massacre since World War Two, there was little evidence Monday, July 18, of reconciliation between different churches in Bosnia Herzegovina. Up to 8-thousand Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995, when Dutch United Nations troops abandoned the troubled Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which was overrun by Serb forces.
The Serbian Orthodox Church has come under pressure to ask forgiveness for the crime, after recently its representation in the Serbian province of Kosovo apologized to ethnic Albanians there for human rights abuses during the Balkan wars.
However "our congregations, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim, expect us to side with our own ethnic groups – to see and hear them primarily, before we look at what’s happening in the neighbor’s yard," Mato Zovkic, vicar-general of the Roman Catholic Church in Sarajevo told Ecumenical News International (ENI).
JULY 11 CEREMONY
Zovkic was among the few church leaders who represented his church at a July 11 ceremony to commemorate the massacre, in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. "Prophetic voices still represent only a tiny minority," Zovkic added. "Unless they gain support, we won’t have real reconciliation," he was quoted as saying.
Muslims reportedly accounted for 44 per cent of Bosnia’s population of 4.3 million before the 1992-’95 war that started after it declared sovereignty in 1991. Mostly Orthodox Serbs made up an estimated 35 percent and mostly Catholic Croats, 18 percent, according to estimates.
The war cost over a quarter of a million lives before ending with the formation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a federation of Serb and Croat-Muslim regions. About 50,000 Bosnians were at Srebrenica’s Potocari cemetery for the ceremony, which also was attended by foreign dignitaries and Serbian President Boris Tadic.
"LACKING COURAGE"
Vicar-General Zovkic accused Serbian Orthodox Church leaders of "lacking courage" for failing to attend. "I would have expected the Serbian Orthodox church to take a courageous step – just to be there, without speaking, would have been meaningful," Zovkic told ENI "But although I searched for an Orthodox priest, I didn’t see one."
But in a statement released by ENI, the Serbian Orthodox Church said Orthodox Bishop Vasilije Kacavenda had been subjected to "repulsive and inappropriate defamatory attacks" in the Bosnian media after announcing that he would take part in the separate ceremony.
The bishop’s willingness to perform a service for "innocent Serbs" who perished didn’t mean he doesn’t regret the deaths of other "innocent victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina," the church added.
CHURCH FAMILY
"The church firmly condemns all crimes, and reminds that no crime can be justified by the misfortunes others inflict upon us," said the Orthodox communiqué. Amid the tension some evangelical have been active in the area of Srebrenica to encourage reconciliation.
"Telling someone else the Good News of Jesus Christ is one of the greatest privileges I know, for when others hear and believe the Gospel, their lives are changed forever," said Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham in a recent statement.
Franklin Graham’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse, has been distributing aid and shoe boxes with presents for Muslim children in cooperation with locals. So far six Serbs have been sentenced, and 10 others are awaiting trial, for their roles in the massacre, which formed part of a 1995 genocide indictment by the UN’s war-crimes court against fugitive Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. (With BosNewsLife Research and reports from Bosnia and Herzegovina).
