Attacks On Bosnian Religious Sites Persist

In their first official count on record of attacks on churches, mosques, cemeteries and other religious sites in Bosnia, the Inter-Religious Council of Bosnia, the IRC, has documented more than fifty such attacks  from 2010-2011, a direct consequence of ethnic and religious divisions still present from the 1992-1995 conflict.

The attacks are mostly against Bosniak, or Bosnian Muslim, cemeteries or mosques in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, and against Orthodox priests and churches in the Muslim-Croat dominated Federation entity.

The IRC analysis listed more than 50 attacks on religious, sites, objects and officials from November 2010 to 2011, with 26 attacks taking place in the Federation and 29 in Republika Srpska.

Latest incidents include verbal harassment of an Orthodox priest in Gracanica, in the Federation, and one where rocks were hurled in October at a mosque in Banja Luka, the administrative centre of Republika Srpska.

Boris Kozemjakin, IRC President, said at a roundtable on Wednesday in Sarajevo and Bijeljina that attacks on religious sites and objects are more often the consequence of inter-ethnic than inter-religious hatred, since the two are often identified with each other.

Ethnic communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina are very often identified through their religious charactericstics since most Serbs are Orthodox, Croats Catholic and Bosniaks of Islamic belief.

“The society is still sick from the war, and the young people that are often the attackers do not act out of personal reasons but because of the different politics,” Kozemjakin said.

Perpetrators of attacks on religious sites, said Kozemjakin, are very often adolescents, stressing that a possible solution lies with tackling the problem at home.

He added that since most of the families that attackers come from are religious themselves, he stressed that the recognition of crimes within ones' own ethnic group is an essential way of eliminating residual  hatred.

Patrick S. Moon, US Ambassador to Bosnia, said reconciliation and forgiveness are never easy, using the United States an example of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country.

“It will take time for many believers in your communities to let go of their grief and anger towards believers from the other community and many blame religious leaders for much of what has happened,” Moon said at the IRC conference.

The IRC was founded in 1997 by religious leaders of Orthodox, Catholic, Islamic and Jewish communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the figures constitute the first-ever tally of such attacks, the IRC said on Wednesday.