As NATO strikes targets inside Serbia, ethnicity, religion and culture reassert themselves as forces in the post-cold war era. The collision of religious ideologies -- Orthodoxy, Western Christianity and Islam are all factors in creating the latest cultural fault line which is the Balkan region.

ith NATO air strikes moving into their fifth day, there appears to be little prospect of an immediate resolution to what is broadly labeled "the Balkan crisis." Popular support in both the United States and Europe is considered "soft, at least in comparison to the allied incursions into Iraq. Battlefield objectives remain unclear, as NATO commanders speak only of hitting Yugoslavia's military infrastructure and "command-control apparatus." Even with stealth technology and a barrage of cruise missiles, it is far from certain that an air war can come anywhere close to bringing the government of Slobodan Milosevic back to the bargaining table, let alone resolve one of the most complex cultural struggles in recent history.

   This is due to the fact that the Balkan crisis is rooted in centuries of violent conflict and history. It is also located atop one of the world's major civilizational fault lines -- a point of intersection involving Islam, western Christianity and eastern Orthodoxy. Conflicting religious, political, ethnic and cultural forces are at work here. There are literally centuries of violent history overlaid with a melange of mythic tales, songs, literature, poetry and feelings. It is a phenomenon which Americans, very much the product of modernity and a vastly different view of the world and history, have difficulty apprehending.

A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...
The Balkan crisis represents a paradigm case described by Samuel P. Huntington in his seminal work, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (1996). Coeditor of Foreign Policy magazine and a political scientist at Harvard, Huntington described the disintegration of the old cold war, bipolar alignment which pitted east against west, and its reconfiguration by a multi-polar world in which "civilizations" would become the major players. Secular ideologies would play less of a role than in the past, being replaced by more traditional forces such as language, ethnicity, religion, ancestral roots and familial ties. Nowhere is this process more evidence than in the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, an amalgam of different ethnic and cultural groups held in the thrall of the late dictator Josip Broz, known also as Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980). A lifelong communist, Tito was imprisoned in 1928 for attempting to overthrow the Yugoslav monarchy. He later orchestrated the left resistance throughout Yugoslavia to the Germans in World War II, and served as Minister when the Federal Republic was declared in 1953. Tito's unique brand of communism, "positive neutralism" drove him away from the Soviet block, and he became a spokesman for the nonaligned nations.

   Under Tito, the government suppressed the separatist ambitions of numerous ethnic groups and political movements. Four republics -- a residue of Tito's experiment in regionalism and limited local autonomy -- broke away from Yugoslavia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was reduced to two of those republics, Montenegro and Serbia. Out of the former Tito State arose Slovenia (June, 1991), Croatia (June, 1991), Bosnia-Herzegovina (March, 1992) and Macedonia (November, 1991).

   This fragmentation was along the cultural fault-lines defined by differing ethnic, cultural and religious groups. For instance, Croatia is predominantly Roman Catholic. During the Second World War, the Nazis established a Catholic rump-government presided over by church officials and the notorious Ustashi movement. In addition to supporting the geopolitical and military goals of the Third Reich, the Ustashi regime engaged in a ruthless policy of exterminating Jews, Orthodox-slav, nonbelievers, and anyone else who would not succumb to the policy of forced religious conversions. Writer Avro Manhattan, author of the "The Vatican's Holocaust," observed, "During the existence of Croatia as an independent Catholic State, over 700,000 men, women and children perished. Many were executed, tortured, died of starvation, buried alive, or were burned to death..."

   The Independent Catholic State of Croatia was under the nominal leadership of Ante Pavelic (1889-1959) who had been President of the Yugoslav Senate, and later an outspoken supporter of the Nazi axis powers. The Ustashi had ties to numerous clerical groups as well as the Vatican-backed Croat Peasant Party, and the powerful Roman Catholic prelate, Archbishop Stepinac. Stepinac served as Head Military Chaplain for the Croatian Ustashi army, and even helped to arrange for a private audience of over 200 Ustashi youth with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican on February 6, 1942. In the midst of all the carnage, Stepinac declared on March 28, 1941: "All in all, Croats and Serbs are of two worlds, northpole (sic) and southpole (sic), never will they be able to get together unless by a miracle of God. The schism (Eastern Orthodoxy) is the greatest curse in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. Here there is no moral, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty..."

   Stepinac's place in history continues to be a focus of considerable debate among historians who remain divided over his role in the Croat-Ustashi- Catholic genocide against Slavs and others. There is evidence that the gruesome atrocities became even too much for the Archbishop, and in May, 1943, the Axis demanded that the Vatican remove him from his post. By then, the whole course of the war was beginning to shift in favor of the western allies. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Archbishop Stepinac was arrested by the new Yugoslav government, and he was transmogrified into a liberatory figure in the battle "against godless communism." He died while under house arrest in 1960.

   Last year during a visit to Croatia, Pope John Paul II beatified Stepinac (the step before canonization and sainthood) in a religious service at the shrine in Marija Boistica. Many saw this as an unpleasant reminder of the "ethnic cleansing" days of World War II, and for Serbs it only underscored the continued confrontation between Orthodoxy and western-Vatican Christianity.

   Ironically, the inhabitants of the region are united in a common language. Approximately 16 million denizens of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia all speak Serbo-Croatian, but even here, historical roots have an important role to play. The modern literary language developed thanks to the 1850 "Vienna Agreement" which found Croatian and Serbian linguists and writers helping to establish a united literary language. There are still regional difference though, in both vocabulary and dialect.

   Religion and national identification thus emerge as two of the leading civilizational fault-line indicators.

   Whereas the Serbs identify with Orthodox Christianity, distinct from their Roman Catholic Croat neighbors, another group is the Muslims, found mostly in Albania. This is why the Kosovo region became an important factor in the current Balkan crisis. Serb-Muslim tensions date back to the 14th century where troops of the Ottoman empire overwhelmed Serbian fighters. The commemoration of this disaster in 1389 is celebrated on June 28, and has become an icon in Serbian history and mythology. The battle took place in Gazimestan, Kosovo. Toward the end of the bloody conflict, a Serb killed Murad I, the military commander and Sultan, and in retaliation the Ottomans slew the Serbian prince, Lazar.

   The Kosovo region is one of the poorest areas in the Balkans. Infant mortality is shockingly high, and most of the 2 million inhabitants remain rooted in agriculture as a way of life. Tribal feuds and bloodletting have been common in rural areas. It is also predominantly Muslims, and the ethnic Serbs have become an isolated minority. Under the 1974 Tito Constitution, the region was granted wide autonomy; fifteen years later, though, the government in Belgrade withdrew that status, dissolving the Kosovo parliament, closing local schools, and reorganizing the police and security forces. Serbs were moved into the area, and the presence of the Yugoslav army increased as tanks and special units took over the streets.

   The Serbian attempt to reintegrate Kosovo into an ethnically and religiously unified state confronts a start reality; most of the Albanian are Muslim, although their ancestry dates back two millennia to the Illyrian tribes who settled the region. In 1990, a region-wide referendum showed to an overwhelming support for some kind of autonomy for the Kosovo province, but the results were not recognized by Serbian authorities. The Kosovo parliament which was elected was dissolved by Belgrade as well, declared illegal and banned from meeting.

   But there is an intense mythic and sacred quality to this land which Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic describes as "The heart of Serbia." Along with the history of the battle at Gazimestan, five historic monasteries dot the area, stark reminders of the close identification linking Serb nationalist aspirations and the Orthodox faith.

   "We have a deep spiritual feeling this place," one Serb administrator told a reporter for the New York Times in 1992. "This is the first Serbian state, and we will never surrender it."

THE MILOSEVIC FACTOR: FROM APPARATCHIK TO NATIONALIST
Understanding a key part of the Balkan requires asking the question: Who is Slobodanb Milosevic? Elevated to the status of a near-demonic and despotic figure in the West (which he may be), Milosevic is actually the articulation of profound Serbian fears, traditions and aspirations which resonate throughout Yugoslavia and, indeed, the wider community of Slavs and Orthodox adherents.

   In the early years of his political life, Milosevic was known as a doctrinaire communist who could organize and negotiate the Byzantine corridors of state power and party intrigue. He was leader of the Belgrade City League of Communists and a prot g of Ivan Stambolic, the Serb minister who emerged in the post-Tito shakeup. Fate smiled on Milosevic, described in western media as a "colorless communist" when he was sent to calm a popular uprising in the Kosovo administrative capital of Pristina in April, 1987. The experience transformed Milosevic as a person, and a symbol of a revitalized Serb nationalism.

   Milosevic spent that summer organizing and speaking to wildly enthusiastic Serbian crowds; his name, "Slobo! Slobo!" became a chant, and was soon included into a ditty playing on his first name which incorporated the stem for the Slavic word for freedom...

"Slobodan, they call you freedom,
You are loved by big and small,
So long as Slobo walks the land,
People will not be enslaved..."

   A cult of personality centered on Milosevic began to emerge in the Serb community, and especially in the press he was quickly changed from a party hack into a new nationalist hero. The process was not a difficult one. His early family life included religious roots, especially on the side of his father who had hoped to become a Serbian Orthodox priest. He was raised by his mother, though, a dedicated Communist party functionary.

   While Misolevic may not be a strict Orthodox, he is certainly a Serb nationalist, and exercises the ruthless politics of consolidating power and tapping into the popular psyche. In March, 1989, he ordered the arrest of ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo, and on June 28, traveled again to the battlefield of Gazimestan. Milosevic told a cheering crowd of Serbs, "Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet..."

THE RELIGION FACTOR
500 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation -- the fruit of the Gazimestan battle -- fused the elements of Serbian ethnic identity and Orthodox religion. It is this Orthodoxy which links the Serb cause to a greater sense of Slavic identity, and accounts for the support that Misolevic and his cause enjoy in the Russian Federation. Here, too, the descendants of Rurik, the reputed founder of the nascent Russian empire, see a common agenda in preserving ethnicity and religious identity -- specifically Orthodoxy -- in its historical stand against both the West and the periodic incursions of Islam.

   Like the battlefield at Gazimestan, Serbia's monasteries also serve as icons of this cultural resistance to the outside world. One aging Orthodox monk, pointing to the shattered walls of an 800-year old monastery building, told a western journalist in 1997 how, "I was lined up against the wall by German troops who searched for documents hidden here by the old royal Government. I returned here again when the Croats took over our monastery in Osijec in 1991 and drove all us Serbs out of the country..."

   Writing in the November 10, 1997 New York Time, Christopher Hedges observed, "The many attempts to eradicate the Serbian Orthodox Church have produced a theology that glorifies warrior priests, makes a cult of suffering and sees in nearly every outsider a heretic plotting to destroy the Serbian people." This theology -- more precisely a weltanshauung fusing history and mythos -- has also percolated over the numerous attempts by outside interest to dismantle Serbia. "The Serbs must accept that they will always be hounded by their enemies," declared the monk. "This is because Orthodox believers know the truth, because God forces all believers to suffer for the faith..."

   The monasteries date to Nemanjin Dynasty at the end of the 12th century, and rule of a chieftain named Stefan Nemanja, also known as Nemanya. The lineage reached its height under Stephen Dushan Nemanya IX (1331-1355), and collapsed -- at the battle of Gazimestan -- during the reign of Namanya X. The "golden age" of the first coherent Serbian state vanished under the rule of the Ottomans, who carried their territorial crusade through the Balkans and into the heart of Europe before being stopped outside Vienna.

   While western media seems to focus on Serb atrocities, including the latest "sweeps" made by Milosevic's elite security forces (one "Tiger" unit is particularly notorious for its rapine sadism and brutality), none of the major factions in the Balkan conflict are without guilt and responsibilities. The rising Muslim tide in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo has brought with it not just cultural diversity, but the presence of extremist Islamic groups which perceive themselves as the ideological and religious descendants of the Ottomans, charged with the divine mission of bringing the word of Allah to the heathen west. One example is the controversy last December over a statue in Savarjevo's Liberation Square. A gift from Italy and sculptor Francesco Perilli, it is titled "Multiethnic Man." Perilli hopes to have copies of the work placed on five continents -- Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australia.

   The sculpture consists of a nude figure looking skyward, surrounded by an orbiting array of peace doves. But what was meant as a statement on behalf of tolerance has been under attack by Islamic militants, who according to the Los Angeles Times, see the sculpture as "pornography at worst, idolatry at best for celebrating the human form over God." Militants originally attempted relatively peaceful protests, such as sneaking up in darkness and covering the enormous statue with black cloth. "Someone always pulls the cover off, though, and 'Multiethnic Man' stand naked again," noted one local observer.

   In fact, the controversy over something as innocent as this sculpture underscores the deep cultural cleavages of the area, not just about matters such as sexuality or art in public places, but the role of tolerance or religious doctrine in governing society.

THE MODERN RELIGIOUS REACTION
Western and Orthodox religious groups seems unified in their condemnations of the NATO bombing attacks, although they speak from divided perspectives. Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexy II, a wily politicians who survived the Communist apparatchik era in Russia, branded the NATO assaults as "a sin before God." He did encourage both the Serbs and Kosovars to return to the bargaining table, and live up to the recent treaty agreements which Milosevic had broken. Similar sentiments came from the Vatican's Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who warned "Resorting to the use of force always signifies the failure of humanity."

   But none of this addresses the long-standing historical roots that run deep throughout the Balkans; nor do these tepid declarations acknowledge the profound cultural fault lines where ethnicity, religion and ancestry divides so many people.

FURTHER READING...
Some of the best background available on the Balkan conflict can be found in the New York Times and some of the in-depth specials running on CNN-Live. For those interested in delving even deeper into the roots of this latest "confrontation of civilizations," there are also numerous books.

   Samuel P. Huntington's seminal opus, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" (Simon and Schuster, 1996) is a "must-read" for appreciating the new geopolitical reality of the multi-polar, civilizational world. The Balkan region is discussed in several chapters as an example of how cultural fault lines impact contemporary political events. Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" (St.Martin's Press, 1993) is a thoughtful meditation in his travels from Vienna to Istanbul and through the Balkan region. Kaplan, a contributing editor for Atlantic Monthly magazine, dissects the ancient animosities and beliefs that propel the history of this part of the world.

   More specific in focus is "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" (Penguin Books, 1995) by Laura Silber and Allan Little. As war correspondents, they devote considerable attention to the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic and the confrontations over Kosovo. Several books discuss "ethnic cleansing" and the atrocities of the various factions. They include "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West," (Simon and Schuster, 1995) by David Rieff, and Edward Vulliamy's "Season in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War," (Simon and Schuster, 1994). Also pertinent is "A Witness to Genocide," (Macmillan, 1993) by Roy Gutman.

   "The Vatican's Holocaust" (Ozark Books, 1986) by Avro Manhattan is unfortunately not available at the present time through American Atheists. Copies may be found for sale, though, in used book outlets, or on line. While lacking an index, Manhattan's history of the Ustashi movement is thoroughly researched and documented.

   The 1930's travel memoir by the late Rebecca West, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," (Penguin Books, 1982) is considered a classic in this field of Balkan studies and accounts, despite some recent criticisms.

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