Bosnian Catholics ‘squeezed out’

Church leaders have issued an urgent call for a new political agreement to guarantee equal rights for all Bosnia’s ethnic groups, warning that the country is still politically fragmented and Catholics are being squeezed out, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Sarajevo, Vinko Puljic, said that 20 years after the war of independence, Bosnians, Serbs and Croats live closely together “at best uncomfortably”.

He told Austrian journalists on a fact-­finding mission to Bosnia that while the 1995 Dayton Agreement, negotiated with the US, Russia and the EU, had ended the three-year war, it had created an “abnormal” state.

The country’s three main ethnic groups – Bosnians, who are Muslims; Serbs, who are Orthodox; and Croats, who are Catholic – lived in a state that was politically fragmented and that none of them wanted, he said. Where an ethnic group was in the minority, it often faced discrimination.

Bishop Franjo Komarica of Banja Luka, the diocese that includes the country’s second city, painted a dramatic picture. He described Bosnia as a kind of “Absurdistan” in which the law of the jungle prevailed. The West had left Catholics in the lurch and the country was being divided up between Serbs and Muslims, he said.

In his diocese, only 5 per cent of the Catholic population of 1991 were left. Formerly Catholic villages were empty, the roads which led to them derelict, there was no electricity and no help for Catholics who wanted to return.

While 12,500 Catholics had wanted to come back after the war, only around 4,000 now wished to do so and there was little chance for them. Catholic refugees’ attempts to get their property restored had always come to nothing. “Lying is the law here,” he said.

The cardinal said it was essential for the future of Europe that the Bosnian question was resolved.