| Abstract (english) | In this work the authot writes about the political activity of Serbian Orthodox Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1989. to 1996. Particular attention in this work will be paid to the role of Serbian Orthodox Church and it’s connection to the Serbian nationalistic elite during the war in Bosnia. The goal of this work is to determine the relationship of Serbian Orthodox Church and its representatives to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The intent is to examine the impact of the institution and representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church have had to the war events and policy decisions related to the peace negotiations and proposals for constitutional and legal structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina in this period. One of the goals of the paper is to examine the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the process of homogenization and political mobilization of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its role in dehumanizing the non-Serb population and participation in crimes against humanity and international law committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The time frame is taken from the period 1989 to the post-war elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1996. The author uses a chronological-problematic approach with the aim of analyzing the official gazettes and publications of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In order to answer the posed questions, the author relies on theoretical assumptions of the social construction of reality. This will determine how the Serbian Orthodox Church acted and participated in the construction of the "new objective reality" in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, and how the non-Serb and non-Orthodox population of Bosnia and Herzegovina was dehumanized by the scholars and intellectuals of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In this paper, the term "political activity" is understood as the way in which the Serbian Orthodox Church, contrary to its nominal religious mission, acted as an institution that was at the forefront of the process in which faith (as a special, individual relationship to the sublime and the world) was neglected, and religion (as a general, collective, organized system) with radical nationalism moved the population to act in the service of particular goals in support of the national political project. The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), as we know it today, got its organizational outlines during 1920. Administratively, it is divided into dioceses that extend to the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the Serbian Orthodox Church sought its social and political position in the Yugoslav political framework in the late 1980s, the dioceses in Bosnia and Herzegovina found themselves in a new political environment with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. The Serbian Orthodox Church did not recognized the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the April of 1992. SOC continued its activities on the territory under the control of the Army of the Republika Srpska. The manifestation of an aggressive view of Serbian nationalism towards the political identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina began by the end of the 1980's, through a series of mass religious gatherings. Adoption of constitutional amendments at the end of 1989. marked the end of the one-party system in politics, which was not enough to implement the political and economical changes that many had hoped for. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the abandonment of the Yugoslav state framework in 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina became an independent state, subject to international law, and was directly confronted with the separatist aspirations of the Serbian Democratic Party, which led to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since the mid-1980s, religious communities in Yugoslavia have intensified their struggle for a position of power by participating in national projects of homogenization and creation of great national states. The paper uses the sources from the Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Archives of Republika Srpska, the Archives of Tuzla Canton, the Unified Court Documentation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, then the material from the National Library of Serbia, University Library "Svetozar Markovic", Bosniak Institute - Adil Zulfikarpasic Foundation, National and University Libraries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Library of Sarajevo and the materials of the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previous scientific research has not offered a complete answer to the questions posed in the paper: What is the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia? What is the connection between the political activity of SOC and the crimes against humanity and international law committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the first half of the 1990s? What is the role of ideology of Svetosavlje in relation to Bosnia and Herzegovina as the subject of international law? The first chapter presents political assumptions and a theoretical framework related to the process of "disintegration of religion" in which the priests of the Serbian Orthodox Church as organicist interpreters conveyed the metamorphosed ideology of the svetosavlje. Controversies over the conceptualization of Yugoslavia and disputes over the affirmation of the national identity of Bosnian Muslims will be outlined, thus laying the foundations for a narrative that revived the revitalization of religiosity during the 1980s through cultural activities. Special attention is paid to the role and activities of religious communities in these processes, as well as their constitutional and legal position. The second chapter discusses the changing political perception of the Serbian Orthodox Church during the 1980s. After the death of Josip Broz Tito, the Serbian Orthodox Church launched a fierce ideological struggle to change its own position of power, and compared to the previous period is trying to gain a more prominent socio-political role. Mass religious gatherings on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina manifested themselves as a continuation of the mass gatherings („događanje naroda“) from 1988, but under a religious cloak. This chapter discusses the aggressive expression of nationalist pretensions during the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, and the establishment of mythological matrices in Yugoslav society. The third chapter discusses the politicization of the return of nationalized religious property, as well as the politicization of the preservation of existing and construction of new religious buildings in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Serbian Orthodox Church continued its political activity through the "sacralization" of public space, political abuse of the ideology of svetosavlje through the celebrations of the anniversary of the 1690's migrations of the Serbs (Velika seoba Srba) and the jubilee of ustasha terror over the Serbs executed in 1941. The fourth chapter shows how the Serbian Orthodox Church provided ideological and political support to the process of "regionalization" of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the creation of mono-ethnic territorial organizations and the establishment and functioning of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. The fifth chapter is about the relationship of the Serbian political elite with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the attitudes of the Church towards the peace proposals and negotiations conducted from 1993 to the beginning of 1996. This chapter will examine the attitude and political perception of the Serbian Orthodox Church towards the decisions of the international community during the negotiations related to the constitutional, political and territorial organization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aim of this paper is to show the relationship of the Serbian Orthodox Church to Bosnia and Herzegovina as a subject of international law. The goal is to examine how the Serbian Orthodox Church sought to disrupt the modernization of society and to reduce the overall social consciousness to a primitive, premodern, mythological matrix. It will be examined whether such a society was successfully incited to war as a rite in which the Other is sacrificed with the aim to (re)homogenizate the Serbian people in one Great Serbian state. |
