Bosnia Pamphlet’s Urgings to Shun Christians Draw Fire

The pamphlet circulating on Christmas urged Bosnian Muslims to shun Christians and their celebrations. “Brother Muslims,” it warned, “do not even congratulate Christians on their holiday.”

Christian and Muslim leaders were quick Thursday to condemn the leaflet, signed by an unknown Muslim youth group. But its appearance served as another reminder of how Sarajevo’s tradition of ethnic tolerance has deteriorated two years after the formal end of Bosnia’s devastating war.

And the leaflet’s message came just two days after a visiting President Clinton urged Muslims, Croats and Serbs to overcome trumped-up differences and simply get along.

Christmas is celebrated primarily by Croats, who are Roman Catholic. (Serbs, who are Orthodox Christian, celebrate Christmas in January.)

Delivering a sermon at the Christmas Eve midnight Mass in Sarajevo’s downtown cathedral, Roman Catholic Cardinal Vinko Puljic said he was surprised at the pamphlet and called on Muslim leaders to denounce it. The authors “are not people who love this country,” he told an overcrowded church. “I hope that this is not an official teaching of one religious community. . . . We offer a hand of brotherly unity, and on this holy night, I call on all people of good will [to] unite our hearts and souls. Let us stop the evil and hatred.”

Meanwhile, radio reports said a rocket attack from the Croatian side of the southern city of Mostar, toward the Muslim side, damaged an apartment building on Christmas Eve. There were no injuries.

Mostar is the site of festering Muslim-Croatian tensions, where two months ago an enormous car bomb wounded several people in the Croatian-controlled half of the city. Sarajevo authorities now blame that attack on Islamic radicals.

The same authorities, concerned at Bosnia-Herzegovina’s image as a haven for Muslim fundamentalists, launched a crackdown earlier this month on moujahedeen--outside Islamic warriors who fought along with Bosnia’s Muslims, then lingered on despite Washington’s demand that they be expelled.

At least 16 such individuals, most from foreign countries, were arrested and may be implicated in the 1995 slaying of an American U.N. worker and bomb attacks on Catholic churches and a Franciscan monastery earlier this year.

Fear of additional assaults on Catholic institutions led to a heavy police presence around Sarajevo’s cathedral Wednesday night and Thursday. But many of the capital’s Muslims, Jews and Serbs ignored potential danger and the warnings of separatist pamphlets to join Croats in attending the annual midnight Mass.

At Christmas last year, Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia’s Muslim president, cast a pall over the holidays by attempting to ban Santa Claus. This year, a more conciliatory Izetbegovic was careful to welcome the holiday with greetings for the Catholic community, and Sarajevo was decked with an unprecedented amount of festive decorations, colored lights and even Christmas trees.

On Thursday, Mustafa Ceric, the head of the Islamic faith in Bosnia, and Ismet Grbo, spokesman for Izetbegovic’s Muslim nationalist Party of Democratic Action, condemned the pamphlet. They said true Muslims are respectful of the holidays of other faiths.

The persistent trouble between Muslims and Croats in the Muslim-Croatian half of Bosnia reflects the attempts by both sides, especially the Muslims, to gain the upper hand in governing their part of the country.

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* SPIRIT OF GIVING: Many are fed and cared for in acts of Christmas charity across the United States. A41