Mines Found in Sarajevo No Deterrent to Papal Visit

Ignoring an apparent assassination attempt, Pope John Paul II traveled Saturday to this predominantly Muslim city, a symbol of a war in which religion became the pretext for fratricide and a capital where ethnic nationalism continues to divide.

Just hours before the pope arrived in Sarajevo, police discovered a powerful batch of explosives along the route the pontiff’s motorcade was scheduled to take. The cache--more than 20 antitank mines and 50-plus pounds of plastic explosives, equipped with a remote-control detonator--apparently was planted under a bridge overnight and would have caused enormous damage, U.N. officials said.

John Paul survived an assassin’s bullets in 1981. No group claimed responsibility Saturday for planting the explosives.

Bosnian police are in charge of security for the pope’s two-day visit but are operating under the watch of thousands of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops stationed here to enforce a peace agreement that ended Bosnia-Herzegovina’s war 16 months ago.

Making good on his oft-stated support for Bosnia, John Paul stepped onto the tarmac of the pockmarked Sarajevo International Airport and preached reconciliation and “true democracy” to this country’s Muslims, Roman Catholic Croats and Orthodox Christian Serbs.

“Never again war!” the pope told the welcoming dignitaries. “Never again hatred and intolerance. This is the lesson taught by this century and this millennium, now drawing to a close.”

The pope spoke in a Serbo-Croatian slightly different from that spoken in Bosnia. Then, rejecting a NATO offer to fly him into town by helicopter, he boarded his armored, glass-topped Popemobile for the six-mile ride along Sarajevo’s notorious “Sniper Alley”--so nicknamed during the war--past thousands of cheering well-wishers to the downtown Roman Catholic cathedral.

“When he realized there were people waiting in the streets to see him, he said, ‘No way’ to the helicopter,” said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, adding: “This attempt means that hatred here still runs high. It also means this papal mission is badly needed.”

Besides the bitter divisions among Serbs, Croats and Muslims, the Catholic Church here is also split between moderate Sarajevo Catholics and hard-line Catholic Croat nationalists who want nothing of the unified Bosnia that the pope’s visit inevitably blesses. Many resent the visit to mostly Muslim Sarajevo. Pilgrims from neighboring Croatia trying to reach Sarajevo on Saturday were blocked by Croatian Interior Ministry officials, international monitors said.

The pope may, in fact, be paying homage to something that no longer exists--a Sarajevo of cultural and ethnic diversity and tolerance.

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The pope’s visit “can be a turning point, a new beginning in the search for a true, multi-religious character [for Bosnia],” said Father Marko Orsolic, a Franciscan priest who directs a Sarajevo peace institute. “Or [it] will be a liturgical act, a spiritual parade--a sprinkle and nothing else. That is the danger. Nationalism is destroying everything.”

So divided is today’s Bosnia that the national anthem was not played at the pope’s airport arrival because the Serbian and Croatian members of Bosnia’s three-member presidency objected to the song’s call for unity.

And the Serbian member of the presidency, Momcilo Krajisnik, refused to attend. As Christian Orthodox followers, Serbs do not recognize the pope.

Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of the presidency, welcomed the pope to “this martyr city” and praised the leader of the Catholic Church for speaking out against Bosnia’s suffering while much of the world kept silent.

The pope’s visit fulfills a pilgrimage planned during the war, in 1994, but canceled because militant Serbs laying siege to Sarajevo would not guarantee his security. It follows bomb and rocket attacks on several Catholic churches, monasteries and two mosques in recent weeks--a spillover, international officials believe, of Muslim-Croat tensions that hit a high in February in the disputed city of Mostar.

Muslims and Croats are allied in a U.S.-created federation that was awarded half of Bosnia in the 1995 peace accords that ended 43 months of war. (The Serbs have the other half, the entity known as the Republika Srpska.) But having fought their own war earlier, Muslim and ethnic Croat leaders remain suspicious of each other and rarely cooperate.

The rancor is deepest in Mostar, an always tense city cleaved into Croatian and Muslim halves, that exploded Feb. 10 when Croatian police opened fire on several hundred unarmed Muslims trying to visit a cemetery. One Muslim was killed and 20 wounded.

International officials issued a scathing report, putting the blame squarely on Bosnian Croat police commanders, who have also permitted dozens of unlawful, violent evictions of elderly Muslim residents. The officials produced photographs that showed police firing guns into the backs of fleeing Muslims. Bosnian Croat authorities refused to accept responsibility but eventually gave the responsible police officers mild slaps on the wrists.

The episode, described by one Western diplomat as the darkest day in the federation’s short life, strained Muslim-Croat relations--possibly beyond repair.

Vatican officials said Sarajevo is one of the pope’s most potentially dangerous destinations. Tight security intensified after the discovery of the explosives Saturday.

Nevertheless, the pope plunged into a delighted crowd outside the downtown cathedral before celebrating evening vespers under bullet-shattered stained-glass windows with a packed house of priests, nuns and seminarians.

“He has always been with us in his prayers; now he is with us in the flesh,” Mariana Kaukcija, 31, said after kissing the pope’s hand. “People just couldn’t believe he was coming until he was before our eyes. We hope he will help us overcome our differences.”

As the pope arrived, Italian and Egyptian troops in armored cars patrolled Sarajevo streets; manholes were being welded shut. Helicopters flew overhead. Bosnian police went door to door in the neighborhoods around Sarajevo’s old Olympic stadium, ordering residents not to look out their windows or stand on their balconies during the pope’s open-air Mass, scheduled for today as the principal public event of the pontiff’s itinerary.

For centuries, Bosnia was on the fault line between the competing faiths of Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and the Islam of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region for 500 years. In this century, communism under Marshal Josip Broz Tito largely papered over ethnic differences, and Serbs, Muslims and Croats in Bosnia coexisted and intermarried for decades.

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But with the collapse of communism, the rise of nationalism and the independence drives of Croatia and Bosnia, ethnic and religious differences were used to inflame war. Members of the clergy often worked hand in hand with nationalist extremists.

“Religion here was reduced to traditionalism and linked to national identity,” said Orsolic, the Franciscan. “The prophetic and peacemaking dimensions of all three religions have been blocked. . . . There are no NATO forces that can bring permanent peace if we do not find peace in our individual hearts. Religion should play that role, but it has not done so here.”

Bosnian Serbs and Croats continue to harbor a dream of uniting with neighboring Serbia and Croatia. Increasingly, Muslim officials speak of forming their own Islamic state in between.

Sarajevo’s Muslims were largely secular until the war drove many to embrace Muslim nationalism, a fervor that is gradually edging out other ethnicities in the capital. Returning non-Muslims often find their apartments occupied by Muslim refugees whom the government refuses to evict. Jobs are increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to obtain here.

“The future for the average Croat will be very difficult,” said the Rev. Franjo Topic, head of the Croatian Cultural Institute. “Without Serbs and Croats, Sarajevo could not have the image it had all over the world during the war. And a future without Serbs and Croats will deprive Sarajevo of the image and the symbolism.”