Genocide fear grips Bosnia's Catholics

by Timothy Elphick
BOSNIA'S Catholics face extinction in their villages if Muslims turn to "ethniccleansing" to preserve their ethnic identity, the Catholic archbishop of Sarajevo warned this week.
Archbishop Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo. the besieged capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. said the Catholic population in parts of the war-ravaged ex-Yugoslav republic feared for its very survival.
He warned that the United Nations Owen-Vance plan to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into ten autonomous zones. at the centre of recent summit talks in Geneva, would intensify ethic border disputes. We truly fear that we will be chased from our lands," he said.
"The drama is that the Serbs carry out 'ethnic-cleansing' but there is the danger that the Muslims will do it too. We Croatian Catholics are afraid of this because we are a minority in Bosnia." Archbishop Puljic said.
The archbishop said that although the ten zones proposed at the Geneva talks would give each ethnic group its own territory defined by internationally recognised boundaries, one third of Bosnia's Catholic Croats live in areas designated for Serb or Muslim control.
Archbishop Puljic's remarks came as fighting between Croat and Serbian forces flared up near the historic Dalmatian port of Zadar. The Croatian army forced Serbian positions back 10 miles from last year's ceasefire line. jeopardising the Geneva peace process and threatening to spark a new Serbo-Croatian war.
Archbishop Puljic said he hoped the Pope would soon be able to visit Bosnia-Herzegovina to see for himself the conditions of the people in the republic and to do what he could for peace.
But although some reports claim that the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinaf Angelo Sodano, has accepted the invitation on the Pope's behalf. Vatican officials have denied that such a trip is planned.
A Church delegation from the Council of Churches for Britain and Irelahd. including Bishop Kevin O'Connor, this week flew to the Balkans to "address the many reports of atrocities on all sides".
• The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks this week warned that the "greatest danger facing humanity" after the collapse of secular ideologies was religiously fuelled nationalism, "the cloak of sanctity over the politics of hate".
Speaking in London, Rabbi Sacks said the case for intervention in the former Yugoslavia was unanswerable. "Let us above all teach that there is no religious justification for xenophobia or ethnic-cleansing or holy war." he said