The statement in my opening posting was not that Patriarch Pavle supported the government in Serbia, but that he supported radical Serb nationalists. In fact, Pavle and the other Serb clergy oppose Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic (who is viewed as not nationalist enough), but have consistently supported Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both of whom have been indicted by the International Tribunal on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia on multiple charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. If you have information that Pavle has condemned Karadzic and Mladic, supported the Dayton accord by which they should be extradited to The Hague, or condemned, specifically, their actions at places like Srebrenica and Omarska, please do let us know the specific texts. My points are made here as hypotheses. The support I see for Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic has come in many forms. These include the following: 1) Pavle's general support for Karadzic and Mladic in their four year opposition to various peace plans giving 31% of Serbs in Bosnia 49% of the land, as supposedly unfair to Serbs. 2) Recent statements by Patriarch Pavle and Bishop Atanasije, among others, that there should be no Serb cooperation with the International War Crimes Tribunal. I will offer a separate posting with documentation on this. 3) Pavle's endorsement of a historical and religious mythology that portrays Slavic Muslims as aliens (having come, claims Pavle, to the Balkans with the Ottomans!), and therefore, implicitly not deserving to exist in the Balkans. 4) The Serb Synod's denial of the existence of concentration camps in Bosnia. 5) Pavle's very problematic statement on the Serb atrocities against Muslims and Croats in Banja Luka. 6) Pavle's endorsement of the claim, popular among the Serb militants and among those in the West who wish to excuse them, that "everyone is guilty" in Bosnia. This claim leads directly to the moral equivalence of the leader of genocide squads like Arkan to a child who has been left orphaned and exposed to torture and rape at a place like Srebrenica. The "everyone is guilty" language of Pavle is an implicit endorsement for any crime, because, since everyone is guilty, it becomes impossible to hold any individual accountable. This theology of "everyone is guilty" fits in perfectly with the attack on the International Tribunal on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia. While Patriarch Pavle has made generalized statements condemning persecution and violence on all sides, his moral support for Karadzic and Mladic has been unwavering. Over the course of time, I will be documenting each of the five points made above. For now just a few examples.
In 1994, negotiators for the "Contact Group" (Britain, France, the U.S., Russia, and Germany) suggested a peace plan that would give the 32% of Serbs in Bosnia 49% of the land, including the areas on which they carried out the most systematic "ethnic cleansing"; the Serbian Orthodox Church attacked the peace plan as unfair, to Serbs. [BBC Monitoring Summary of World Broadcasts, July 7,1994, "Yugoslavia: Serb Bishops Appeal for Rejection of Contact Group's Maps." Tanjug news agency, Belgrade, in Serbo-Croat 1550 gmt 5 Jul 94:Belgrade, 5th July]. In urging rejection of the peace plan, the synod stated that it was speaking not just as a political party, but as "Christ's church of this God-loving people at a time of serious temptations for our history and the history of humankind"--to the people whom it has guided upon "Christ's Via Dolorosa for centuries."
Patriarch Pavle, the leader of the worldwide Serbian Orthodox Church claimed that Serbs were native to Bosnia-Herzegovina, whereas the Muslims had arrived with the Ottoman invasion. Patriarch Pavle claims concerning essentially alien character of slavic Muslims who somewhere were supposed to "have arrived in the Balkans with the Ottomans"(!?) Pavle endorses a central component of the ideology of genocide. In fact, the ancestors of both the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims had lived in the area long before the Ottoman conquest. Sarajevo was established by the Ottomans as a major economic, cultural, and political center. But the mythologized history promulgated Patriarch Pavle implies that Slavic Muslims had no right to land in Bosnia because they lacked ethnoreligious priority. People whose ancestors arrived with the ancestors of their Serb neighbors were relegated to a permanent alienness and denied any claim to existence in the region.
After revelations of the killing camps, organized rape, and systematic destruction of mosques, the Serbian Orthodox Church led the way in denial. The Church's government body, the Holy Episcopal Synod, stated: "In the name of God's truth and on the testimony from our brother bishops from Bosnia-Herzegovina and from other trustworthy witnesses, we declare, taking full moral responsibility, that such camps neither have existed nor exist in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina." The Synod also wrote a protest against the European indifference to genocide in Bosnia--the alleged genocide against Serbs. The document was composed in May, 1992, while the Serb armies were rampaging triumphantly through Bosnia and hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs were being killed and driven from their homes, before the eyes of local Serbian Orthodox priests and bishops. [See "The Extraordinary Session of the Holy Episcopal Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Response to the False Accusations against the Serbian People in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Pravoslavni misionar; June, 1992, pp. 250-51, cited by Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia, p. 89; and Memorandum of the Holy Episcopal Synod's session of May 14-20, 1992, Pravoslavlje, June 1, 1992, p. 2, in Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia, p. 78.]