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Religious Conflict in the Balkans

  • Writer: Morgan McBride
    Morgan McBride
  • Jan 19
  • 10 min read

An exploration of how religious conflict manifests in a unique way throughout the Balkans, due to the close linkage between religious identity and national identity.





Religious conflict, unfortunately, persists as a prominent crisis around the world, with many conflicts having solid roots in historical clashes between religious groups.

In Yugoslavia, and its current identification as the Balkans, religious conflict has manifested into a core facet of nearly all modes of conflict throughout the region.

The separatist movements during the region’s transition in the 1990s, following the fall of communism, experienced significant violent influence. Balkan states ultimately utilized the military, the church, the media, and the educational system to construct their national identities.

Due to a variety of influences, religion became a core component of the Balkan national identities, leading political leaders to co-opt religious identity in the development of nationalism.


Yugoslavia

In 1912 and 1913, a series of conflicts — later known as the Balkan Wars — erupted in southeastern Europe. At this time, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria formed a military alliance that led to the final expulsion of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans.




Yugoslavia later emerged as a Socialist state after World War Two ended in December 1918. The federated country comprised six republics that brought together Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes, and others under a comparatively relaxed communist regime. However, the arbitrary creation of this kingdom paid little attention to the existing ethnic, cultural, and religious divisions within this region.

As the president of Yugoslavia for twenty-seven years, Josip Broz Tito utilized an ideology of uniting the nation’s people under its own brand of communism. However, when this ideology floundered, new components of social identity based on ethnicity and nationalism arose.

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, which led to Yugoslavia's dissolution throughout the 1990s through violent means.

Ultimately, the ties that seemed to bind the Yugoslav people together were weaker than anyone could have imagined. When it disintegrated in a welter of separatist movements, the regions of the former Yugoslavia were ravaged by ethnic wars.


The Balkans

Although there is no universal agreement on what constitutes the Balkans, the following countries are often included in this region: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.



The complexities of the Balkans’ ethnic map complicated the region’s attempts to draw state boundaries that aligned with pre-existing ethnic divisions. Thus, minority problems plagued the area for decades.

The region’s nations used a variety of avenues — the military, the educational system, the church, and the media — to shape their national identities.

Yet, religion played a significant role in the preservation of national identities in the region, as religion and nationality merged in the Balkans. However, the three primary religions of the Balkans — Islam, Eastern Orthodox, and Western Christianity — are not inherently at odds.


“In the Balkans, religious identification became part of national identity, as expressed through language and the communication of the national myth. Thus, being Orthodox is part of being Serbian. Americans don’t have a single religion — being Catholic or Orthodox or Muslim isn’t part of our American identity.” - Peter Black

Religious Identity

Religious turmoil in the Balkan region stems from a turbulent history, including the arrival of the Slavs in the 7th century, the split between Rome and the Orthodox Church a thousand years ago, and the later arrival of the Ottoman Turks, who rewarded those who converted to Islam.

The Slavs — the largest ethnic group in Europe — arrived in the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries, and they gradually split into distinct groups. So, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, and Macedonians comprise a single Slav ethnicity, even though most would deny it.




While Slovenia and Croatia are predominantly Catholic states, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia are predominantly Eastern Orthodox states. And Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are both predominantly Muslim states.


During the regime of Josip Broz Tito — former president of Yugoslavia — and the ten years after his death, attempts were made to manipulate religion as a cultural component of revolutionary identity, to treat it as part of a central national identity, and to use it as a target of political control. Unfortunately, this philosophy has lingered in the Balkan region for decades.


According to Paul Mojzes, a religious studies historian, “Religious identity has been present constantly in the antagonisms that have fragmented the Balkans for centuries -- setting neighbor against neighbor, Muslims against Orthodox Christians, and Orthodox Christians against Western Christians, who are represented, at least symbolically in the current conflict, by NATO.”


Religion and nationality merge in the Balkans, making it possible to craft potent propaganda and a unique mytho-history to inspire hatred of “the other.”


Because political leaders have engaged in what they claimed was a struggle to free/save their “nations,” and rallied troops from within their religious communities to assist them, it has become all too easy to mistake nationalist struggle in the region for religious conflict.


Ultimately, religious conflict manifests uniquely throughout the Balkans because of the close linkage between religious identity and national identity in the region.


The Yugoslav Wars

A commonly held historical observation of the region expresses that “Yugoslavia was created out of war, and it ended in war.”

President Josip Broz Tito managed to suppress the tensions between the groups of Yugoslavia. However, these tensions reemerged after Tito’s death in 1980.

Subsequently, four major wars occurred in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, as its republics began declaring their independence.


In 1991, two wars for independence began as Slovenia and Croatia fought against the Yugoslav People’s Army for their independence, which Serbia predominantly controlled.


The Serbs of the Croatian district known as the Krajina, where they were in the majority, wanted to join their lands to Serbia. However, this effort failed: in August 1995, the Croatian army overran the Krajina in a lightning invasion and forced most of the Serbs — some 170,000 of them — to flee for their lives.

The Bosnian War, the largest and bloodiest conflict of the Yugoslav Four Wars, saw the Bosnian Serb population orchestrate clear and organized atrocities against Bosnian Muslims who wanted to secede from Yugoslavia.



Under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić, the Yugoslav forces threatened bloodshed if Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats -- who outnumbered Serbs -- broke away from the federation.


On March 1, 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina held an independence referendum in which 99.7% of voters, with a 63.4% turnout, voted in favor of separating from Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serbs wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia and boycotted the vote. Yet, the recognition of Bosnia as an independent state in April of 1992 led to Bosnian Serb forces beginning an attack on Sarajevo (the nation’s capital).


For nearly five years, the Bosnian War amassed a death toll of over 100,000 victims and forcibly displaced two million people.



Beyond traditional warfare, ethnic cleansing became a systematic objective by the leader of the Bosnian-Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, to eliminate Muslim enclaves within Bosnia. Between 1992 and 1995, Serb forces orchestrated ethnic cleansings against Muslim and Croat populations living in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.


Tragically, in July of 1995, Bosnian Serb troops killed 8,372 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The city and neighboring settlements had been deemed demilitarized zones by the United Nations two years prior, which means that the massacre occurred in what was supposed to be a safe, conflict-free space.


The war raged in Bosnia for nearly 4 years before Western leaders acknowledged it in a meaningful way. And, UN peacekeepers, brought in to quell the fighting, were seen as ineffective.


Nevertheless, the war ended in 1995 after NATO bombed the Bosnian Serbs, while the Muslim and Croat armies made gains on the ground.


In some ways, the UN presence, under the limited rules of engagement, only prolonged the violence rather than dampening it.


According to Michael Sells, “The role of religion in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been both obvious and invisible. It was obvious that both perpetrators and victims of organized atrocities were identified by their religious traditions. It was invisible in that the religious manifestations were viewed either as incidental or as masks for deeper social, political, and economic issues; or else categorized exclusively as aspects of ethnicity.”


Generally speaking, the conflict and ethnic cleansing were based upon religiously informed ideologies and constructions of difference.


The category of “Muslim” in the Balkans was created in the 1980s to offer Bosniaks and other Slavic Muslims nationhood and, thus, group enfranchisement parallel to that of Bosnian Croats and Serbs, but the term ultimately led to contradictions.


For example, a Bosniak with a Muslim name but who was an atheist and non-observant was of the “Muslim” nation, while an Albanian Muslim who happened to be a believer and observant was designated “Albanian” with no reflection of Islam in the name of the nationality.


Similar religious/ethnic-based violence persisted in the region during the 1998-1999 Kosovo War, in which ethnic Albanians fought ethnic Serbs and the Yugoslav government in Kosovo.


In 1989, Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo — a Serbian province — initiated a policy of nonviolent protest against the reversal of the province’s constitutional autonomy by Slobodan Milošević, then president of the Serbian republic. Ethnic Albanians were ousted from local government jobs, education opportunities, and employment in state-owned industries, which amplified pre-existing tensions. However, with tensions rising between the two groups, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged in 1996, and they later enacted sporadic attacks on Serbian police and politicians.



Violent attacks performed by the police, paramilitary groups, and the army led to an outburst of refugees fleeing the area. In total, some 90% of the Kosovar population fled their homes during the war. After cease-fire negotiations failed, both sides reignited the conflict, with the Kosovo Liberation Army lighting the spark.


The Yugoslav and Serbian forces’ response amounted to a ruthless counteroffensive coupled with ethnic cleansing against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians. For instance, an attack orchestrated by the Serb troops massacred forty-five Kosovar civilians at Račak on January 15, 1999.


The collapse of peace talks and renewed violence led to NATO enacting a bombing campaign to quell the war, which amounted to 78 days of bombing and warfare. So, finally, in June of 1999, the Kosovo War concluded, with massive amounts of damage and sorrowful grief remaining in the region.


Across the Balkans, many survivors of the bloody conflicts of the 1990s still don’t know what happened to their missing loved ones. So, the trauma and despair of ethnic cleansing and religious violence remain a centerpiece of the nature of conflict within the Balkans today.


However, contrary to other forms of violence in the region, the division caused by religious and ethnic conflict ceases to matter in order for organized crime to flourish in the Balkans.


“Although the conflict in Yugoslavia/the Balkans continues today, the organized crime world throughout the region remains extremely prevalent today.” - Nemanja Mladenovic

Most members of Balkan organized crime groups tend to be ultranationalists in public. However, when it comes to their personal interests, the closest business ties are being established even among so-called worst enemies — Serbs and Albanians.

Rival ethnic groups in the Balkans often work together for a common purpose: profiting from organized crime.


Organized crime, as defined by INTERPOL (the International Criminal Police Organization), is any enterprise or group that repeatedly profits from the illicit economy.


In Eastern Europe, organized crime developed and expanded through an increasingly dangerous model — synergism between criminal syndicates and the state.


The main criminal enterprises present in the region consist of smuggling and trafficking of drugs, human trafficking, and moving contraband goods across borders.


According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the organized crime situation in the Balkans is rooted in the instability generated by the simultaneous impacts of political transition and conflict. In the post-communist times of widespread poverty, of physical and social ruins left by the Yugoslav Wars, and the weak central governments of the late 1990s, the criminal empire has risen to become the industry of the region.


Instead of being regulated by traditional power structures, the region’s organized crime networks are run by multiethnic networks of bosses, transporters, dealers, and enforcers.




In an interesting case, although Albanians and Serbs have experienced decades of conflict, especially regarding Kosovo, both countries essentially abandoned the conflict in order to allow organized crime operations to thrive.


Serbian and Albanian criminal groups have control over one of the most prominent organized crime regions in Europe. Criminals of both ethnic groups have found a safe haven in Kosovo and have often been able to escape from justice due to law-enforcement agencies’ disputes over jurisdiction as well as their mutual distrust.


The absence of direct cooperation between Serbia’s and Kosovo’s police and judicial authorities in a vast number of cases makes these governing and law enforcement bodies paralyzed and unable to fight criminals.


The four municipalities in the North of Kosovo, governed by Srpska Lista (the only Serbian-backed Serb party in Kosovo) in somewhat lawless conditions, are seen as a hotspot of both Serb and Albanian traffickers who use the grey zone to smuggle goods illegally.


The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2019 report demonstrated that smuggling in Northern Kosovo had become so rampant that it is considered a regular economic activity, with an estimated weekly loss to Kosovo's budget of approximately 750,000 euros.


The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated that, “Criminal networks can forge bonds across borders and overcome cultural and linguistic differences in the commission of a transnational crime.” Such a phenomenon remains clearly present in the Balkans, as ethnicity and religion-based strife seem to play an insignificant role when it comes to money and corruption.



Centuries of religious conflict persist in the Balkans; however, disentangling religious identity from politics might be a solution for the future. Additionally, stopping the co-optation of religion for political ends holds the potential to dismantle the dangerous faultlines plaguing the region.


Vjekoslav Perica commented that the problem in the Balkans has been that religion has been co-opted for political ends, leaving an empty shell devoid of the peace-building qualities fundamental to those religions' doctrines. This sentiment underscores the importance of establishing a more stable divide between religious identity and politics in the Balkans.


All in all, warfare, ethnic cleansing, and organized violence -- based in religious conflict -- continue to threaten the stability of the Balkans.



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