Christoslavism is the belief that Slavs are inherently Christian, and that any conversion of a Slav to another religion is a conversion of race or ethnicity: from Slav to Turk. Christoslavism involves a particular ideology of conversion that maintains that those Slavs who converted to Islam were the dregs of society, the cowards and the greedy, and by converting to Islam actually changed their ethnicity and race to Turkish. Furthermore, as explicitly stated by ideologues such as Belgrade Professor Miroljub Jevtic the Slavic descendantss of these converts of 4-5 hundred years ago "bear the blood on their hands" of Serbs killed in the original Ottoman invasion of the Balkans.
This ideology of conversion as racio-religious transformation is bound up with a particularly powerful symbol: the presentation of the Serbian Prince Lazar, killed in the battle of Kosovo in 1389, as an explicit Christ figure, surrounded by disciples, betrayed by a Judas, and killed by Christ-killers (Turks).
Thus, in the ideology of Christoslavism, Turks and Slavic Muslims (who according to the ideology become Turk by converting from Christianity) are, in the most powerful symbolic terms, treated as Christ-killers and bear an eternal and infinite guilt that takes away any claim they have to be considered human beings or to exist Slavic areas. Thus when a Professor Mirojlub Jevtic writes of Slavic Muslims of today as "bearing the blood on their hands" of Serbian martyrs of five hundred years ago, he is able to do so because of the way religious symbols, such as the Christ-Killer motif, collapse time and transform the Slavic Muslim friend next door into an eternal enemy responsible for an eternal crime, outside of all temporal boundaries. It is as if the friend next door were suddenly revealed to be killing the Christ-Prince Lazar right before one's eyes in the present moment.
In order to explain the specific roots and extent of this ideology of Christolavism, I will discuss its two most famous exponents. The two authors are Bishop Petar II Petrovic, known as Njegos, who composed the central text of Serbian religious nationalism, The Mountain Wreath, and Ivo Andric, who adopted Njegos's ideas, combined them with early 20th century notions of race, and definitively expressed them in his popular novels and in his scholarly dissertation.
Another component of Christoslavism entails the movement from ideology to the specific activity known as "ethnic cleansing." This movement began in the late 1980's in the Kosovo provice of Serbia, was harnessed and exploited by Slobodan Milosevic in his rise to power, and was unleashed on Bosnia in the spring of 1992 with genocidal consequences. The religious anger over the ancient battle of Kosovo was cunningly combined with the recent and painful memory of Serb victims of WW2 at the hands of the Ustashe.
In the postings that follow I will examine, carefully, the major religious components behind the Christoslavic movement in Bosnia. These components, in order will be:
1) Njegos's Mountain Wreath, the notion of Slavic Muslims as Christ Killers, and the idea that the extermination of Slavic Muslims is a sacred, religious act.
2) Christoslav ideology in the works of Ivo Andric, the notion that religious conversion necessarily entails racial conversion, and the influence of Njegos on both Croat and Serb religious nationalists.
3) The conflict over Kosovo, the "Serb Jerusalem" and site of Serbia's most sacred site and most brilliant religious art and architecture. The role of that conflict in the radicalizing of Serb religious nationalism.
4) The way in which religious rituals were exploited to combine and conflate the death of Lazar in 1389 and the persecution of Serbs by the Ustashe during WW2 and to channel both events into the present.
5) The turning of such robust Christoslavic religious mythology into an active political and military campaign to "cleanse" the South Slavs of the supposedly alien "Turks" or "Balije" (that is, the Slavic Muslims in Bosnia). This latter topic will involve the use of militias or genocide squads such as the White Eagles, Yellow Wasps, and Arkan's Tigers, their protection and support by the Milosevic secret police, their cooperation with the Yugoslav army, and their network of lucrative business and financial transactions.
Note: The text of Belgrade professor Dr. Miroljub Jevtic, in which he vilifies all Muslims and confuses Muslim religion with Arab and other ethnicities, and in which he announces that Slavic Muslims of today bear on their hands the blood of ancient Serb martyrs can be found translated from the original appearance in the Serbian newspaper Duga in both H.T. Norris's Islam in the Balkans, New York University Press, 1993 (in the appendix) and in Norman Cigar's Genocide in Bosnia, Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
Michael Sells