Defying an icy downpour, an imam and a Catholic priest made their way
up the Majevica mountain in northeastern Bosnia to meet two Orthodox
priests whose church was burgled.
The visit was a rare show of
religious solidarity in Bosnia where memories of its bloody war between
Croats, Muslim and Serbs remain sharp and ethnic divisions persist.
"To
desecrate a church is like desecrating a mosque," lamented imam Asim
Rizvic to the orthodox priests, in front of their tiny stone church
under construction on the site of a monastery destroyed in Ottoman
times.
Unidentified thieves broke a window and forced open its
door to steal a power generator and various tools belonging to the
builders.
Rizvic, who himself was forced to flee his native
village during the 1992-95 war and took refuge in a hamlet near Rozanj,
understood the frustration of the priests.
They were hoping the presence
of the church would nudge villagers to return.
"People who fled
during the war feel much more secure if a church or a mosque is built in
the village when they return," Rizvic said.
Of some 130 Serb
families who lived in Rozanj before the conflict, only two or three have
returned, bemoaned Orthodox priest Zoran Ilic.
The remote hamlet
-- a stone's throw from the border between Bosnia's two post-war
entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republika Srpska, and
35 kilometers (22 miles) from the nearest paved road -- has received no
help for reconstruction.
The tiny church is surrounded by houses that
were nearly all razed to the ground.
After the war, Rozanj found
itself in the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia and the priests fear the theft
could undermine their efforts to encourage the Bosnian Serbs who fled
Rozanj to return home.
The priests say they've gotten no support from local authorities.
"They do not want us back, they are sabotaging our efforts," Ilic charged. "But this is our land, we will never sell it."
Bosnia's
two post-war entities are highly autonomous and strongly divided along
ethnic lines.
Fifteen years on, tensions linger and in 2010 alone, some
50 attacks were recorded on churches, mosques and other religious
symbols, according to the country's Inter-Religious Council.
A
local non-governmental agency, with help from the Norwegian government,
has been trying to organise "inter-confessional" visits to promote
religious dialogue in communities where attacks have taken place.
"In
most cases, the targets are minorities. The attacks are carried out to
make them understand that they have to leave, that living together is
impossible," Emir Kovacevic, an official on their Inter-Religious
Council, told AFP
This happened in the eastern town of Zvornik,
across the divide in the Republika Srpska, where only around 15 percent
of local Muslims have returned to their pre-war homes.
Twenty-three
mosques were destroyed in and around Zvornik during the war and some 15
have been rebuilt, said local imam Mustafa Muharemovic, but the return
of the Muslim population has been slow and at times painful.
"Sometimes
we discovered a slaughtered pig in a mosque being rebuilt," Muharemovic
recalled, a desecration in Islam which considers pigs unclean and bans
eating pork. He said the situation has since improved.
Overall,
some 40 percent of Bosnia's population of 3.8 million inhabitants are
Muslims.
Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats represent respectively
about 31 and 10 percent of the population.
In the Bosnian capital
Sarajevo, the official in charge of inter-religious relations at the
Catholic Archdiocese, Monsignor Mato Zovkic, blames such attacks on what
he calls the "arrogance of the majority".
The handful of Catholic churches in Sarajevo, where Muslims represent a vast majority, are often vandalised.
"The
windows of one new church have been broken so often that the priest is
wondering if it is worth repairing them," Zovkic told AFP.
"Catholics
sometimes complain that people ask them what are they still doing in
Sarajevo, and it hurts us a lot," he lamented, adding there are "no
quick solutions to develop mentalities. Minorities have to be patient."
SIC: AFP/INT'L