic, Bosnia's first democratically elected president, is in this tradition...
...But with the fall of communism, religious freedom and access to the media were granted...
...Now that the Muslims have been drawn inexorably into the cataclysm, it is vital that outsiders understand their predicament...
...Muslims suffered atrocities at the hands of both Croat Ustasas and Serb Cetniks...
...Although they are in alliance with the Croats against the Serbs, they don't completely trust them...
...It became a stronghold of the medieval Commonweal 8 May 1992: 5 dualist heresy Bogomilism, whose members suffered intense persecution from the Catholic church...
...In the eighteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs invited the Serbs to defend their frontier against the Turks, and in 1878, Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...Traditionally, Croats and Muslims were closer to each other than to the Serbs...
...JANICE BROUN Janice Broun is Eastern Europe correspondent for News Network International...
...Tito (1892-1980), Yugoslavia's charismatic Communist leader, recognizing the necessity of counterbalancing escalating tensions between Serbs and Croats, created a Muslim power base in Bosnia...
...A Muslim and an academic, one of his chief concerns before the war was how Muslims should adapt to modem democratic European pluralist societies...
...It is all too simple to attribute the disturbances to so-called Muslim fundamentalism...
...Unlike Yugoslavia's other major Muslim group, the Albanians, Bosnian Muslims are not a despised, barely literate people speaking an alien tongue and out-breeding everyone else...
...Its hard-line government overreacted and imprisoned, among others, Izetbegovic and Franciscans associated with Medjugorje...
...Of its 4.3 million people, 44 percent are Muslim Slay s, 31 percent Orthodox and Serb, and 17 percent Catholic and Croat...
...They built as many mosques as there are Orthodox and Catholic churches...
...They are an integral element in Bosnian society, and thanks to fiscal benefits enjoyed under the Ottomans, come from more prosperous backgrounds than Bosnia's Christians...
...Muslims feel doubly vulnerable...
...The British journalist Nick Thorpe found Bosnians the most open, kind people in Eastern Europe...
...During World War II, Bosnia was annexed by a Nazi puppet Croatia whose genocidal Catholic Ustasa government perpetrated unspeakable atrocities...
...While enlightened Muslim leaders like the dynamic Hadj Jakub Selimowski and Bosnia's largest political party—the Muslim Party for Democratic Action—deny Serb allegations that they intend to undermine the secular state, five hundred of the country's three thousand imams have demanded the reintroduction of traditional Islamic codes regarding schools and the role of women...
...6: 8 May 1992 Commonweal...
...In prewar Yugoslavia, they became masters of coalition politics...
...Sarajevo had the only Muslim theological faculty in Europe...
...Bosnia lies athwart the crucial historical and religious "fault line" between Byzantine Eastern and Latin Western Christendom that cleaves the Balkan Peninsula from northeast to southwest...
...So complex is their distribution that the present civil war in Bosnia is even more tragic than the war in Croatia...
...Muslims also benefited from the contacts Tito built with Middle Eastern states...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 9
