It’s raining cats and dogs here in Perast, a small town on the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro, a beautiful mountainous country on the Adriatic coast, part of the Balkan peninsula. Mountains surrounding this side of the bay range up to 6,300 ft. It’s spectacular. And there actually are many cats here – feral cats it seems but gentle ones who seem comfortable meandering through the outdoor restaurants. But no cats or dogs on the menu.
I’m here for the wedding of my wife’s much younger half-sister, Valerie Hopkins, a Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. She’s not living in Moscow now, as conditions there are not optimal for journalists.
She lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina for several years, reporting on post-war reconstruction for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. My daughter, Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, replaced her in that position in 2012 when Valerie went to Columbia Journalism School. Eliza is now a senior reporter at Bloomberg News.
I first visited Sarajevo and the Balkans in 2013. Sarajevo is a beautiful city of 275,000, surrounded by the Dinaric Alps. It was founded by Ottoman Turks in the 15th century and the old town area preserves some of those earliest buildings. For centuries it was a city that managed harmonious relationships between Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews in a region that has long been torn by ethnic/religious conflicts.
It was the site for the spectacular 1984 Winter Olympics, one of the most highly celebrated Olympiads.
Brief history
Bosnia and most of the Balkans benefited from the creation of the Socialist Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia (SPRY) after WW2. During the war Nazi Germany had occupied what later became the six constituent states of the Republic: Bosnia and Herzegovina (informally Bosnia), Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
SPRY Prime Minister, later President Josip Broz Tito (in office 1944 – 1980), who had been a commander of anti-Nazi communist partisans during the war, prevented the resumption of historical conflicts between the constituent states by giving each state relative autonomy. His administration also successfully resisted Soviet hegemony in the Eastern bloc.
The collapse of Communist states in eastern Europe that began in 1990 led to the breakup of the SPRY. Immediately the ethnic/religious conflicts that had been suppressed by a federal government returned full force.
Serbia, the largest state, and Croatia, the second largest, each sought to claim pieces of Bosnia. Serbia sought to create a new greater Serbia by annexing parts of other states. Chaos ensued with Serbians fighting against Croatians and the Muslim Bosnians (known as Bosniaks) at risk from these external enemies and by Serbs living in Bosnia.
These Bosnian Serbs sought to carve out a Serbian nation from Bosnia, with the support of Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević. They began an ethnic cleansing, genocidal campaign against Muslims and maintained a four year (1992-96) siege of predominantly Bosniak Sarajevo to impose Serbian rule. They blockaded the city and bombed it from the surrounding mountainsides. Elsewhere, they perpetrated mass executions of Bosniak men and boys, including over 8,000 in Srebrenica in July 1995.1
The siege of Sarajevo lasted longer than the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis. Over 5,000 civilians were killed. Much of the city was damaged and residents went many months without heat, electricity, and even access to water.
Resilience
Sarajevo and most Bosniaks survived the siege and the larger Balkans War which ended in 1996 following the Dayton Accords. In 2000 a constitution was established that acknowledges Croatian, Serbian, and Bosniak communities as equal members of the nation and government of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In 2013 the rebuilding and resurgence of life in the city was impressive but incomplete. Bosniaks had retained their Muslim identity, a very liberal, European Islam. What I observed then is reflected below.
Sarajevo Monday Waken at dawn to a muezzin’s call from a nearby minaret. “Hayya alas Salah; Hayya alal Falah.” Hasten to prayer; hasten to success. Prayer is better than sleep. Follow footprints in the sand of Sarajevo sidewalks where mortar can still fall from the walls above you, to the market where mortars lobbed from hillsides mingled animal, vegetable, mineral. Among your twenty questions— is it a species that kills for pleasure? Those are roses painted over sidewalk craters. That cemetery sprouts rows of identical white stiles. Now to the old town where young Muslim women have colored their hair fuchsia, magenta, crimson. Walk past ruins of a caravanserai to the ancient bazaar cornered by a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue. A collective effort feeds the wild dogs at the market. They seem wary of strangers but they know their friends. Walk down Ferhadija Street to where you’re welcomed into the courtyard of the old mosque. Please observe the symbols: no smoking, no short skirts, no guns. In a cafe on Dulagina Cikma hear the death metal rap of Necro “I’ll hit that pussy up with a nasty attack” followed by Marley’s “One Love.”
Up in the hills after-school children play around a broken fountain. Behind them eighty names are carved in a marble wall-- wide-ranging birth years and a three year range of deaths. Hana, Branka, Mehmed. A chubby boy is teased by the others. Two adults, maybe teachers, encourage him to re-engage, and stay to watch. The children play again.
Religious Nationalism
Today, the Balkans enjoy peace but trouble is brewing in Montenegro where 40% of the population identify as Montenegrins and 23% as Serbs who have formed a right-wing political party that is now the second strongest in parliament.
The natives of all six nations that were part of SPRY are Slavs. “Yugoslavia” literally translates as “land of the south Slavs.” They share a common language, Serbo-Croatian, although nationalism enters into a language dispute as well. For example, many Montenegrins claim that the Montenegrin dialect is a language distinct from Serbo-Croatian. Linguists disagree, as do many other Montenegrins. Everyone in the Balkans can communicate clearly across all six states.
It is not ethnic differences or language trivialities that have torn apart the Balkans. It's religious and romantic nationalism.
For reasons of geography and the shifting boundaries of empires Serbians and Montenegrins are associated with the Serbian Orthodox Church. North Macedonia has a plurality of members of the Macedonian Orthodox Church with a large minority of Muslims. Croatia and Slovenia are primarily Roman Catholic. In Bosnia and Herzegovina about half identify as Muslims, 30% as Serbian Orthodox, and 15% as Roman Catholics, which parallels the proportions of Serbian and Croatian Bosnians.
The religious differences are important, especially in regard to the Muslim Bosniaks, but the romantic nationalism is apparent here and in the human tribal tendency to create significant differences where they don’t exist, as when the supporters of one English soccer team battle fans of another. We need a “them” for us to have an “us.”
In the U.S.
At times religious nationalism in the U.S. has been almost as intense as in the Balkans. Religious freedom has often been threatened and toleration has not always been the norm.
The Puritans who were disaffected with the Church of England and came to the New World in 1630 did not come to create a land of religious freedom. They created a theocracy. They forbade preaching by non-conformists. In 1660 they hanged three Quakers, including a woman, who persisted in preaching despite this interdiction. And they expelled dissidents, including midwife and spiritual leader Anne Hutchinson and minister Roger Williams who went on to establish Rhode Island as a colony for liberty of conscience.
Protestant-Catholic conflicts began with the arrival of immigrants from Ireland who were followed by Italians, Poles and others. Parts xenophobia, religious bigotry, and economic competition, the intensity of the animosity is reflected in the formation of the American Party (Know-Nothings) in the North in the 1840s and the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, circa 1915, a terrorist group of white Protestants who targeted as the enemy blacks, Jews, and Catholics.
Today in the U.S. religious nationalism and violence is rising, especially since the 10/7/23 Hamas attack on Israel. Anti-Jewish violence, bomb threats, and swastika graffiti have increased by over 100% in 2023. Jews have been attacked by those who condemn the Netanyahu administrations’s war in Gaza as well as for the regrettably typical reasons.
https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/us-antisemitic-incidents-soared-140-percent-2023-breaking-all-previous
Anti-Muslim hate incidents have been a major problem since 9/11/01 but have also increased recently.
https://nysba.org/islamophobia-surges-in-the-u-s-due-to-global-and-national-tensions/
Unlike anti-semitism, anti-Muslim attitudes have some official sanction such as President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, known as the Muslim ban, one of his first official acts as president. Anti-Muslim rhetoric is acceptable even in a Congressional hearing. It’s hard to imagine a representative of any other ethnic or religious group being treated in this manner at a Senate committee hearing, in this case a Senate Judiciary Committee on hate crimes on 9/18/24:
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) accused Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, of being a Hamas and Hezbollah supporter. She denied these wild accusations but he won’t accept her denials and then asks if she supports “Iran and their hatred of Jews.” He closes by telling her, “you should go hide your head in a bag.”
Copy and paste to witness this exchange.
https://x.com/cspan/status/1836085942416707641?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1836085942416707641%7Ctwgr%5E9068930d107fde7d6a6f20b10151d890567b4622%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Fworld%2Fus%2Fus-senator-accuses-muslim-advocate-supporting-extremism-hearing-hate-2024-09-17%2F
Christian nationalism is a strong sentiment among Republican voters who fear the increasingly diverse, racially and religiously, demographics of their country. According to the data rich survey conducted by PRRI in 2023, over 50% of Republicans support Christian nationalism - 21% as strong adherents and 33% as supporters. Trump’s campaign appeals directly to this group, “my beautiful Christians,” and other Republican candidates do as well — they must do so in many states to win a primary.2
Despite this strong support for Christian nationalism and the incendiary language used to defame refugees, particularly Muslims, most media experts seem to believe that the U.S. could never experience widespread religious violence. Maybe. But it’s worth noting that the PRRI survey also found that 40% of strong adherents to Christian nationalism and 22% of supporters agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country.”
With the 1/6/21 attack on the Capitol barely in the rearview mirror, I think it is a good idea to prepare for any deepening fissures in the national landscape, with particular attention to the tendency of Trump and his confederates to try to unite “regular” Americans by identifying a common enemy and to look for a reason and a scapegoat for political setbacks.
Demagogues succeeded, at least temporarily, in the Balkans. I wouldn’t put it past Trump and friends - I wouldn’t put anything past them - to do more of this before November, perhaps even more so after the election if he loses.
Milosevic was one of 161 Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnian Serbs arrested for war crimes and tried at The Hague before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Milosevic died of a heart attack in his cell before trial. Two of the worst Bosnian Serb war criminals, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, are serving life sentences.
PRRI survey data here. https://www.prri.org/research/a-christian-nation-understanding-the-threat-of-christian-nationalism-to-american-democracy-and-culture/
Such a sad and complicated history.