ARTICLE TOOLS

Print this article Bookmark this article

Last month, Muslims in Bosnia remembered the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The genocide perpetuated by Bosnian Serbs against thousands of Muslims was one of many perplexing atrocities that unfolded after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991.

News reports of the remembrance ceremony offered descriptions of the massacre 10 years before, yet they failed to provide readers the full picture of ethnic, religious, and national identities that led Christians to kill their Muslim neighbors. Without this full picture, we can never understand why U.N. peacekeepers are still needed in the Balkans, and how religion, Christianity included, could be used to encourage behavior forbidden by that religion.

"Whenever religion gets too cozy with political power, it loses its soul and becomes a tool for those who would manipulate the religious impulses of a people to serve their own ends," Chris William Erdman writes in a discussion of several books chronicling the recent Balkan violence.

Yet it is not sufficient to blame a low wall of separation between church and state for the Balkan wars, the genocide directed by Slobodan Milosevic's regime, and the ethnic cleansing committed by Catholic Croatian Slavs, Orthodox Serbian Slavs, and Albanian and Slav Muslims. Understanding Balkan history, particularly recent events, requires knowing the religious dimensions of the cultures. We must also confront the desperate wickedness of the human heart.

"Brought face to face with the dark side of the much celebrated ideal of autonomous individualism, we readers are challenged to reevaluate many of the assumptions of the modern Western world," Erdman says. "For in Bosnia, the unencumbered self did not soar like an angel toward the heavens, but made its demonic descent into the depths of hell."

Since 1389 when the Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbian forces on the plain of Kosovo, Serbian national identity has rallied around avenging that defeat and resisting the advance of Muslim occupation. Despite 500 years of Turkish oppression, the Serbs were largely successful. The Turks conquered their way toward Central Europe and even besieged Vienna in Austria, but the Serbs prevented further Turkish aggression.

Until 1912, the Ottomans continued their rule in the Balkans, often with terrifying results for the native inhabitants. Rape, murder, and torture were common, and most Christian Slavs were kept in near-absolute poverty. As inheritors of Byzantine civilization, the Serbs maintained their national identity with a mix of nationalism and Orthodox faith. "The rather fierce nature of Serbian Orthodoxy, and of Serbian nationalism, has to do with their perception of themselves as the 'defenders of Christendom,' or the 'last dam holding back the deluge of Islam,' and as being left alone and deserted in this fight," Old Testament scholar Carl E. Armerding, director of the Schloss Mittersil Study Center in Austria, told CT.

This identity provided strong resistance during the centuries of Turk occupation. Serbs affirmed their identity in poems, books, and later, films. But that story had its dark side. King Lazar, the Serbian leader who led his troops against the Turks at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, was said to have rallied his men by declaring that anyone unwilling to die for his country would be cursed. On the 600th anniversary of that defeat, in 1989, one Serbian Pentecostal pastor says, "Orthodox priests carried the relics of King Lazar [which were kept in a monastery] in 'holy procession' from town to town, rekindling the 'national spirit' that inspired King Lazar and, they said, reiterated the curse."

Milosevic gave a rousing speech that year on St. Vitus Day (the anniversary of the defeat and the day, in 1914, when the archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo starting World War I) to hundreds gathered on the Kosovo plain. The speech helped to bring Milosevic to power.

National myth explains that Lazar and his army lost because a traitor had given their battle plans to the Turks. For centuries since then, Slav Muslims have been hated as traitors for abandoning their faith, culture, and nationality in favor of the Turks. Churchmen and politicians used the curse as propaganda when Serbs tried to evict the majority Muslims from the region of Kosovo until the NATO-led bombing in 1999 toppled the Milosevic government.

At the time, Christianity Today reported, "After the bombing started, Serbian police and soldiers forced more than 500,000 people from the country. An estimated additional 400,000 have fled their Kosovo homes but remain within the province's borders." This round of ethnic cleansing began only after peacekeepers had been stationed in the region to stop previous ethnic-cleansing attempts.

When the media cover such atrocities, including Kosovo, the story is usually about an innocent group victimized by some guilty, powerful group. But Fleming Rutledge shows that in the former Yugoslavia, as in much of the rest of the world, no one is innocent. Learning about the "sweltering cauldrons of hate" in the refugee camps across the border in Macedonia forced Rutledge to rethink how desperately wicked the heart is.

She tells the story of a mob of Kosovo Albanians attacking two Gypsy men living in the camp. For four hours the mob grew as relief workers tried to rescue the men, who were beaten nearly to death. Upon discovering a 7-year-old Gypsy boy, the mob even wanted to kill him, attempting to literally tear him apart.

"What we see illustrated here is that victims can become victimizers in a blink," Rutledge says. "Thus it has been throughout millennia."

Miroslav Volf, who grew up in Croatia and defends his country's right to maintain its own identity by seceding from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, says the West's answer to racial hatred only dulls man to who he is. Volf says "the diminution of hope in America [can be traced] from God to nation and finally to the naked self concerned primarily with the gratification of its own desires." Similarly, "the freedom of a citizen with ties to a particular place and time is being replaced by the freedom of a 'consumer without qualities.'"

Perhaps growing up the son of a Pentecostal pastor gave Volf the character to resist the secular notion that man has "progressed" beyond cultural identities to become simply a consumer. As a theologian, he says he resists "the kind of shifting smorgasbord of culture that we live in, in which everything is interesting and nothing really matters."

Volf condemns the atrocities committed by both Serbs and Croats during the Balkan war, but he says the answer is not to eliminate identity. "We must develop a notion and a practice of identity which is situated somewhere between a formless hybridity and a rigid purity." Both sides in the war pursued rigid purity; Serbia continued to do so in its ethnic cleansing attempts.

"Maybe some help could be found in the Hebrew Scriptures," Volf says, "in which the injunction to remember that one was a slave in Egypt is coupled with the command not to treat the alien the way one was treated by the Egyptians."

What was commanded of Israel was also commanded of the church, for whom there is no Jew and no Greek. During and after the Balkan atrocities of the 1990s, some Christians have modeled concern for the outcast. A Muslim family from Kosovo that endured Serb attacks, an escape under fire, and three months in a Macedonian refugee camp entered the United States to a welcome by a Christian family in Kent, Washington.

The Kent family has been accepting refugees for almost 20 years. "They showed us lots of care and love," one refugee said. "May God grant them favor for what they have done."

Today, Christians are planting churches, providing aid, and leading racial reconciliation efforts. "During the last six years, the European Evangelical Alliance has hosted three Hope for the Balkans conferences, two meetings for pastors in the region, and a special meeting for national leaders," CT reported in 2003.

"Danut Manastireanu, a Romanian who works with World Vision on reconciliation in the Balkans, says evangelicals in the region face a hard but not impossible challenge." But, Manastireanu says, "If [Serbs and Albanians] will dare to meet and talk, they will be surprised to discover that they have more in common than what divides them. We don't have much in common, apart from Christ."

And that is everything.

Rob Moll is online assistant editor of Christianity Today.