If anything could elicit a unified front, however, perhaps it might be the realization that American foreign policy has effectively imposed a death sentence on the Catholic church in a small but symbolically important country, one that functions as a bellwether for the possibility of peaceful coexistence everywhere.
That, at least, is the dream of Auxiliary Bishop Pero Sudar of Sarajevo, a 61-year-old prelate who’s become the leading public voice of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s beleaguered Catholic minority.
The 1992-1995 Bosnian War that followed the breakup of the old Yugoslavia was one of the most shocking and symbolically charged conflicts of the post-Cold War era. A country long seen as a model for inter-religious harmony, where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics lived side by side in peace, suddenly exploded into sectarian bloodshed.
The 1995 Srebrenica massacre offered a new metaphor for genocide, and the upheaval in Bosnia reintroduced the concepts of “ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes” and “humanitarian intervention” into popular consciousness.
Today, the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina is widely seen as a litmus test not only for the stability the Balkans and southeastern Europe, but any region where people of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds share the same real estate.
In that context, Sudar charges that the United States has put the survival of Bosnia’s Catholic community at risk, and thus the vision of Bosnia as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
In a Feb. 9 interview with NCR, Sudar appealed to American Catholics to demand that the U.S. government rethink the framework imposed by the 1995 Dayton Accords. In effect, the Dayton agreement sanctioned the division of Bosnia into two separate entities: the Republika Srpska, dominated by the Serbian Orthodox, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, now largely under the control of Bosnian Muslims.
Sudar says Dayton’s basic message is that “there’s room in the country only for two peoples, not for three” – with the odd man out being the Catholics.
The impact has been dramatic.
In 1992, there were almost a million Catholics in Bosnia and Herzegonia, the vast majority ethnic Croatians, representing almost 20 percent of the country’s population.
Today Sudar says there are only 460,000 left, meaning the Catholic presence has been cut in half, and most of those who remain are considering exit strategies. Sudar predicted that Croatia’s entry into the European Union, set for this July, will further exacerbate the exodus.
Church leaders, Sudar said, are trying to resist this tide.
“We have to make our contribution to the healing of society,” Sudar said. “Catholics have a mission and a vocation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Realistically, however, he predicted that unless the situation changes on the ground, it’s likely to be a losing argument.
“Without a real sense of coexistence, Bosnia and Herzegovina will remain a very serious threat to global security,” he said, adding that he believes the key decisions about Bosnia’s future aren’t made by its own leaders but by the American ambassador. (Since 2010, the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina has been Patrick S. Moon, a career foreign service professional originally from Oklahoma City.)
“We need a change in the political attitude of the United States,” Sudar said. “If the Catholic church in America can give voice to that need, it would truly be an enormous help.”
Sudar, 61, was born in a small Bosnian village during the Communist era that was roughly half Catholic and half Muslim, and he says there were few religious tensions because Muslims and Catholics found themselves in the same boat vis-à-vis an oppressive regime.
Up until the war, he said, that spirit still prevailed, with Muslim and Catholic seminaries exchanging faculty to teach courses in each other’s creeds.
Today, however, Sudar soberly charged that religious and ethnic tensions in Bosnia are, if anything, “more intense than immediately after the war” – a result, he charged of the “unjust” situation imposed by Dayton, along with a dysfunction economy and general stagnation.
Sudar was named auxiliary bishop of Sarajevo in May 1993, at the peak of what’s believed to be the longest siege of a capital city in the history of warfare.
In that environment, Sudar emerged not only as beacon of hope for the Catholic minority, but a leading force for national reconciliation. He pioneered the creation of a series of “Schools for Europe,” bringing together Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim students. It’s one of the few venues where members of those groups mix freely.
“Our hope is that after attending one of our schools, the Muslims become better Muslims, the Catholics better Catholics, the Orthodox better Orthodox, and so on,” Sudar said. “If so, they’ll also be better citizens who can help construct a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-cultural country.”