Common misperceptions propagated by the media. The underlying divisions in the former Yugoslavia are along religious lines, but are being exploited by thoses who are obviously not representing the faiths - Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims. The so-called 'ethnic' differences are revisionist contrivances meant to obscure the fact that religion is again being hijacked for worldly means. Here is a good article:
swans.com
There is no doubt that religious identity was a driving force behind the Yugoslav conflict and a determining factor that decided which side any individual would "take" in the civil wars. This has lead to disintegration of whole communities along religious lines - marriages were ended and families have been bitterly split in an unprecedented demonstration of the destructive power of religion-based disputes. A common linguistic, ethnic and territorial heritage has failed as a potential cohesive factor among the Serbo-Croat speaking population of Yugoslavia. Religious identity became everything - the first and foremost determinant of the new Yugoslav order.
The people of Yugoslavia have not demonstrated any remarkable degree of religious piety in their reaction to the suffering of members of their religious groups and, for that sake, of other sufferers too. In the words of Raju Thomas, professor of political science at Marquette University and co-director of Marquette and Wisconsin-Milwaukee universities Center for International Studies, "one need not be religious to act violently on the basis of religion." Belonging to a religious creed in Yugoslavia primarily served group identification rather than being a natural basis for dialogue and establishing of common grounds. Instead, the country sank into economic degradation as a result of internecine hatreds driven by religious identity. In his essay, "The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia," American political scientist Michael Parenti outlines that federal Yugoslavia had:
The Serbians were clearly the aggressors in this latest set of wars, having first attacked and massacred Croats before moving onto Muslims. If your point is that they were merely revenging themselves on the Croats for their WWII massacres, that's fine. But, the basic fact is that the Serbs and Croats have a mutual hate that is bred from their different religions. Serbs in WWII were given the choice of converting to Catholicism or dying.
Christians killing Christians is a common theme in history. Protestants versus Catholics, Popes versus anti-Popes, Roman Catholic vs Orthodox. Just because they're all Christians didn't stop them from slaughtering each other in the name of 'their' brand of Jesus. To them, they WERE out to destroy what they saw as a 'heretical' version of Christianity. |
