The War in Former Yugoslavia and Religion

Abstract

IIt is a legitimate, intriguing and urgent challenge to contemporary sociological research to enquire into the role of religion in the Yugoslav crisis. The question involves more than simply the relationship between religion and war: it involves the earlier and wider question of the role of religion in deepening social divisions and cleavages until they reach the point of fracture and in exacerbating social conflicts until they reach maximum incandescence. It also involves the question of the rela­ tionship of religious confessions to each other, and to the otherness of the others, in an area with mixed population, muIticonfessional, multinational and multicultural. Two fundamental a priori objections may of course be made to asking the question at all. Firstly, some will point out that the war has been characterised as a religious one by the propaganda apparatus of one or other of the conflicting parties with the purely propagandistic aim of concealing the real nature of the war and creating (at least) confusion in international public opinion. It is more or less obvious, however, that this war has not been a religious war. It is evidently a political war, caused by politi­ cal strategies which since the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis have been on a colli­ sion course. It is a war which fully confirms the well-known formula of Klausewitz that war is but a continuation of politics by other means. However, this does not mean that religion has nothing to do with the war. It is also more or less obvious that the three major confessions of the region, Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, have all been implicated and involved in the conflict in some way and to some degree. Here we see an analogy with the civil war in Lebanon and the chronic conflict in Northern Ireland. In both these cases the wars have not been 'religious' in terms of the classical definition of a 'holy war'; I but at the same time it has been obvious that religion has not been a purely passive onlooker but has been actively engaged in the conflict. Consequently at an impressionistic level the assertions of F. Vreg sound a convincing note: Amongst the demons of destruction of the processes of cultural rapproche­ ment in the European area have been not only growing ethnicism, which frequently turns into the malignant tumour of nationalism, but also reli­ gious mysticism. We have seen a brutal eruption not only of national feel­ ings with their political symbols, but of religious feelings and symbols too, and this has been wrongly understood as a religious rebirth. Croatian soldiers wear not only HDZ badges, but Catholic crosses too; Serbian soldiers do not carry photographs of Milo~evic but Orthodox crosses. Muslim fundamentalists and mujaheddins kill under the slogan of Allah.