Viorel ROMAN
The Religious War of the Southern Slavs 1995-10-24
inapoi
The Religious War of the Southern Slavs End of the Cold War I. 1989 marked the peaceful end of the East-West Cold War, between the western Christians' capitalist world and the communist Orthodox camp led by Moscow. Capitalism is a way of life, a lay expression of the Roman-Catholic and protestant Christendom, such as communism was a way of despotically organizing the social and political life for the eastern Orthodox world. Resorting to the so called dictatorship of the proletariat, the Oriental Christians wanted "to catch up with and to overtake capitalism". At the sa-me time, communism has been an alternative to the western model in the process of modernizing underdeveloped societies. In reality, these two forms of social and political organizing are not so much different. Both of them evolved from the Christian model. They were rational, materialistic, and both pursued industrialization and bettering the workers' quality of life as a common purpose. Nevertheless, there is a general understanding that Russia lost the Cold War and defected with "guns and bags" to the other si-de, crossing into the camp of her former ideological enemies. This occured in the absence of a previous understanding between Pope John Paul the Second, the patriarch of the West, and the Russian leaders: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, or Alexei II - the patriarch of the whole Russia. As a direct result, an increased degree of interference has been disturbing the East-West com-munication process, especially in regard to the religious war of the Southern Slavs. The religious war II. The armed conflict in former Yugoslavia is the first religious war in Europe following the ideological struggles that more or less hid its religious structu-res. The interests and the lines of battle are now clearly drawn. Croatia and Slovenia, both Roman-Catholic countries, are being helped by the West (UN, EU etc.). On the one hand, the federation of Serbia and Montenegro is an avantpost of pravoslavnic orthodoxy and Russia. On the other hand, the muslim Bosniacs, a modest island of islamic world in Europe, are a residue of the Ottoman Empire. The West feels responsible to protect its allies, to offer a survival alternative to the Muslims, and at the same time to reach a modus vivendi with the orthodox world. The orthodox Serbs find themselves confronted with a conflict of overpowering proportions at a time when Rus-sia is itself affected by a serious crisis. After the Gulf War and the under-standing between Jews and Palestinians, the islamic world seeks new bridges with the West. Western and oriental civilizations III. The armed conflict in Yugoslavia could be construed today as an anteroom of the great confrontation between western and islamic civilizations in the same way that, during the Cold War, the United States and USSR post-poned their nuclear confrontation, due to a series of conventional wars and regional conflicts such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Middle East, etc. The is-lamic and western worlds are still far removed from finding a formula for fu-ture understanding, and a religious dialogue has not yet started. Two schools of thought were born in the US and generally in the West. "The Hawks" want Russia unconditionally to accept the Cold War outcome. Mos-cow will otherwise risk the suspension of all western assistance. "The mod-erates", USA president Clinton and german chancellor Kohl among them, favor a longer period of transition that will make possible the integration of a democratic Russia in the New World Order. Moscow and Yugoslavia IV. For Moscow, the war in Yugoslavia has a certain symbolic significance ba-sed on the fact that all the forces present in the religious war of the Sou-thern Slavs are to be found almost identically in the problems of the former Soviet Union's Eastern Slavs. Seeking to insulate themselves from pro-Russian Serbia, pro-western Croatia and Slovenia are synonymous with Ukraine and Belarus, countries where strong Roman-Catholic traditions are still felt. If in trying to break from Muscovite Russia, these two former Soviet republics will tomorrow step on the same road taken by the Baltic countries in order to get closer or, eventually, get integrated into the EU economic sy-stem led by the French and Germans, then many pravoslavnic Russians li-ving in Ukraine and Belarus will confront the same problems affecting the Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the same context, there is an evident similiarity between the Serbo-Muslim conflict in Bosnia and those conflicts affecting the Russians in the Caucasian islamic republics. New World Order V. How the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina will be solved will influence the evo-lution of religious conflicts in CIS. The possiblity of a conflagration, of conti-nental proportions, forces the US, CIS, and each of their partners to engage in negotiations seeking an equitable solution and an immediate start of a reconstruction and cooperation program of great proportions. Help and cooperation for the Balkans could also arrive on the Danube river. There is a great chance that this river can be again transformed from a borderline in-to a multi-ethnic cooperation conduit, a catalyst for religious tolerance and undertanding, with the purpose to define what unites rather than divides the Southern Slavs and, in general, all Europeans. Will we find here the coexi-stence and cooperation formula for the New World Order ?