Religion in the Yugoslav successor states at the beginning of the twenty-first century (original) (raw)

Religion in the Yugoslav successor states at the beginning of the 21 st century With the turn of the century, a new stage began in the religious life in the Yugoslav successor states. In the previous decade, religious institutions and religious leaders had often played an active role in supporting or at least justifying the nationalist and irredentist policies of their respective government. In exchange, political leaders helped the church-and for that matter the mosque-to recover from the damages suffered under the communist regime and ultimately to acquire a privileged position in the state. As Mitja Velikonja noticed, commenting on the alliance between religions institutions and state power, "national, political, and, ultimately, military mobilization of these societies could not be achieved without religious legitimation, while, on the other hand, religious communities were unable to achieve their goals without the active support of nationalist parties and politics in general." 1 Five years after Dayton, with the June 1999 Military Technical Agreement between Serbia and KFOR, concluding the war in the FR Yugoslavia, and the August 2000 Ohrid Agreement, the nationalist conflicts in the Western Balkans finally came to an end. About the same time, there occurred among both political and church leaders a number of "staff changeovers": in 1997 Franjo Kuharić, the Croatian archbishop and true ally of President Franjo Tuđman deceased and was succeeded by Josip Bozanić; in 1999 Franjo Tuđman himself died; in Serbia in 2000, Slobodan Milošević was dethroned and replaced by Vojislav Koštunica. The consequences of these changes were not in all cases identical and not always unfavourable to the churches. However, there was nowhere a return to the close cooperation, not to say complicity of religious and party leaders. The religious institutions had now acquired a position of power that enabled them to focus on their evangelic mission-the dissemination of the traditional moral values proper to their creed, including love of one's neighbour, while remaining, to be sure, the conscience of the nation. They did so with such a zeal that in some of the Yugoslav successor states the secular nature of the state was seriously endangered. (Zakon o crkvama i verskim zajednicama), voted on 20 April 2006 by the Serbian Assembly after long public debates and after the text was endorsed by the Patriarchate (!), makes a distinction between, on the one hand, "traditional churches and traditional religious communities that have in Serbia an age-old continuity and whose status as a legal subject is based on particular laws", and, on the other hand, "confessional communities". 3 Traditional churches are the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Slovak Evangelical Church (Augsburg Confession), the Reformed Christian Church and the Evangelical Christian Church (Eventually, after protests from Bucharest, the Romanian Orthodox Church was added to the list.) Traditional religious communities are the Jewish and the Muslim communities, which cannot be termed as "churches". Article 11 of the Law, descriptively rather than prescriptively, points out "the extraordinary historical, state building and civilizational role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the formation, the safeguarding and the development of the identity of the Serbian nation" and actually singles out the Serbian Orthodox Church as a primus inter pares. So-called "confessional communities" are all the others-mainly neo-Protestant or Evangelistic churches as Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Methodists, Seventh-Day Adventists and suchlike-which, at variance with the "churches and religious institutions", have to apply for official registration. Traditional churches and religious communities are not obligated to register-a discrimination that in fact legalizes a kind of hierarchical distinction between "traditional churches and communities" and "religious confessions". Obviously the provision that "confessional communities" need to register aims at protecting more specifically the Serbian Orthodox Church against the neo-Protestant communities, which make converts mainly among the Orthodox flock. The "traditional churches and religious communities" as a rule do not proselytize among each other. Registration can be refused, as provided in Article 3 of the Law on Churches and Religious Communities, which echoes Article 44 of the Constitution: "The Constitutional Court may ban a religious community only if its activities infringe the right to life, right to mental and physical health, the rights of child, right to personal and family integrity, public safety and order, or if it incites religious, national or racial intolerance." In practice, neo-Protestant churches are frequently branded as "sects" and prevented from registration, or deprived of many of their rights. 4 Similar restrictions on "sects", however, exist in many European countries, although they are not applied in a similar discriminatory way; the US is as a rule more tolerant. Most protests against violations of the religious freedom of neo-Protestant communities seem to come from organizations in the US. Article 41 of the Croatian Constitution states that "All religious communities shall be equal before the law and shall be separated from the State." In the 2002 Law on the Legal Position of Religious Communities (Zakon o pravnom položaju vjerskih zajednica) no denominations are mentioned by name. Article 5, clause 1 of the Law specifies that religious communities can gain legal status when they become enlisted in the register, and they can get enlisted in the register (Evidencija) upon making an official application. Clause 2 also states that only communities that worked for five years as legal entities can apply for obtaining an official legal status. This means that a religious community is not obligated to apply for a legal status, but if it fails to do it does not have the same rights as those that did register.. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, relations between the state and the religious communities are regulated by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which came as Annex 4 with the 1995 Dayton Agreement and was agreed upon by the signatories. Amendments were made in 2009 under the supervision of the international community. Both entities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, created by Dayton Agreement, the (Bosniak-Croat) Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, have additional constitutions of their own. The Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina grants religious freedom, paralleling the rather unspecific phrasing of the Dayton Agreement. 5 The 1992 Constitution of 1. The Macedonian Orthodox Church, as well as the Islamic Religious Community in Macedonia, the Catholic Church, Evangelical Methodist Church, the Jewish Community and other Religious communities and groups are separate from the state and equal before the law. 2. The Macedonian Orthodox Church, as well as the Islamic Religious Community in Macedonia, the Catholic Church, Evangelical Methodist Church, the Jewish Community and other Religious communities and groups are free to establish schools and other social and charitable institutions, by way of a procedure regulated by law. 9 Relations between the state and the religious institutions and communities in Macedonia were finally regulated in the same pluralist spirit by the 2007 Law on the legal status of church, faith community and religious group (Zakon o pravnata položba na crkva,verska zaednica i religiozna grupa). 10 Both the 2006 Montenegrin and the 2008 Kosovo Constitutions, stating that the state is secular and neutral in matters of religious beliefs.