Serb Orthodox Church Accused of Fanning Bosnia Strife

The vast, cave-like interior of the unfinished St. Sava Cathedral echoes with sporadic hammering. Construction on the squat, concrete dome, which one day will be the largest Christian Orthodox Church in the Balkans, has been slowed by shortages and funding problems--a consequence of the U.N. embargo against the former Yugoslavia.

“This is the very spot where 400 years ago, Turks burned the relics of St. Sava, Serbia’s patron saint,” says chief architect Branko Pesic, standing at the center of the building site’s dirt floor.

The history of the Serbian people, who are overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, is integrally bound to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Under the flag of St. Sava, the church defended Serbian culture during 500 years of Ottoman rule.

Today, with the Serbs internationally isolated for their policies in Bosnia, democratic critics charge that the Orthodox Church has re-emerged as the self-proclaimed guardian of national interests.

But rather than engage itself in seeking a speedy solution to the war, the critics say, the church has rallied to the cause of the defiant Bosnian Serbs.

Some of the most powerful factions within the Orthodox hierarchy have taken the Bosnian Serbs’ side not only against the world, but against Serbia proper too.

Relations between the church and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic are strained, with some church leaders complaining that Milosevic’s willingness to sign a peace plan that would sacrifice a piece of Serb-occupied Bosnia in exchange for a lifting of the blockade amounts to a betrayal.

Relations between Milosevic and the church were not always so tense. When Milosevic rose to power as a nationalist-minded Communist reformer in the mid-1980s, he opened new opportunities for the church, such as the chance to reconstruct St. Sava Cathedral.

The church welcomed Milosevic’s moves, and its ever-bolder nationalist tone helped fuel the passions that allowed Milosevic to consolidate his power.

Today, democratic critics within Serbia charge that the church’s high council of bishops, or episcopate, is dominated by hard-line nationalists.

In official memoranda, the episcopate charges the “godless Communist” Milosevic with undermining the creation of a Greater Serbia by supporting the peace plan, and with forcing an unjust peace upon the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs.

“Our church is for the unity of the Serbian people and Serbian lands,” reads one statement, “as well as for the just rights of other peoples who live with or near the Serbian people.”

In public, the church’s supreme leader, Patriarch Pavle, condemns ethnic cleansing and war crimes. But he places equal responsibility on “all three sides.”

And some leading Serbian bishops are considered among the Bosnian Serbs’ last supporters, along with a handful of extreme right parties in Serbia. Patriarch Pavle--widely regarded as a decent and apolitical man who is deeply disturbed by the war--makes regular trips to Pale, the Bosnian Serb capital, to meet with Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic.

In Serb-held Bosnia, priests sit in the front row of the self-styled parliament, as well as on the front lines, where units and even weapons are blessed before battles.

“The Bosnian Serbs have given the church everything it wants,” said Dejan Anastasijevic, senior editor of the Serbian weekly Vreme . Religious instruction is mandatory, all religious holidays are scrupulously observed and school books are in Cyrillic script favored by nationalists.

According to Mladan Zivotic, a philosopher and leading Serbian democrat, the church and the Bosnian Serbs share a common clerical-nationalist ideology, with a vision of a traditional, patriarchal society.

“This is a fundamentalist, anti-Western ideology,” said Zivotic. “It’s something that even Milosevic can’t accept.”

In Serbia proper, the church has had less success in realizing its political agenda. Last year, Milosevic personally vetoed a church-sponsored bill to curb abortions, which grew out of charges by nationalist clergymen that a liberal abortion policy is draining the Serbian population and jeopardizing the survival of the nation.

Church insiders say the views of the outspoken episcopate are not universally accepted among the clergy or church laity. But dissenting voices are seldom heard from the lower echelons of the strict church hierarchy.

Zivica Tucic, editor of the religious weekly Orthodoxy, denies that the church plays a political role or holds political positions. Rather, he maintains, the church functions as a spiritual organization, administering to the spiritual needs of all Orthodox believers across the former Yugoslavia.

In speaking with political leaders, Tucic said, the patriarch is only trying to play a mediating role to achieve peace. “The patriarch is right. . . . It’s still too early to tell who’s done what to whom. In this war, everyone is guilty.”

Church radicals, however, speak openly of “the Turkish aggression” against the Christian Serbs and the “crucifixion” of the “suffering Serbian people.”

In a recent issue of the weekly Pogledi, Bishop Atansije of Herzegovina urged Serbs not to “capitulate to the world as Milosevic has. The vultures from the West will not get our signature [on the peace plan].”

In the United States, North America’s second-largest Orthodox Christian group has expressed support for the Serbian Orthodox Church, although some Orthodox officials contend that extremist elements in the Serb church have undermined the search for peace.

In July, the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America, a sister institution of the Serbian Orthodox Church, declared “unwavering support” for Pavle and his bishops “in their continued efforts to bring reality and reason” to the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But the Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, a Russian Orthodox priest who chairs the Europe Committee of the New York-based National Council of Churches, concedes he is dismayed at the role of some Serbian Orthodox Church leaders in the Bosnian conflict.

Kishkovsky, also the ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church in America, said extremist strains of the church hierarchy have actively encouraged nationalist passions.

Still, Kishkovsky stressed that all sides and religious factions in the region--including Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims--are guilty.

“The problem,” he said, “is that no one is willing to admit that their people have done something wrong.”