religion in Bosnia
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In the Bosnian conflict, religion was deemed so inconsequentialat least by the intellectual litethat one commentator could quip that the three sides "are of the same race, speak the same language, and are distinguished only by their religionin which none of them believe." [vi] The ferocity of the conflict belies such a simplistic explanation, however.
Three possible explanations present themselves, each of which provides part of the story. [vii] The first is that the outbreak of fighting in the 1990s was merely the latest chapter in a long history of an ethnic conflict that is too complex for outsiders to understand and too intractable to be resolved. Its logical conclusion is perhaps best expressed by a contributor to an Internet newsgroup: "Let them keep on killing each other and the problem will solve itself." [viii] A second and related possibility maintains that the conflict is an inevitable fault line conflict consistent with Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." This notion is popular among belligerents on all sides, who tend to give the conflict a strongly religious dimension by portraying it, in the words of Croatian sociologist Srdjan Vrcan, as "centuries-long conflicts between essentially opposed human types, types of cultures and civilizations,[one of which is portrayed] as quasi-immaculate and as the side of the Good as such [and the other] in demonical or satanic terms as the incarnation of evil as such." [ix] As Bosnian Serb nationalist Radovan Karadzic stated in a 1993 interview, "[the] West will be grateful to us some day because we decided to defend Christian values and culture." [x]
The Second Yugoslavia: Titoist Communism
After World War II, the Communist guerrillas who formed the backbone of the Yugoslav resistance took power under Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito. Like Marx, Tito viewed religion and culture as vestiges of backward institutions designed to ameliorate the masses...