Keeping Faith in a Better Tomorrow

ZENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Whether he’s fretting over a soup kitchen for the poor, hosting visitors from the Vatican or sharing drinks with Muslim friends, Father Stipan Radic exudes optimism.

Throughout Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war, Radic, 45, was the chief Roman Catholic priest in Zenica, even as war raged between Muslims and Croats and this city in the center of the country became headquarters for fundamentalist Islamic fighters.

While many religious leaders either fled the war or encouraged it, Radic stayed behind and fought to preserve a Catholic community in unfriendly territory--an affront to every hard-liner in this divided country.

Against all odds, it is a mission he continues to pursue.

With visits to young families, in counseling sessions for other priests and from the pulpit, he is encouraging Croats to live among Muslims and attempting to staunch a steady, debilitating postwar exodus by people who have given up on Bosnia’s future.

“At this moment, it is very difficult to motivate people to stay, especially those who cannot think of their long-term future,” Radic said. “But things are getting better and will continue to improve. The pessimists kept saying there was no chance of a life here, that people wouldn’t be able to travel, that we would live with checkpoints and barricades and 50-German-mark [$30] salaries for years to come. And just look. Some changes are happening more quickly than even I expected.”

Radic is widely praised as a gifted conciliator who, wearing the brown cassock characteristic of the Franciscan order, regularly ventured across battle lines during the war to identify bodies, block looting by soldiers and rescue the detained.

His determination earned him enemies among radical Muslims, whom he publicly accused of intimidation and torture, and within the leadership of his own Bosnian Croat community, which he believes misled and manipulated its people.

And perhaps most delicately, he resisted and challenged the more vocal, extremist wing of the Franciscans.

The Franciscans surrounding Radic were part of a 700-year-old tradition of friars who were tolerant and tolerated in this region. But right-wing Franciscan priests from the country’s western Herzegovina region were a different breed, thriving in a bastion of close-minded separatism that would prefer to join neighboring Croatia.

Radic’s belief that Muslims and Croats, as well as Serbs, who are less numerous in the area, should and could live together offended the friars of Herzegovina. They branded him a Muslim lover, calling him “Friar Suljo,” the local equivalent of an Uncle Tom.

Understanding Amid a Hail of Vituperation

A self-effacing Bosnian native who does not like to talk about himself and who looks sad even when he smiles, Radic turns the other cheek when reminded of such insults.

“My colleagues were not evil or mean, just misinformed,” he says magnanimously.

With the collapse of atheistic communism in the former Yugoslav federation in the 1980s, religion emerged as an alternative system of beliefs that politicians seized upon and perverted. Because almost all the people of what had been Yugoslavia--Serbs, Croats and Muslims--spoke the same language, were of the same Slavic heritage and shared many of the same customs, religion was the only difference that those who wanted to divide the country could use and distort.

Religion became entwined with nationalist politics, and clerics from many faiths became instruments of war and apologists for xenophobic violence. They advocated revenge, not reconciliation; force, not forgiveness.

The exceptions, like Radic, are today faced with recovering their religions’ credibility. A multidenominational council for Bosnia has been formed, with Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Jews, but even issuing an initial statement took it months of negotiation. The damage to faith and those who pastor it may be too great for true reconciliation to occur.

“We in the Catholic Church remember the Crusades,” Radic said. “You get attached to politics, you pay dearly.”

A Gathering Point for Islamic Radicals

Bosnia-Herzegovina came under attack from Serbian forces in April 1992. The following year, Croatian extremists turned on the Muslims in a 10-month sidebar war that claimed thousands of lives until U.S.-led negotiations formed a tenuous Muslim-Croat alliance that now comprises half of Bosnia.

But in 1993, Zenica, in the heart of Muslim Bosnia, was besieged by both Serbs and Croats. Crowding into the city were thousands of Muslim refugees fleeing a vicious Croatian “cleansing” of Muslim villages to the west.

As the Muslims began to fight back, Zenica became the focal point of radicalized Islamic forces consisting of Bosnian soldiers and of moujahedeen, or holy warriors, from Iran and other countries.

Radic refused to be intimidated, recalled Besim Spahic, a Muslim who served as the mayor of Zenica during the war.

In his book “Zenica at the Turn of the Century,” Spahic says that the priest, despite the clear danger of doing so, complained publicly of the brutality exercised by the moujahedeen, who took over people’s homes and drove around town waving swords from their car windows. He took Zenica’s military authorities to task for praising instead of reprimanding the fighters. He denounced torture taking place in the basement of the green-painted Music School, located around the corner from his church and used as a center for secret security operations.

Spahic has nothing but praise for Radic, whom he considers perhaps the most reasonable and levelheaded member of the Croatian community.

“He is the example of how to forge cooperation under very difficult circumstances,” Spahic said.

Radic today says the point he tried to make then is still true: In the short term, the moujahedeen were a problem for Catholic Croats; in the long term, they are a greater problem for Muslim Bosnia.

Under U.S. pressure, most of the foreign Islamic fighters were forced to leave the country. But many had married Bosnian women or were otherwise granted citizenship and have remained in central Bosnia, where they terrorize villagers, kidnap recruits and impose a strict Islam that was never part of the Bosnian tradition.

“This is a danger for the whole country,” Radic said. “People are still afraid of them.”

Before 1993, Zenica’s population of Croats was close to 27,000; today, it’s barely 10,000. A small number were killed, but most left.

While most peacemakers in Bosnia these days are focused on returning tens of thousands of displaced Bosnians to their homes, Radic concentrates on the flip side: departures. A relentless march of people, especially the young and minorities, is leaving Bosnia. The end of the war did not end the exodus.

Radic blames nationalist Croat politicians, as well as the political leadership in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, for luring Bosnian Croats away from central Bosnia by offering them easy citizenship, jobs and other incentives. The migrants are often resettled in areas that Croatian officials are trying to “cleanse” of non-Croats.

A watchdog agency in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, has estimated that at least 25,000 Bosnians will leave for other countries this year.

“These policies make Bosnia into a wasteland,” Radic said. “I never doubted there was a future here for Catholics.”

Counseling Those Determined to Flee

Clad in his cassock, sandals and socks, Radic pays visits to people such as Marija Tomic, a 26-year-old Croat who has lived in Zenica since 1992 with her out-of-work husband and small son.

Tomic (not her real name) is desperate to leave Bosnia because she believes that opportunities for Croats, especially her son’s generation, are scarce.

“No money. No work. No future. That’s why I’m leaving,” she said as she chain-smoked in a back office at Radic’s St. Elijah Church in Zenica. “I still cannot say what I really think about an event, or it will be interpreted as hatred for Muslims.”

On top of having to endure searches of her home, harassing phone calls and taunts in the streets, Tomic says her husband was taken in for questioning “20 times” during the Muslim-Croat war. Each time, it was Radic who got him released.

“Everyone came to Father Stipan,” she said. “He was the only one with the faith and strength and guts to help people to stand up to what was happening.

“There were moments when I was so desperate that the only reason we stayed was because Stipan persuaded us to stay. He is still trying to convince us, but I don’t have the strength to fight anymore.”

Tomic’s is a case, Radic admits, that he may lose.

On a recent Sunday morning, Radic took his ministry on the road, this time to the nearby town of Vares. Like Zenica and other urban centers in the region, Vares is testing whether Muslims and Croats will be able to again live together.

Vares was evenly divided between Croats and Muslims until fighting, looting, raids and killings in October 1993 drove out first Muslims, then Croats. Muslims returned initially, along with about 700 Croats from an original population of 6,000. In recent months, more than 2,000 Croats have returned to join an estimated 9,000 Muslims.

A hard-line Muslim mayor who had put Vares on the international community’s blacklist was replaced in municipal elections last year, and, under outside mediation, Croats are gradually being brought into the city government, the police force and public administration.

A Band Called Hope Typifies New Mood

While it is far from perfect--the returning minority residents still cannot recover their apartments or get good jobs--this is roughly how the mending of ethnically riven Bosnia is supposed to work.

The pews at Vares’ St. Miholvil Roman Catholic Church were packed when Radic rose to the pulpit. A rock band called Hope, with a spiky-haired kid on synthesizer and a young friar on acoustic guitar, played a song called “Return.”

“Man since his existence is looking for where to live and belong, and in this endless search he finds himself,” Radic preached. “It is not surprising that many people in this region are confused and lost and do not know what to do. So many feel betrayed and have lost faith. The church wants to be a sign for these people, to give them the power to trust and love. It is the only thing that can unite us.”

Many in the congregation, which included white-haired ladies and youngsters too, wept.

Parish priest Mato Topic, several years younger than Radic and in many ways his protege, concluded the service with a list of church activities--a picnic for children, visits to the homes of the newly returned, the building of a new chapel in a nearby village.

“A lot of Bosniaks [Muslims] ask me why we celebrate so much,” the rosy-cheeked young priest said, his voice rising in emotion. “I say it is not because we are happy but because we want to prove we are here, we want to live here, and we will stay here.”

Father Mato then led the congregation in a life-affirming dance outside the church, a conga line of parishioners bouncing to the boisterous folk songs played by Hope.

Father Stipan stood to one side. Conferring with him was Miroslav Pejicinovic, a former city official who fled Vares in 1993 but who has returned and is working with a newly integrated Muslim-Croat police force.

“Every Croat who has come back first rang this doorbell,” Pejicinovic said, referring to the church. “There was no other help. The church has a big role. But it’s the individual priests who have invested every bit of themselves in this. If they weren’t here, our being here would not be possible.”

Radic says that Croats, like minorities elsewhere in Bosnia, will never be fully comfortable until they have a fair chance at jobs and recovering their homes and until the educational system is freed of war-era nationalistic rhetoric. Always the optimist, he believes that these things can happen.

“There are certain laws in life,” Radic said, “and I believe a time will come when pluralism, even among the parties, will take hold. Now, they are following the old rules, like under communism. But a process has begun. One day, people will respect capability and knowledge over nationality. One day, we will finally start to live normally.”

The complete series, “Bosnia: Five Who Fought Back,” is on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/bosnia.

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A Nation Still Divided

Nationalism and ethnic prejudice were used to stoke 3 1/2 years of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Millions of lives were ruined. Long after the shooting stopped under a Western-imposed peace settlement, much of Bosnia remains separated along ethnic lines. But a small number of Bosnians fights the system and resists the status quo in uphill battles to make a difference and give Bosnia hope for genuine change. This series introduces a few of these men and women:

SUNDAY: A Serbian mayor’s quest to go back to a hometown now controlled by Croats reveals the complexities of refugee returns, the single greatest problem in postwar Bosnia.

MONDAY: A Muslim reporter who remained in Serb-held territory grapples with how to live alongside the very men who abused him for his faith.

TUESDAY: A Muslim judge endures threats and condemnation from fellow Muslims for standing up for what he feels is just, even if it runs counter to nationalist wishes.

WEDNESDAY: A Serbian woman in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia ignores ethnic prejudices to help women assert their rights and rebuild their lives.

TODAY: A Croatian priest working in a Muslim city challenges hard-liners from both groups to preserve a Catholic community in unfriendly territory.