Some Thoughts On Enduring Religious Divisions in Europe

The Dutch-Belgian border near Maastricht; a cultural frontier?

Until recently, I thought the Protestant-Catholic divide in mainland Europe was no longer very important.

Of course, southern Europe is poorer and less advanced than northern Europe and this divide roughly coincides with religion, but surely anomalies such as the economically advanced conditions found in Catholic Belgium and Austria negate the utility of such generalisations?

Not according to the Ronald Inglehart and Marita Carballo, authors of "Does Latin America Exist", a 1997 article that appeared in the journal Political Science and Politics. In their attitudes to matters such as the level to which the state should intervene in the economy and deference to authority, Belgians and Austrians are very much part of Catholic Europe, the authors say. So the Netherlands, despite sharing a border with Belgium and a language with more than half of its inhabitants "is culturally much closer to the Nordic countries than to Belgium. Historically, The Netherlands has been shaped by Protestantism; even the Dutch Catholics today are remarkably Calvinist."

This is not just a result of Protestant countries liberalising faster due to secularization and having more permissive attitudes on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Church attendance has also collapsed in Belgium and Austria and attitudes on social matters have developed in the same way as in Protestant Europe, but on economic and other issues, Protestant countries in Europe apparently have more in common with still-religious America than with their Catholic neighbours.

These conclusions are slightly surprising to me given that I had assumed, for example, that Flemish Belgians were likely to have more in common with their Dutch neighbours than with their French-speaking co-nationals, let alone than with Spaniards and Italians. I also note that the findings appear to be based on questionnaires, and wonder if such methods can really give us a fully-rounded portrayal of a country's national character.

Nor does Professor Inglehart’s thinking on the enduring religious divide apply just to Protestant and Catholic countries. His "Sacred and Secular: Religions and Politics Worldwide (Second Edition, 2011)", co-authored with Pippa Norris, approvingly quotes an Estonian colleague who thinks different worldviews of Estonians and Russians are rooted in religious heritage: "We are all atheists; but I am a Lutheran atheist, and they are Orthodox atheists." Presumably Catholic-Orthodox divisions are similarly enduring.

Although I have many reservations about Professor Inglehart’s claims, I am reluctant to dismiss them too lightly. The violence that plagued Europe following the Reformation was not the result of obscure theological disputes over transubstantiation and other matters, but the product of fundamental disputes in areas such as personal morality and social stratification. The Reformation took nearly 200 years to properly establish itself in some countries. Maybe secularization will take just as long to negate the Catholic-Protestant divide and the split between these two religious traditions and the Orthodox east.

But are religious-based divisions a useful prism through which to view recent and future conflicts in Europe? The most recent conflicts, in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 (and probably beyond), have occurred within the Orthodox sphere, suggesting the answer is no. Then again, maybe these conflicts would have been more bitter and violent, if, like the Croat-Serb conflict in the 1990s, they had pitted against each other peoples with different religious backgrounds. Any conflicts involving ethnic Russians living in the Baltic states and their indigenous populations would, at least in terms of the belligerents’ religious heritage, more closely resemble the Croat-Serb conflict than the more recent ones. They would also severely test the idea that Europe’s old religious divisions no longer have any relevance.

The Riddle of the Sandzak

The Sandzak, a Muslim-majority region that straddles the border between Serbia and Montenegro, is something of a backwater.

Despite the violence that consumed neighbouring Bosnia and Kosovo as Yugoslavia dissolved in the 1990s and Sandzak’s seemlingly similarly combustible ethnic mixture, it has remained relatively quiet. It is now the only region in the former Yugoslavia where significant numbers of Serbs and Muslims live side-by-side peacefully, if not harmoniously.

But the lack of drama in post-Yugoslav Sandzak is what makes its story so fascinating, because, but for key decisions taken by ruling powers over the course of its history, Sandzak might also have suffered a similar fate to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

The main reason for the Sandzak’s relatively peaceful post-Yugoslav history is demographic. Its population is tiny. Although the region is majority Bosniak (Slavic Muslims who identify with the Muslims of Bosnia), there were just 152,000 Slavic Muslims in central Serbia (not including the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina) in 1991 and 78,000 in Montenegro. These populations, which are concentrated in the Sandzak, are dwarfed by the Orthodox Christian populations of Serbia and even tiny Montenegro. While Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians on the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse were in a weak position compared to the Serbs demographically and otherwise, they at least inhabited territories in which they were the largest ethnic group and through which they could pursue their aim of self determination, an option was never really open to the Sandzak Muslims.

The first key decision in that shaped Sandzak’s present day circumstances was in 1877, when it had for centuries been part of the Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Bosnia. As the recently-published and much-needed “Sandzak: A History” by Elizabeth Roberts and Kenneth Morrison relates: “Measures designed to protect Ottoman territory from Austria’s designs were ... enacted, among them the redrawing of the administrative boundary which had hitherto seen Novi Pazar and most of the present-day Sandzak incorporated in the Vilayet of Bosnia.”

The Ottomans transferred Sandzak from the Bosnian to the Kosovo Vilayet, but this might have been quickly reversed if hawks in the Austrian administration had held sway when Austria occupied Bosnia in 1878. They demanded that the sanjak of Novi Pazar should also be occupied. Instead, Austria opted for a kind of compromise; the Sandzak remained under Ottoman administration but fell under joint Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian military occupation. This ambiguity over Sandzak was still apparent in 1908 when the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, but withdrew from Sandzak, paving the way for Serbia and Montenegro to achieve their aim of linking up by occupying Sandzak in the Balkan War of 1912-13. This may not have happened had the Austrians taken the advice of the German Kaiser, who thought it was “folly” not to help the Ottomans repel the Serb and Montenegrin advance.

Although Sandzak’s current division between Serbia and Montenegro can be traced back to decisions taken by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in their dying days, its fate was sealed during the Second World War. As the Communist Partisans’ strength grew in Yugoslavia towards the end of the war they began discussing how its federal structure would be arranged in peacetime. Muslims wanted to make Sandzak part of the new republic of Bosnia. Failing this, they wanted it to be either unattached to any republic or part of Serbia or Montenegro, but not divided between them. According to Ivo Banac in “With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism” some Serbs and Montenegrins also favoured wholly  incorporating Sandzak into their respective federal units, which in the case of Montenegro would have had the interesting effect of giving that republic a very large Slavic Muslim minority. The partisans instead opted for the worst option from the Muslim point of view, reverting to the situation brought about by the 1912 Balkan War and dividing Sandzak between Serbia and Montenegro.

Bosniaks in the Sandzak may rue the decisions taken by the Ottomans, Austrians and Partisans that separated the region from Bosnia, but that separation probably saved them from the fate of their ethnic kin in neighbouring parts of Bosnia, which are today part of the ethnically pure “Republika Srpska”. The Sandzak’s Bosniaks live in Orthodox Christian countries that haven’t granted them any form of autonomy, but at least Sandzak remains a Muslim-majority region.

An Interesting Development

The most interesting thing about the recently reported HDZ-SDA proposal on reforming the process of electing Croat and Bosniak members of the Bosnian presidency is that it clearly delineates two separate entities within the Croat-Bosniak Federation.

This never happened during the controversial “Prud Process” abandoned in 2009, which proposed reconstituting Bosnia along the lines of four territorial units, so the outcry that has greeted the latest proposal is not surprising.

According to the Oslobodenje newspaper, the agreement between the leaders of the HDZ and SDA stipulates that for the purposes of electing two of the members of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, the Federation will be divided into two units. One will comprise the Posavina, Una-Sava, Western Herzegovina, Herzegovina-Neretva, and Central Bosnia Cantons, with the other made up of the Tuzla, Zenica-Doboj, Sarajevo, and Bosnian Podrinje Cantons and Brcko District.

The publication of the proposal has already provoked a firestorm of opposition, most notably from the SDP, which claims that it paves the way for a three-way division of Bosnia.

But the agreement stresses that the division into two units would be solely for the purpose of electing members of the Bosnian presidency, rather than the creation of two separately governed entities. It effectively proposes creating two electoral constituencies, rather than any kind of administrative entities. (Although it would have the interesting effect of creating a link between "constituents" and the presidency member they have elected.) More importantly, the actual composition of the two units could never realistically form the basis of three way division of Bosnia because the first unit, though containing the vast majority of Bosnia's Croat population, has one overwhelmingly Bosniak canton, Una-Sana, and another, Central Bosnia, where power has been steadily shifting demographically and politically from the Croats to the Bosniaks. Any future Croat entity in Bosnia is unlikely to include these cantons.

Nevertheless, this agreement has once again raised the possibility of a new two-way division within the Federation that groups together existing cantons, albeit not the right ones to form the basis of the third entity that many Bosnian Croats dream of.

The Joint Criminal Entity

Jadranko Prlic: Courtesy of the ICTY

Lingering doubts about the nature of “Herceg-Bosna”, the entity established by Bosnia’s Croats in November 1991, will have been laid to rest by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s recent judgement in the war crimes trial of six Bosnian Croat leaders.

The ICTY found Jadranko Prlic, former prime minister of Herceg-Bosna, and his co-accused guilty of crimes against Bosnian Muslims during the Muslim-Croat war. According to the judgement, the crimes they committed against Bosnian Muslims between January 1993 and April 1994 “were the result of a plan drawn up by members of the JCE (Joint Criminal Enterprise) whose goal was to permanently remove the Muslim population from Herceg-Bosna.”

This assertion follows findings in previous judgements that Herceg-Bosna was established with the intention that it would “in due course, become part of the Republic of Croatia” and that this was in line with Croatian president Franjo Tudjman’s “dream of a Greater Croatia.”

So Herceg-Bosna was to be separated from Bosnia, cleansed of its non-Croat population and attached to Croatia. It seems there is little left to say.

Yet a closer examination of the voluminous Prlic judgement suggests that things might not be so simple. Referring to the territories that were to come under Croat control in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) the judgement states that from mid-January 1993 the Croat aim was to enact an ethnic cleansing campaign that would make the three provinces designated to the Croats “majority or almost exclusively Croat.”

The difference between the two possibilities arising from this statement is huge. If the Croat goal was to make areas they controlled “almost exclusively Croat”, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing was necessary, due to the large non-Croat pre-war population in the municipalities claimed by Herceg-Bosna. But if the goal was for the Croat provinces created by the VOPP to be Croat-majority, this left open the possibility that a large part, or possibly all, of the pre-war Muslim population could stay in these territories.

The judgement’s detailed account of events between 1992 and 1994 seems to back up the former interpretation, that Herceg-Bosna was to be “almost exclusively Croat.” From at least October 1992, the Bosnian Croats realised that it was necessary to modify the ethnic composition of territories. From May 1993, the HVO (Bosnian Croat Army) began demanding the assistance of international organisations in resettling Croats from Muslim-controlled territory such as Sarajevo and Tuzla into Croat-controlled areas. Parallel with these movements of Croats into Croat-controlled territory Muslims were expelled from Croat areas of municipalities such as Mostar, Stolac, Capljina, Ljubuski and Prozor into ARBiH- (Bosnian Army) controlled territory or to other countries via Croatia. In three neighbouring municipalities in Herzegovina, Ljubuski’s Muslim population fell to 826 from 2,381 between September and October 1993, Capljina’s fell to 3,852 from 14,085 and Stolac’s to zero from 8,093. Ljubuski is of particular interest because its pre-war population was already 94% Croat – suggesting that ethnic purity was the motive for the expulsions. As in other municipalities Muslim men of fighting age were imprisoned then released on condition they and their families left Herceg Bosna. Between June and the end of 1993 and in line with the campaign to replace Herceg-Bosna's Muslim population with Croats, 22,000 to 24,000 Croats from places such as Travnik, Novi Travnik, Vares, Kiseljak and Bugojno arrived in Herceg Bosna, notably in Prozor, Stolac, Capljina and Ljubuski. The crimes that were committed by the HVO between January 1993 and April 1994 were in the vast majority of cases the result of a plan drawn up by the leaders of Herceg Bosna to modify the ethnic makeup of Croat-controlled territory.

Yet despite the judgement’s exhaustive account of the ethnic cleansing campaign visited on Muslims in Croat territory, many questions remain about the nature of the JCE of which Prlic and his co-defendants have been convicted. Did the resettlement of Croats from Bosnian government-controlled areas into Herceg-Bosna necessarily mean that the Muslim population would also be expelled from areas of resettlement? If the Bosnian Croat policy of ethnic modification did tilt more towards majority-Croat territories than “nearly exclusively Croat” ones, did this mean that only Herceg-Bosna taken as a whole had to be majority Croat or did each municipality have to be majority Croat? In the latter case, Muslims would have to be expelled from municipalities such as Jablanica and Konjic, which had pre-war Muslim majorities but were claimed as part of Herceg-Bosna. If the JCE did aim at ethnic purity, as is suggested by expulsion of Muslims from places that were already overwhelmingly Croat, such as Ljubuski, why were Muslims not expelled on the same scale from municipalities such as Tomislavgrad and Orasje, a municipality where Muslims continued to fight in the HVO until the end of the war? (Orasje was originally in the Croatian Community of Bosanska Posavina, which like the Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna was established in November 1991. Though it is in northern Bosnia, it became part of Herceg-Bosna, which originally only comprised municipalities in Herzegovina and central and western Bosnia, in September 1992. Orasje was according to the VOPP to be in Province 3, which the Prlic judgement explicitly states was, like the other Croat provinces, 8 and 10, to be ethnically cleansed of Muslims. This never happened.) The judgement says that the Bosnian Croat leaders sought to resettle Croats from Bosnian government-controlled Sarajevo and Tuzla to Herceg-Bosna. To what lengths did they go in pursuit of this aim and if this was their aim why did the HVO continue to operate in Sarajevo and Tuzla until the end of 1993, before being disbanded by the Bosnian government? Such questions need to be properly addressed to determine whether the Croats’ aim was to make Herceg-Bosna “majority” or “almost exclusively” Croat. But the claim about Sarajevo and Tuzla is taken from comments made by an anonymous witness in closed session, so we can’t properly assess it.

Some of the answers to these questions may be contained in the exhibits that are mentioned in the judgement. But reading the dissenting opinion of the presiding judge reinforces the impression that the judgement does not back up its bald assertion that the JCE’s “goal was to permanently remove the Muslim population from Herceg-Bosna.”

Judge Antonetti, did not share his colleagues’ view that the accused were part of a JCE also involving the Croatian leaders to ethnically cleanse Herceg Bosna. In his dissenting opinion, he says it is “it is very difficult to discern exactly the real goal of the JCE” and notes that just as ethnic cleansing may have motives other than the creation of “Greater Croatia”,  the creation of “Greater Croatia” did not necessarily entail ethnic cleansing.

Much of Judge Antonetti’s criticism of the JCE concept relates to the involvement of President Tudjman and other Croatian leaders in the plan and his doubts about whether Tudjman really was playing a “double game” that involved publicly supporting Bosnia’s borders while actually seeking to annex part of it. He is less sparing in his criticism of the Bosnian Croat leaders, for instance acknowledging that Prlic played a personal role in the expulsion of Muslims from Herceg-Bosna.  The Prlic judgement and Judge Antonetti’s dissenting opinion leave one in little doubt that a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing was carried out against the Bosnian Muslims in the municipalities that were covered by the trial. Whether this campaign was actually the result of a plan to create an ethnically pure Herceg Bosna is much less clear.

The Power of Propaganda

Mostar after the war

The first few seconds of the documentary “Unfinished Business: War in Mostar”, which was broadcast on the BBC in 1993, are very powerful.

 

Images of the devastated city are set against a tannoy system emitting a ghostly female voice, interrupted by gunfire before the presenter takes over. He describes what we have just heard: “Croatian propaganda echoing over the front line in Mostar, the most vicious theatre of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

This sets the tone for the rest of the documentary, which portrays the devastation the Croats inflicted on besieged Muslim-held East Mostar, the expulsion of elderly Muslims from Croat-held West Mostar and the desperate attempts of the Muslims to fight back. It does deliver some balance when it shows the Bosnian Army forcing captured Croat soldiers to dig trenches on the front line in contravention to the Geneva Convention, but taken as a whole, there is little doubt at which side this film points the finger. 

It contains much interesting and harrowing detail about the horrendous conditions in East Mostar, but what about this propaganda the Croats were relaying over loudspeakers? The presenter of the documentary, Jeremy Bowen, who dramatically reminds us about it again eight minutes into the film, fails to provide any kind of description. 

All that can be heard is the voice listing international dialling codes for Croatia and Slovenia: “Republiku Hrvatsku 385, Republiku Sloveniju 386”. The viewer can only imagine what kind of Orwellian poison spews out of these tannoys once the speaker has finished listing telephone numbers.

Mr Bowen was given the opportunity to shed further light on the nature of the propaganda when he appeared in 2007 as a witness in the ongoing trial of Jadranko Prlic et al, Bosnian Croat political and military leaders who are accused of war crimes against Muslims in Mostar and elsewhere. He was quizzed about the documentary by the defence team.

Mr Bowen insisted that although the audible part of the speech from the tannoy is not propaganda, “that broadcast went on for many hours a day and we listened to it a lot and I listened to it with our translator who described to me what was being said ...  [the tannoys] were there for a purpose, and that purpose was to try to get over the political propaganda points of one side.”

He concedes that the documentary makers “should have chosen a better piece of sound for that section of the picture, because it is a bit confusing” but adds, “I'm telling you there was propaganda coming out of those tannoys.”

Pressed by the judge to come up with “a sentence that was actually spoken and leads you to say it was propaganda”, Mr Bowen replies that he can’t remember an exact sentence, but explains that the Croats were broadcasting news of battlefield victories in the same way the BiHTV news he saw in Sarajevo broadcast news of Bosnian Army victories.

“I didn’t take either news broadcast seriously; I regarded both as propaganda,” he adds, perfectly reasonably.

None of this laudable scepticism and balance is apparent in the film though. This wouldn't matter so much if it were also possible to imagine a BBC documentary about the Muslim-Croat conflict beginning with an unexplained account of the Bosnian government's nefarious propaganda, but this is not the case.


In "Bosnia by Television", Nik Gowing,  diplomatic editor for the UK's Channel Four News until 1996, writes that due to difficulties getting there, the conflict in Mostar barely received any coverage until Jeremy Bowen made his film. So as one of the few contemporary accounts of life in Mostar in 1993, "Unfinished Business: War in Mostar" may well have played an important part in shaping Western perceptions of the Muslim-Croat war. But the film itself was clearly shaped by an already prevailing view of that conflict and, by failing to question that view, can be seen to have contributed to a distorted view of the conflict.