THE BRIDGE BETRAYED: RELIGION AND GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA

BY MICHAEL A. SELLS (PUBLISHED 1998 BY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.  ISBN: 0-21662-8) 244 pages

In our increasingly fundamentalist country it should come as no surprise to any freethinker that during and since the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, the mainstream media has largely ignored the war’s religious dimensions.  While few people living in Bosnia escaped the ravages of this war, it is the Muslim community that has been its primary victims.  Michael Sells, author of Mystical Languages Of Unsayi has produced this work, originally published during the conflict.  The Bridge Betrayedattempts to set the historical record straight and, by doing so, explain the origins of the 1990s war.  The book’s title refers to an ancient bridge which was demolished by Croatian religious fanatics in 1993.  What sets Sells’ work apart from other contemporary accounts is that he makes no effort to deny the role of religion in fanning the flames of religious strife in Bosnia.  His theme, that religious mythology, militant nationalism, and racist ideology are indelibly intertwined, is well thought-out and presented.

The Bridge Betrayed begins by tracing the present conflict to its historical genesis.  The battle of Kosovo in 1389 is a turning point in Balkan history, and its significance has assumed miasmic (and mystical) proportions up to the present day.  The hero of the 1389 conflict, Prince Lazar, has been transformed by modern Christian nationalists into a sort of Serbian Golgotha, a Christ-like figure who was martyred by the Muslims.  Here, we see a typically Christian rationalization for the 1990s massacre of Muslims as being somehow justified.  Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006) was a leading rabble rouser in the anti-Muslim hysteria that engulfed the country and its surrounding environs, using the medieval 1389 battle in a propagandistic effort to justify a new “Crusade” against the Muslim “infidels,” as well as against other perceived enemies.

The justification for this new crusade is based on Chrystoslavism, the idea that the Slavic people are inherently Christian and that any apostasy comes about due to a degeneration of the Slavic race.  Thus, according to this ludicrous rationalizing, it is irrelevant whether a Muslim is Slav or Albanian; all are mystically transformed into Turks in their opponents eyes and as such responsible for the death of Lazar.

Of course, this is yet another example of the racist religious mindset that inspired the original Crusades (to say nothing of Hitler’s Holocaust).  It shows once again, if any further proof were remotely needed, the power of absolutist religion to divide people and turn them against one another.  The entire Bosnian conflict, which has usually been portrayed as a nationalist struggle while its religious element is dismissed has, as Sells brilliantly explains, an indisputably religious foundation.

The atrocities, destruction, and horrors of the Bosnian war serve as a stark illustration of a recurring theme in world history: the attempt to eliminate not only perceived infidels, but all traces of their culture.  Sells details so much of this, including the destruction of the bridge and other cultural and historical landmarks, the destruction of some fourteen hundred mosques, and the burning of libraries and museums, that only a true religious fanatic could deny the role played by religion in the conflict.  Sells makes it abundantly clear that contemporary Christian terrorists, although never referred to as such by the media, are in fact spiritual descendants of their medieval crusading ancestors, who in a like manner also sought to eliminate not only dissent, but all traces that dissent and countercultures ever existed.  This method has allowed the various Christian churches to write history in the way they want it to be rewritten.

For anyone seeking the true story of the genocidal conflict in Bosnia, The Bridge Betrayed is an absolutes necessity.  Michael Sells deserves congratulations for his honest appraisal of the real historical roots of this religious conflict.