The International Institute For MiddleEast And Balkan Studies (IFIMES)

the international institute for middle-east and balkan studies (ifimes) in ljubljana, slovenia, regularly analyses events in the mid

The International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan Studies
(IFIMES) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses events in the
Middle East and the Balkans. Dr. Robert J. Donia, President of the
Council of the International Institute IFIMES and Professor at the
University of Michigan, in his article "Nationalism and Religious
Extremism in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo since 1990" explores the
structural complexity of the relation between nationalism and
religion. He points out that religious communities have been stalking
horses for nationalism and have found little reason, other than direct
challenges to their own jurisdiction, to curb extremism in their own
ranks. His article is here published in its entirety.
Dr. Robert J. Donia
President of the Council of the International Institute IFIMES and
Professor at the University of Michigan
Nationalism and Religious Extremism
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo since 1990
When nationalists superseded the ruling communists in the lands of the
former Yugoslavia in 1990, religious believers were freed from the few
remaining constraints to practice their faith. Many in the West hoped
that the post-communist denizens of democracy would allow religious
freedom while simultaneously building secular, democratic states free
from the partisan influences of organized religion. Those hopes went
unfulfilled. It soon became apparent that leaders of religious
communities in Southeast Europe yearned for political influence in
addition to their spiritual duties. Religious leaders have since
proven to be among the most stalwart partisans of nationalism and in
some cases have emerged as major threats to stability and barriers to
reconciliation.
In this essay I will review the historical evolution and contemporary
state of relations between nationalism and the religious communities
of Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the post-socialist era, focusing
on the former Yugoslav areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. I argue
that faith has been an invaluable handmaiden to nationalists in
acquiring and retaining political power, but that religious
communities have consistently acted subordinately to nationalist
political parties in both lands. Religious communities have been
stalking horses for nationalism and have found little reason, other
than direct challenges to their own jurisdiction, to curb extremism in
their own ranks.
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovoi
Since 1990, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo have shared a progression of
historical developments: nationalist political mobilization, forcible
spatial segregation along ethnic lines, ethnic cleansing and genocide,
armed conflict, negotiated peace agreements, international supervisory
regimes, rampant corruption, and the gradual but alarming introduction
of Islamic fundamentalism. Although the violent breakup of Yugoslavia
began with armed conflict in Slovenia and Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina
and Kosovo have suffered the most in the wars accompanying
Yugoslavia’s demise. The peoples of both areas have experienced the
complex interaction of faith and nation since the waning days of
Yugoslavia’s existence.
Both areas are home to populations of mixed national and religious
identity, but their populations differ substantially. Serbs inhabit
both areas, but in neither area are they the dominant group. As of
1991 (the last year of a full census in either area), Albanians made
up 82% of Kosovo’s population of 1,954,747, Serbs made up 10%, and a
scattering of other groups accounted for the remaining 8%.ii In
Bosnia-Herzegovina, unlike in Kosovo, no single nation commanded an
absolute majority. Of 4,354,911 inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17%
were Croats (generally associated with Catholicism), 31% were Serbs
(generally associated with Serbian Orthodoxy), 44% were Bosnian
Muslims (generally associated with Islam), and the remaining 8%
consisted of Yugoslavs and “Others.” In 1993, to prevent being
mistaken for simply a religious community, leaders of the Bosnian
Muslims voted to change their group’s name to “Bosniak,” the term used
hereafter in this essay. International organizations accepted the new
designation over the next few years, bringing closure to the group’s
quest to achieve formal recognition as a secular nationality that had
begun in Yugoslavia in the 1960s.
Religion and Popular Mobilization in Late Socialist Yugoslavia
In the 1980s, political entrepreneurs turned to mass mobilization to
override systemic dysfunction and gridlock in post-Tito Yugoslavia.
Albanian students in Kosovo organized strikes and demonstrations in
1981. Throughout the 1980s, syndicates sponsored a growing number of
strikes and brought workers’ grievances directly to the authorities by
organizing demonstrations in republic capitals. Political
entrepreneurs were not far behind the students and workers. Slobodan
Milošević, fresh from a victory over rivals in the League of
Communists of Serbia, organized serial demonstrations known as the
“anti-bureaucratic revolution” in 1988-1989 by focusing discontent on
the alleged plight of Serbs in Kosovo.iii
Mobilization in this pre-democratic era was opportunistic and
instrumental: Political entrepreneurs convened gatherings to focus
inchoate popular discontent on specific causes and thereby gain the
loyalty of previously mute constituencies. Milošević aroused Serbs
with tales of Serb oppression at the hands of Albanians in Kosovo, but
he bused demonstrators to two locations that had nothing to do with
Kosovo: Podgorica and Novi Sad, the capitals of Montenegro and
Vojvodina, respectively, each of which held one vote on the
eight-member Yugoslav federal presidency. After passing constitutional
amendments in March 1989 that revoked the autonomy of Kosovo and
Vojvodina, Milošević imposed a police state on Kosovo. He flooded
Kosovo with Serbian security forces and dismissed most Albanians
employed in the social sector, replacing them with Serbs or Roma.
The Serbian Orthodox Church helped advance Milošević’s agenda with its
own mobilization campaigns that paralleled the anti-bureaucratic
revolution. The church used these campaigns to accentuate its
self-assigned role as the creator and custodian of all that was
precious to Serbs.iv In 1989, church officials removed the earthly
remains of Prince Lazar, Serbian hero of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo,
from the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Belgrade and paraded
his remains on a tour of Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Serbia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.v The procession served to
link the secular and religious cores of Serbianism – Belgrade and
Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo – with peripheral Serb
communities in Yugoslavia’s “near abroad.”vi In a second mobilization,
in summer 1991 the remains of Serb victims of the Second World War
were exhumed from caves in Herzegovina and reburied in Belgrade. Like
Lazar’s funeral procession, the reburials served to bring the Serb
periphery back into contact with its spiritual and political centers.
In both campaigns, the church reasserted its historical role as a
reservoir of Serb symbols and proponent of the political unification
of all Serbs.
Serbian Orthodox Church leaders in Serbia and Kosovo embraced Serbia’s
drive to reassert political and military authority in Kosovo. Based on
Serbian Orthodox monasteries built in Kosovo in the Middle Ages,
church officials argued that Kosovo was the church’s spiritual
capital, and that a state church such as theirs could never allow its
center to be in a foreign land. With these and other convergences of
political and religious interests, the Serbian Orthodox Church acted
in the 1990s as a critical but subordinate actor in Serb nationalism
in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia.
The South Slavs: Religious Loyalties and National Identity
By the 1840s, nationalism among South Slavs had begun to develop
irreversibly along religious fault lines. Among Christian communities,
church and nation were closely linked. The Catholic Church and its
high officials were major players in Croatian nationalism, and the
Serbian Orthodox Church promoted Serb nationalist goals. Following the
nineteenth century historical pattern, but under very different
circumstances, political organizers in the 1990s looked to the church
to help reanimate Serb culture and advance political claims. Radovan
Karadžić, the first president of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS –
Srpska demokratska stranka) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, complained that
Serb culture had atrophied under communism, particularly “where the
Serbian Orthodox Church was unable to carry out its activities,” so it
would “take some time for Serbs to become true Serbs in a] cultural
and political sense, in areas where the Church was not permitted (to
function).”vii Founders of the SDS called for “cooperation with the
Serbian Orthodox Church and its equal inclusion in the life of the
Serb people.”viii
Like the Bosnian Serbs, Bosniak leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina formed
one dominant nationalist party in 1990 to compete in the multiparty
elections held in November of that year. They identified their new
organization, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA – Stranka
demokratske akcije) as a “party of citizens and peoples of the Muslim
cultural-historical circle.”ix Much like the Bosnian Serbs of the SDS,
they embraced democracy, denounced communism, and rejoiced at the “end
of a (single) party monopoly and its result, a party state.” SDA party
leaders did not specifically mention the Islamic community in their
party’s program, but they called for “complete freedom of activity for
all religions in Yugoslavia and full autonomy of their religious
communities” and demanded “return of seized property of religious
communities and their institution (vakufs and endowments).” They also
requested the availability of “food in the army, hospitals and jails
in accord with religious regulations for citizen-believers.”x The
party supported “maintaining Yugoslavia as a free community of
sovereign nations and republics within existing federal boundaries”
and urged respect for the integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina and for the
“national particularities of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims.”xi The
program explicitly supported a democratic state and contained nothing
to indicate sympathy for the staples of Islamic fundamentalism such as
forming an Islamic state or implementing Islamic legal codes in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The election campaigns of 1990 brought together the secular and
religious leaders of each major nationality in campaigns to lead their
communities and oppose the reformed communist parties. Nationalists
resurrected religious and national symbols that had been taboo under
socialism, infused old symbols with new meanings, and invented some
new ones. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, religious officials lent support to
the nationalist parties. Hodžas and muftis rallied Muslims to vote for
the SDA, headed by Alija Izetbegović. Most Franciscans in Herzegovina,
and many Catholic priests, supported the HDZ (Croatian Democratic
Union – Hrvatska demokratska zajednica). Orthodox priests supported
Serb nationalist parties, and many ended up supporting Karadžić and
the SDS.
Albanians: Religious Divisions and National Unity
The Albanians of Kosovo emerged from communism with a profile
different from the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. Unlike the South
Slavs, whose national divisions developed along religious fault lines
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Albanians in the late
nineteenth century articulated themselves as a single, unified nation
of those who spoke the Albanian language whatever their religious
affiliation. Albanians necessarily embraced religious diversity as
part of their drive to define their national identity. They respected
but superseded the differences that separated Muslims, Catholics, and
Orthodox. Whereas Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks drew heavily upon
religion and religious traditions to strengthen their respective
national identities, Albanians stood the risk of being divided by
recourse to religion. Additionally, Albanians became increasingly
secularized in the twentieth century, particularly in urban areas and
particularly during the decades of communist rule. One might therefore
expect that Albanian nationalists would be disinclined to ally with
religious communities.
However, Albanians in Kosovo are almost all Muslims by faith or
religious heritage: only a few thousand are Catholic by religion, and
there are no Orthodox Albanians to speak of in Kosovo. Therefore,
despite Albanians’ religious pluralism and secularism, the Islamic
community within Kosovo is mostly an Albanian institution, and it
stalwartly supports Albanian nationalist values. Its leaders attach
great importance to building and rebuilding mosques, and they see
themselves as protectors of those few Albanians living in enclaves in
the Serb-majority northern area of Mitrovica. For all the secularism
among urban Albanians in Kosovo, the Islamic community is still a
significant pillar of Albanian nationalism.
In their choice of national heroes, Albanians have demonstrated that
religious belief is welcome in Albanian patriots. Albanians highlight
two figures as avatars of their national values: Skandarbeg, the 16th
century hero of Albanian resistance to Ottoman invaders, and Mother
Teresa, a Nobel Prize-winning 20th century Albanian born in Skopje,
Macedonia.xii These two figures together validate religious diversity
within Albanian culture while highlighting qualities considered
essential to Albanian national identity. Skandarbeg’s personal history
demonstrates the pre-eminence of Albanian identity over religious
affiliation. Born a Catholic, he converted to Islam and become a
general in the Ottoman Army, but he defected to lead an Albanian
uprising against the Ottomans and returned to the Christian faith. He
is consistently portrayed as a dominant male and a fierce warrior,
while Mother Theresa appears as humble, obedient, and compassionate.
Representations of Skanderbeg are typically monumental, while Mother
Teresa is usually portrayed in life-size statues, diminutive in
comparison to the fierce, imposing images of Skandarbeg.
Like the three major nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albanians in
Kosovo rallied around a single charismatic leader and a single
dominant political party as free elections approached, but religion
was less influential among Kosovar Albanians. Ibrahim Rugova, a
highly-regarded scholar, literary critic, and president of the League
of Writers of Kosovo, became president of the Democratic League of
Kosovo (LDK - Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës) when it was formed in
December 1989 and dominated the party until his death in 2006. When
Milošević’s security forces turned Albania into a Serb-controlled
police state, the pacifistically-inclined Rugova led Kosovar Albanians
in creating a parallel or “shadow” state that educated Albanian youth
and provided basic medical and administrative services to the majority
Albanian population. At a time when other nationalists in the former
Yugoslavia were acquiring arms in preparation for war, the Albanian
parallel state was the most humane and least confrontational response
to nationalist rivalry in the region. The parallel Albanian state
functioned with greater or lesser effect for nine years, but it failed
to produce results among foreign diplomats and policy-makers in ways
achieved by armed nationalists elsewhere in the region. With little
international attention on the plight of Kosovar Albanians under
Milošević’s rule, Rugova and the LDK found themselves challenged in
the latter half of the 1990s by Kosovar Albanians who favored
resisting Serb security forces by violent means.
Religion and National Mobilization in War
War came to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 and to Kosovo in 1999. The
causes and nature of those wars is beyond the scope of this paper, but
it should be noted that in both wars, the Serbian government based in
Belgrade, either directly or indirectly, supported violent campaigns
to kill and expel non-Serbs. Religious communities were vital
contributors to the war efforts of their respective national
movements. Even before war began, each nationalist party in
Bosnia-Herzegovina was compelled to seek outside support in manpower
and materiel in the life-and-death struggle for territory. From summer
1991 to winter 1995, the parties mobilized people and materiel for the
primary purpose of fighting more effectively. Serbia provided as much
as 90% of the financial resources for the Army of Republika Srpska
(VRS – Vojska Republike Srpske); Croatia provided the Croatian Defense
Council (HVO - Hrvatske vijeće obrane) with command and staff
expertise, particularly in the 1995 campaigns that drove Serb forces
from Croatia.
The Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ARBiH - Armija
Republike Bosne i Hercegovine), capitalizing on the huge number of
Bosniak refugees and displaced persons driven from their homes by Serb
and Croat armed forces, was the most successful recruiter among the
military forces. Nevertheless, the ARBiH accepted several thousand
foreign Muslim fighters in its ranks. Most were Arabic speakers from
countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and many had honed
their fighting skills in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation in
the 1980s. The “mujahedin,” as they became known, were only nominally
under control of the ARBiH for much of the war, and their atrocities
against civilians led to charges of war crimes against their
commanders. Most never blended into Bosnian society, but several
hundred mujahedin married Bosniak women and acquired Bosnian
passports. In violation of the Dayton Agreement, several hundred
remained in Bosnia after the war, living mainly in villages from which
Bosnian Serbs had fled or been expelled.
Bosnians of all nations attach great significance to houses of worship
as symbolic manifestations of their national identity and claims to
residence. In wartime, armed nationalists attacked mosques and
churches with the intent of destroying the national symbols of other
national groups. Bosnian Serb nationalists, in pursuing their plan to
establish an ethnically pure state and wipe out traces of other
groups, destroyed most mosques in areas they controlled, leaving the
territory of the Republika Srpska largely devoid of Islamic religious
structures. Croatian forces destroyed many mosques and some Serbian
Orthodox institutions, most notably the defenseless Žitomislići
Serbian Orthodox Monastery. Only Bosniaks undertook no systematic
campaign to destroy others’ houses of worship. The Serbian Orthodox
Church in Srebrenica, a town that became a haven for thousands of
Bosniak refugees and was besieged by Serb forces through much of the
war, remained intact and undamaged, while the historic White Mosque
only a hundred meters away was annihilated once Serb nationalists
conquered the city. The New Serbian Orthodox Church in Sarajevo was
damaged, not by Bosniaks who had access to it for four years, but by
Serb nationalist snipers who shot out most of the windows in its
cupola. It would later be restored with the financial assistance of
the government of Greece.
The Bosnian war relegated to oblivion the less violent struggle in
Kosovo between Serbian security forces and the LDK-sponsored
underground state. When the international community failed to address
Kosovar Albanian grievances at peace talks in Dayton in Fall 1995,
Albanians in Kosovo began to doubt the efficacy of non-violent
resistance as a strategy to draw international attention to their
grievances. The implosion of the Albanian government in 1997 (owing to
the collapse of a pyramid scheme) left that country’s armories
unguarded, and hundreds of thousands of weapons came available to
Kosovar Albanians. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA; Albanian UÇK –
Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës) was founded in 1993 but remained an
embryonic assemblage of warriors until 1997, when its members launched
sporadic attacks on Serbian policemen and police stations with the
benefit of donations from abroad and arms from the arsenals of
Albania. Serbian security forces reacted harshly to KLA attacks by
retaliating against Albanian civilians, wiping out an entire clan in
1998 and entire villages in early 1999.
Neither the LDK nor the KLA’s political wing, the Democratic Party of
Kosovo (PDK – Partia Demokratike e Kosovës) had any use for Islamic
fundamentalism, as some ideologues posing as “experts” have
irresponsibly alleged.xiii On the contrary, the increasingly violent
confrontation between Milošević’s thugs and the KLA was a hauntingly
familiar early warning to western policy-makers of a possible
Milošević-inspired ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Serbs. US and
European diplomats demanded that Milošević withdraw his forces from
Kosovo and allow international peacekeepers to supervise the province.
When he refused, NATO undertook aerial assaults that struck targets in
Kosovo and elsewhere in the Republic of Serbia. Milošević retaliated
with a vengeance, unleashing Serbian security forces to drive over
half the Albanian population from Kosovo in a matter of weeks. At the
same time, the KLA made gains in their fighting against Serbian
security forces. After 78 days of NATO bombing attacks and Serbian
ethnic cleansing, Milošević capitulated and concluded a peace
agreement. Security Council Resolution 1244, passed on June 10, 1999,
cleared the way for Kosovo to be administered by UNMIK (United Nations
Interim Mission in Kosovo) while maintaining the legal fiction that
Kosovo was a province of Serbia.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Neither the Bosnian nor the Kosovo conflict was a religious war, but
religious symbols were seen by many actors as targets worthy of
destruction. Serbian security forces in Kosovo destroyed hundreds of
mosques during the 78 day war, and after a cease-fire was declared and
Serbian security forces withdrew, armed Albanians destroyed large
numbers of Serbian Orthodox churches and institutions. The campaigns
of destruction brought the Islamic and Serbian Orthodox religious
communities into closer alignment (if that was possible) with their
respective national movements.
Symbolic Sublimation: Continuation of Conflict by Other Means
The nationalist parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo emerged from
war more powerful than ever. They sought to continue fueling
interethnic tensions and inducing fear in their own followers, but
were forbidden by peace agreements and international peacekeepers from
waging war. Instead, they and their religious communities diverted
their efforts into symbolic interethnic rivalry, a process I call
“symbolic sublimation.” Religious leaders revived old holidays and
declared new ones on occasions of key battles and landmark dates in
the state-forming narrative. They raised money to reconstruct
destroyed churches and mosques, and religious communities engaged in
what my colleague Andras Riedlmayer refers to as the “space race.”
Altitude – having the tallest manmade structure within view – equates
to symbolic supremacy in this race, which thrives on contending
symbols within visual proximity of one another. In Kosovo, some
memorialism is secular, centered on monuments to victims of Serb
oppression and those who served in the KLA, but as in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, many houses of worship have been restored or built
anew by the Islamic community or the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Driven by imperatives of symbolic sublimation, Bosniak nationalist
leaders deepened their dependence on external aid in the post-war
years. Islamic countries took turns financing the building and
rebuilding of hundreds of mosques, first in the Muslim-majority areas
of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and then (after the dawn of
the new century) in areas where Serbs and Croats had expelled Bosniaks
in the war of 1992-1995. Most mosques have been constructed or
reconstructed in a modern style imported from the Middle East, with
sleek lines, synthetic building materials, and towering minarets. The
new mosques and cultural centers stand in stark visual contrast to the
wood-and-stone simplicity of traditional Ottoman-inspired mosques.
Many Bosnians resent the mosques’ obvious architectural message of
subordination to foreign Islamic interests. But most Bosniaks also see
mosques as visual embodiments of their community’s claim to inhabit
the land, and rebuilt mosques have contributed to a sense among
Bosniak refugees and displaced persons that it was safe to return to
their former homes. Refugees and displaced persons have returned in
substantial numbers to many areas in the Republika Srpska from which
they were expelled, but rarely without reconstructing a destroyed
mosque or constructing one anew.
Islamic Fundamentalism
With Bosniaks relying on funds from other Islamic states to rebuild
mosques and schools, the authorities of some of those states have
exploited Bosniaks’ dependence to promote the spread of Islamic
fundamentalism, principally through sponsoring the movement known in
the periodical press as Wahhabism. Only a small percentage of Wahhabis
are committed to using violence, but they include many converts who
sympathize with the use of violence by others. Even with the aid of
powerful state sponsors, Wahhabis have failed to win more than a few
thousand converts in Southeast Europe. Most informed observers agree
that they number somewhere in the low thousands in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and in the hundreds in Kosovo, so we may dismiss the wildly
speculative allegations that almost all Muslims in the region have
turned to fundamentalist beliefs. In both Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Kosovo, Wahhabis are socially ostracized and politically marginalized.
The vast majority of Bosniaks and Kosovar Muslim Albanians are
dismayed by the very sight of Wahhabis, recognizable by their shaved
heads, untrimmed beards, and short pants.
The Wahhabist movement is essentially an aggressive recruitment
campaign led from Islamic centers in Vienna and several Middle Eastern
Arab countries. Wahhabis have won control of several schools and
mosques in a number of towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is tempting to
see new and rebuilt Middle Eastern style mosques as manifestations of
Wahhabism, but Wahhabis have intruded into only a few such mosques,
leaving the correlation between modern mosque architecture and
Wahhabist influence subject to doubt. Many Bosniaks, fearful that
Wahhabism will weaken and discredit their traditions, have
increasingly challenged the Wahhabi presence in their land. Most
Albanian nationalists in Kosovo likewise abhor Wahhabism as alien to
their national character and fear that it will crush their hopes for
integration into Europe.
After years of acquiescence to fundamentalists’ inroads into mosques,
schools, and cultural centers, the Islamic community of
Bosnia-Herzegovina began in early 2007 to confront Wahhabis directly.
In January 2007, Wahhabis in the northeast Bosnian town of Kalesija
attempted to take over a local mosque but were driven out by local
Bosniak believers. Leading the Wahhabis was a native of Kalesija,
Jusuf Barčić, who had left Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, studied
in Saudi Arabia, and returned in 1996 dedicated to spreading
Wahhabism.
In February 2007 Barčić sought to enter Sarajevo’s monumental Gazi
Husrevbeg mosque, built in the seventeenth century and valued by all
Bosniaks as a central institution of their faith. Traditionalists
physically contested Barčić’s entry, and the Sarajevo Cantonal police
were called to separate the contending factions. Sadrudin Iserić, imam
of the Gazi Husrevbeg mosque, voiced widely-held Bosniak views in
announcing that Wahhabis would no longer be allowed to use the mosque
for lectures: “The people are frightened, and already there are those
who stay away from prayers on Thursday to avoid meeting them. All that
we have accomplished for 600 years they now want to destroy.”xiv
On Thursday, February 22, 2007, the Wahhabis again attempted to gather
in the Gazi Husrevbeg mosque but were confined to the courtyard, where
they held a service and lecture observed by more reporters (about 50)
than followers (around 20).xv Barčić railed against the Muslim
establishment, criticized the Islamic community for departing from the
true teachings of Islam, demanded the implementation of sheriat law in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and implicitly threatened to form a parallel
Islamic community dedicated to Wahhabist beliefs.
Barčić was a reckless driver with a lengthy history of traffic
violations. According to some journalists’ reports, his driving record
derived from his rejection of all civil authority, including traffic
regulations, and he routinely ran red lights. On March 30 he lost
control of the Mazda he was driving and ran headlong into a light post
just outside the eastern Bosnian town of Tuzla. He died a few hours
later of head injuries sustained in the crash. An estimated 3,000
Wahhabis came from near and far to attend his funeral in Tuzla and
turned the occasion into a rally for their cause. Some mourners
skirmished with police, who were unprepared to handle such a large
crowd. Barčić’s truncated career as a Wahhabist gadfly thus evoked a
greater response on his death than during his life and served mainly
to bring Wahhabism sharply into public focus. The Islamic community
reacted belatedly to Wahhabism, more in response to threats to its own
power than to Bosniaks’ near-universal revulsion to Muslim
fundamentalism.
On April 17, less than three weeks after Barčić’s funeral, police in
the Republic of Serbia raided a small camp of Wahhabis in the Sandžak
region, home to tens of thousands of Serbia’s Bosniak minority. The
police arrested three men but failed to locate a fourth member of the
group. Three days later, Serbian security forces surrounded a small
house occupied by four Wahhabis, including the fugitive from their
previous raid. The house’s occupants opened fire on the police, who
killed the group’s leader Prentić, injured another, and saw one of
their own slightly wounded. Only three weeks before the killing, the
Kosovo Police Service had issued a warrant for Ismail Prentić, brother
of the slain Wahhabi leader, for smuggling weapons across the
administrative boundary between Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia. The
episode thus highlighted the Wahhabist movement’s cross-boundary
linkages. Sandžak Mufti Muamer Zukorlić estimated that there were 150
Wahhabis in the Sandžak, of whom “fifteen to thirty are problematic,”
that is, violence-prone.xvi He noted that the Sandžak Wahhabis looked
to Bosnian Wahhabis as their leaders and organizers.
The response to the attacks demonstrated the Islamic community’s
contempt for violence-prone Wahhabis. Tellingly, no Bosniak leader
publicly defended the Wahhabis after the Serbian police attack,
although several used the incident to blame Albanian radicalization on
maltreatment by Serbian security forces. Imam Zukorlić alleged that
Serbian security forces had instigated the Wahhabi challenges to the
established Islamic community of Serbia, and Social Democratic leader
Rasim Ljajić highlighted the “irrationality and futility of their
alleged mission.”xvii Although they did not endorse the Serbian police
raid, neither secular Bosniaks nor leaders of the Islamic community
identified with those attacked, arrested, or killed in the raids.
Wahhabis have also made advances in Kosovo, but as in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, they are socially ostracized, despised by most
Kosovars and the governing political parties, and operate outside the
indigenous Islamic community. In December 2006 I visited Kosovo and
interviewed local political and religious leaders. In one interview, I
asked a group of Albanian veterans of the 1999 war if they had Islamic
fundamentalists in their midst. No, they emphatically replied. They
told me of two houses in the town of Gjilan where foreign Islamic
radicals and their local converts lived. These radicals could be
identified by their long beards and short pants. They attracted
converts mainly by offering courses in foreign languages, particularly
English, to Kosovar Albanians. Two of the interviewees told me of male
acquaintances who had taken English lessons, delved into religious
instruction, begun sporting beards, and eventually disappeared
altogether, presumably to join Islamic radicals fighting in
Afghanistan or Iraq. My interviewees viewed this as a tragedy; they
expressed fears that such recruitment would spread. They emphasized
that Albanian nationalists detest Islamic radicalism and fear its
potential to send Albanians off to foreign wars as well as to threaten
tranquility at home.
Serbian Orthodoxy
In the era of symbolic sublimation, the Serbian Orthodox Church has
continued to be a central actor in advancing Serb nationalism. As
Serbs in the Republic of Serbia have become consumed with the issue of
Kosovo’s future, high church officials have continued to highlight
their case for keeping Kosovo’s patrimonial sites under the
jurisdiction of the Serbian state. Vladika Vasilije Kačavenda of the
Zvornik-Tuzla Episcopate in Bosnia-Herzegovina left his headquarters
in Tuzla in 1992 for the Bosnian Serb-controlled town of Bijeljina and
built a palatial residence on Bosniak-owned land.xviii
Since moving to Bijeljina, Kačavenda has made a career of building
churches in his Episcopate on Bosniak-owned land and has succeeded in
getting legislation introduced in the Republika Srpska legalizing such
appropriations.xix He has publicly denounced a prominent Serb
dissident living in Bijeljina who spoke out against Serb nationalist
extremists, and used the occasion of a funeral to threaten the man
publicly with retaliation.xx Kačavenda is among the most radical
Serbian Orthodox clerics in having used his clerical office to incite
nationalist confrontations, but he is not alone. The Serbian Orthodox
Church, as it has for decades, continues to be a major force for
incendiary Serb nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo.
Conclusion
Ethno-national competition, conducted or controlled by the leading
nationalist parties and their allied religious communities, remains
the principal trait of democratic-era politics in Kosovo and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbian Orthodox and Islamic religious
communities have been major contributors to the rhetoric, mobilization
campaigns, and electoral successes of nationalists in Croatia, Serbia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, but they have consistently supported
rather than challenged the dominant role of secular nationalist
political parties. Bosnia’s Islamic religious community and secular
Bosniak politicians tolerated mujahedin during wartime and after the
war turned a blind eye to the gradual growth of Islamic fundamentalism
on the fringes of Bosnian and Kosovar society. But in guarding their
monopolistic positions, Islamic religious communities in Kosovo and
Bosnia-Herzegovina have begun to confront fundamentalism head-on and
challenge further inroads. Given the absence of internal deterrents to
extreme nationalism and the weakness of external constraints, the
Serbian Orthodox Church poses as great a threat to long-term political
stability and reconciliation in the two regions as do marginalized
Islamic fundamentalists.
Ljubljana, 12 June 2007
International Institute for Middle-East
and Balkan Studies (IFIMES) – Ljubljana
Directors:
Bakhtyar Aljaf
Zijad Becirovic, M.Sc.

i I use the formulation “Bosnia-Herzegovina” to refer to the polity
formally called the “Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina” until
December 1995 and thereafter called “Bosnia and Herzegovina.” I use
the most commonly used English name, “Kosovo,” rather than its name in
Albanian (Kosovë) or Serbian (Kosovo i Metohija) to refer to the
entity that remains technically a province of Serbia as of this
writing.
ii Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), p. 313. Since most Albanians boycotted the 1991 census,
their numbers – and therefore the total population – were estimated by
the Federal Institute for Statistics, based on data on the natural
augmentation and migrations after the 1981 census.
iii Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia,
1962-1991 (Second edition) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), p. 231. See also Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia:
Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 37-40.
iv The church maintained in the Diaspora its self-assigned role as the
creator and guardian of all things Serb. Speaking of St. Sava, a
member of the medieval Serb royal family who secured autocephaly for
the church in 1219, church officials in New York assert, “In creating
the Serbian Church, he created the Serbian state and Serbian culture
along with it.”http://www.stsavanyc.org/english/e11/stsava.html.
(Website of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava, New York,
viewed 7 February 2007.)
v Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of
Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 39.
vi Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 18. Verdery sets forth a slightly
different interpretation of Lazar’s posthumous tour: “Prince Lazar’s
skeleton thus set the boundaries of greater Serbia, on the principle
‘Serbian land is where Serbian bones are.’ … Parading the dead bodies
of famous men thus uses their specific biographies to reevaluate the
national past.” While this may have been symbolically true, most
monasteries were located amidst settlements of Serbs. They did not
define the outer geographic boundaries of Serbdom but were rather
important symbolic centers of Serb life outside of Serbia and Kosovo.
It therefore served Serb national interests to reaffirm the
monasteries’ links with the core.
vii Radovan Karadžić, “Srbi u Bosni” (Serbs in Bosnia), interview in
NIN (Belgrade), July 20, 1990, as reprinted in Ljiljana Bulatović,
Radovan, p. 152. “…tamo gdje je Srpska pravoslavna crkva bila
onemogućena u djelovanju. Trebaće dosta vremena da Srbi, u krajevima
gdje je Crkva bilo onemogućena, ponovo postanu pravi Srbi u kulturnom
i političkom smislu.”
viii “Program Srpske demokratske stranke Bosne i Hercegovine” (Program
of the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina), Sarajevo,
Petrodan 1990. god. “saradnja sa Srpskom pravoslavnom crkvom i njeno
ravnopravno uključivanje u život srpskog naroda.”
ix Maid Hadžiomeragić, Stranka demokratske akcije i stvarnost (Party
of Democratic Action and Reality) (Sarajevo: Unikopis, 1991), pp. 131.
“stranka gradjana i naroda muslimanskog kulturno-povjesnog kruga…”
x Ibid. “…puno slobodu djelovanja svih religija u Jugoslaviji, punu
autonomiju njihovih vjerskih zajednica… vraćanje oduzete imovine
vjerskim zajednicima i njihovim institucijama (vakufima i
zadužbinama); …ishranu u vojsci, bolnicama i zatvorima u skladu sa
vjerskim propisama za gradjane-vjernike.”
xi Ibid. “nacionalne posebnosti bosansko-hercegovačkih Muslimana…”
xii From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1971-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore
Frängsmyr, Editor Irwin Abrams (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing
Co., 1997) viewed at
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-bio.html,
June 4, 2007.
xiii For example, Shaul Shay, Islamic Terror and the Balkans (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), pp. 39-92. Shay,
advancing the view of right-wing extremists, suggests that all recent
Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian political and military activities
are manifestations of global Islamic fundamentalism.
xiv Eldin Hadžović, “Čija je Allahova kuća” (“Whose is Allah’s
house?”), Dani (“Days”) (Sarajevo), br. 506, 23 Feb 2007, Electronic
version,
http://www.bhdani.com/default.asp?kat=txt&broj_id=506&tekst_rb=8,
viewed 200702.24.
“Ovdje postoji i drugi problem – ljudi ih se plaše, pa već ima onih
koji ne dolaze na namaz četvrtkom jer ne se ne žele susresti s njima.
Sve što smo radili 600 godina oni sada žele da sruše.”
xv Oslobodjenje (“Liberation”) (Sarajevo), February 23, 2007,
electronic edition.
xvi Dnevni list (“Daily newspaper”), (Sarajevo), April 17, 2007.
xvii Dnevni avaz (“Daily voice”) (Sarajevo), April 21, 2007, p. 21.
xviii Dani, August 9, 2002.
http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/269/t26919.shtml, viewed June 4, 2007.
xix
 Sinan Alić, “Vladika koji je blagosiljao smrt,“ Dani, June 26, 2006.
xx “Pogled” (“Survey”), insert in the Sunday edition of Oslobodjenje,
April 28, 2007, p. 19.
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