His Eminence Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic
Archbishop Emeritus of Toronto
Biography :: Letters, Homilies, Statements :: Articles

The Killing Fields of Bosnia
January 1993

There seems to be no end in view for the tragedy of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Even if peace should come, and United Nations put blue helmets between the warring factions, the Serbs will not abandon the occupied areas or allow the refugees to return. A terrible injustice is being inflicted on Bosnian Muslims and its results are being cemented -- population movements of such proportions are seldom undone.

Serbs no doubt perceive the war with its barbarous ethnic cleansing as a means of securing territories to which they imagine to have a right. We cannot help but hear the overtones of something else, however, namely, the centuries-long struggle of the Serbian nation and its Orthodox Church for survival and independence against Islam.

United Nations and European Community, their statesmen fluttering as impotent putti over raging fires, are naive enough to imagine that their ineffectual threats and easily circumvented sanctions will shame Serbs into compliance -- little do they know them! On second thought, they may not be as naive and helpless as they seem to be; they may want the creation of a greater Serbia, to serve as a source of future stability in the Balkans.

Thinking geopolitically, we might be tempted to see some value in the Serbian view of things. We cannot help but perceive the challenge posed by the Muslim populations of Iran, Turkey and all of North Africa which are bursting at the seams. A strong Serbia, Greece, and maybe Romania and Bulgaria might be sorely needed as breastwork against another invasion of Islam, which only 300 years ago haughtily rasped on the gates of Vienna.

This crass notion may well carry the seeds of its own destruction. For it is being claimed that the world leaders of Islam are not entirely unhappy with the developments in Bosnia; they see the Muslim refugees streaming north as a missionary force. They may well turn out to be just that, in view of Europe's rampant secularism, "white-man's disease" (no children), the tame and domesticated God of many Christians, and the sheer vapidity of much of our theology and exegesis.

For disciples of Jesus who are asked to love their neighbour, the situation is far more tragic. There is death and violence, humiliation and torture, expulsion, confiscation and brazen-faced pillage and destruction. The Muslims the world over will, moreover, hardly be disposed to make the distinctions we would wish them to make. While the Catholic Bishops and, with particular courage, the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch, have condemned the unspeakable ethnic cleansing, and though the Catholic Church in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere is doing its valiant best to help the refugees, they will be tempted to see the Bosnian events as a continuation of the Crusades, the gradual attrition of the Ottoman power and the humiliation of the Muslim nations after the First World War. Dialogue with Islam has been practically nonexistent, now it may become impossible for some time to come. I wish I could see a light at the end of this tunnel, but I can find nothing "positive" to say about it.

We must pray. And help the refugees: one way of doing so is to give aid through the Bosnia & Hercegovina Relief Fund and Information Centre, c/o Croatian-Islamic Centre, 75 Birmingham Street, Etobicoke, M8V 2C3.