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The Role of Religion in the Yugoslav War
by Mohamed Elzarka

Introduction
In the early 1990s, the Southeastern corner of 

Europe exploded in a firestorm of war and violence 
between the different republics of the Socialist 
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Civil war broke out 
as tensions flared between different religious and 
ethnic groups, and the republics that comprised 
the nation declared their independence. Starting 
with Slovenia’s initial declaration and succeeded 
by similar decrees in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and 
elsewhere, one nation was transformed into seven at 
the expense of nearly a decade of violence. According 
to the International Center for Transitional Justice  
(2009), the conflict included “widespread attacks 
against civilians, population expulsions, systematic 
rape and the use of concentration camps.” Most of 
the massacres occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
Croatia, and Kosovo and, by the war’s end, “over 
140,000 people were killed and almost 4 million 
others displaced” across the region (International 
Center for Transitional Justice, 2009). 

In addition to the violence between the armies 
of each republic, massive genocidal and ethnic 
cleansing campaigns were executed by makeshift 
soldiers who were normal citizens only a few years 
prior. In the case of the Srebrenica Massacre, for 
example, “more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men 
and boys were systematically massacred and buried 
in mass graves, thousands of women, children and 
elderly people were forcibly deported, [and] a large 
number of women were raped” (Remembering 
Srebrenica, n.d.). This makes the atrocity the worst 
in Europe since World War II and highlights the 
severity of the conflict, as examples like Srebrenica 
were not unique when it comes to the crimes that the 
explosion of the “Balkan keg” brought about. 

This paper will examine the importance that 
religion had in the development towards war and 
how religion and religious identity were used as 
tools by political actors to breed mistrust and incite 
violence. By examining the historical significance 

of religion in the region, we will identify how the 
close association of religious identity with ethnic 
identity divided and polarized different religious 
groups against one another for several centuries. The 
paper will then explore how the polarization of these 
groups was compounded by economic and cultural 
differences, which further exacerbated the tensions 
and how these tensions translated into historical 
conflict over the course of the 20th century. Finally, 
commentary on the historical pressures in the 
Balkans will be unified with a discussion of some of 
the rhetoric and political actions that immediately 
preceded the war to determine how differences in 
religious and ethnic identity were used as motivators 
for war and how the political tensions between the 
different Yugoslav republics increased as a result.  

Historical Perspective on Religious and Ethnic 
Divides

In order to comprehend the conflict in greater 
detail, it is important first to understand more about 
the region as a whole and the religious divides that 
define it. Perhaps the most important concept to 
grasp when examining the Yugoslav Civil War is 
that religion in the former Yugoslavia is almost 
synonymous with ethnicity. In the Slavonic and 
East European Review nearly 30 years before the 
war’s onset, David Dyker describes the religious 
and political realities between the Serbs, Bosniaks, 
and Croats of the area. Dyker highlights that nearly 
all Serbs are Eastern Orthodox in their practice of 
Christianity, that Croats are ubiquitously Catholic, 
and that Bosniaks are almost completely Muslim 
(Dyker, 1972). In fact, the extent to which religion 
defines ethnicity can be found in some of the earliest 
censuses that Dyker showcases in his article. In an 
Austro-Hungarian census from 1879, Bosniaks were 
not even identified by their ethnic status, but by 
their religious one. Using the term “ethnic Moslem” 
as a racial identifier, the language of the census 
underscores the close affiliation that religion and 



The Role of Religion in the Yugoslav War

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201830

ethnicity have in the land of the South Slavs. This 
affiliation was so strong that changing one form of 
identity might constitute changing the other. In the 
Austrian History Yearbook of 1967, Michael Petrovich 
details that “religion was not so much a matter of 
private conscience as of one’s public identity. In 
some cases, the identification between religion and 
nationality was so great that a religious conversion 
automatically entailed a change of nationality, in the 
eyes of others if not in those of the convert himself ” 
(Petrovich, 1967). In this way, religion and ethnicity 
were one and the same in Yugoslavia for generations 
before the war began. 

This complete concordance between the two 
identities is not only a unique and interesting 
distinction, but also serves an important role in 
addressing how the tensions between the different 
groups grew to such elevated levels, and how the 
ethno-religious groups of the Balkans often perceived 
themselves as having less in common with one 
another, despite a shared language and frequently a 
shared nationality. It is first important to note that 
despite strong ties between the constructs of religion 
and ethnicity in the Balkans, the interrelation of these 
two elements of identity and the extent to which their 
relationship has been a catalyst for armed conflict 
are nuanced and ever-changing over the course of 
history. Indeed, people of distinct ethnicities and 
religions have coexisted rather peacefully in the 
region for centuries despite the intermittent conflict 
that is to be discussed. According to Kanchan 
Chandra’s constructivist viewpoint of ethnicity—
which is predicated on the belief that “ethnic 
identities are not singular, nor are they fixed”—the 
kind of separation between the different religious and 
ethnic identities of Yugoslavs was not an eternal and 
undying phenomenon. Instead, Chandra argues that 
identities like the aforementioned can change, and 
underscores examples where they have—sometimes 
very drastically (Chandra, 2012). In all cases, she 
attributes these changes to complementary changes 
in the environment, perception, or thoughts of the 
people in question. In essence, racial and ethnic 
categories are created through experience and by 
influences over the course of history. 

With this point in mind, it is imperative to 
examine how the seemingly inseparable racial and 
ethnic identities of Yugoslavia were actually shaped 

and molded into their contemporary existence. 
According to historian Florian Bieber, much of the 
polarization between the groups may be attributed to 
historical developments in the region. He highlights, 
for example, a specific instance in the 14th century 
when the height of the medieval Serbian state was 
reached. At this time, Serbian king Stefan Dusan 
controlled a large portion of the Balkans. Soon, 
however, his empire was destroyed and fragmented 
by the arrival of the Ottomans, who defeated the Serbs 
in the Battle of Kosovo Polje (Bieber & Dastalovski, 
2003). This battle, to nearly all Serb nationals, 
signified the beginning of the unjust Ottoman 
conquest of their lands. For these Serbs, the arrival 
of the Ottomans began a period of repression and 
maltreatment, something for which a longstanding 
begrudging attitude would be held. Dimitrije 
Djordjevich describes how the day on which the 
battle was fought has even taken on its own national 
symbolism as Vidovdan, or St. Vitus’s Day, and has 
remained part of the Serbian national consciousness 
since the day that the battle took place. He highlights 
how “generations of Serbs and historians divided the 
national past into two periods: before and after the 
Kosovo Battle” (Djordjevich, 1999). The reverence 
with which this battle is remembered signifies the 
prevalence of a strong anti-Ottoman sentiment that 
concentrated itself in Serbia for centuries. 

This mindset against the Ottomans would also 
be translated into a hatred of the Islamic religion 
that the Ottomans brought with them. For many 
Serbs, “Turkish” and “Muslim” were synonymous. 
This is made evident by the term “Turcin,” which 
was formerly used to denote members of the Islamic 
religious community despite the fact that there is no 
significant evidence linking Yugoslavia’s Muslims 
to ethnic Turkish ancestry (Dyker, 1972). Instead, 
as Dyker describes, the term derives from the close 
association that Serbs held between Ottomans and 
those ethnic Slavs who converted to Islam upon 
the arrival of the Ottomans. Many ethnic Bosniaks, 
who at the time of Ottoman conquest were part 
of an independent Bosnian Church, were already 
perceived as heretics of both the Catholic and 
Orthodox churches for their differences in belief. 
This group of Slavs did not identify with many of the 
religious ideologies of either institution, and thus 
soon latched on to Islam when it was presented to 



The Role of Religion in the Yugoslav War

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201831

them as an alternative (Dyker, 1972). Many other 
adherents of Catholicism and Orthodoxy also 
became Muslim due to the benefits of doing so 
under Islamic law and with hopes of stepping up the 
Ottoman power pyramid. Those who converted paid 
a lesser tax and had more positions of advancement 
in the regional governments and martial hierarchy 
available to them, so conversion was widespread 
(Slack, 2001).

With past heretics and a mass of formerly Catholic 
and Orthodox adherents joining this new faith of the 
incoming conquerors, the Slavic churches were pitted 
against Islam. This spelled trouble moving forward, as 
these churches played an important role as “cultural 
and quasi-political institution[s]” (Perica, 2002) in 
the governance of ideologies among their adherents. 
By serving as “the historic repository of nationhood, 
national values, and quite often, as the savior of a 
nation’s very existence” (Radu, 1998), these churches 
were able to shape the national dialogue for many 
centuries to come and keep incidents like Vidovdan 
and the maltreatment of the Serbian people by the 
Muslim Ottomans at the forefront of the national 
consciousness. In this way, they were able to shape 
the divide between the Muslim and Christian groups 
and exacerbate the tensions felt on both sides.

The interreligious conflict was not limited 
exclusively to Christians and Muslims, either. 
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbians also had 
extensive historical differences that pitted them 
against one another. According to Slack (2001), 
“From the ninth century, the Church of Rome 
brought religion, education, and literature in the Latin 
alphabet to Croatia and Dalmatia, while the Church 
of Byzantium in Constantinople brought Eastern 
Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet to 
Bulgaria, Macedonia, and eventually most of Serbia.” 
These two churches set up important differences in 
the cultures of the two regions which evolved into 
marked changes in the economies of these areas. The 
north—comprised mainly of Croatia and Slovenia—
had a Latinic alphabet and was predominantly 
Catholic, which fostered close ties to contemporary 
European powers like Italy as they engaged in the 
Industrial Revolution. Serbia and the rest of the 
south, however, were relatively underdeveloped with 
closer ties to antiquated Russia through the Cyrillic 
alphabet and Eastern Orthodoxy. As a result, Croatia 

was significantly more economically successful than 
Serbia (Bertsch, 1977). Michael Radu postulates that 
“perhaps the primary source of political conflict in 
Yugoslavia [in the time of war] results from regional 
and, hence, ethnic inequalities in the goods and 
services produced and consumed by the different 
peoples” (Radu, 1998). In other words, not only was 
the eventual split of Croatia and Slovenia from the 
rest of Yugoslavia politically damaging, but it also 
endangered Serbian economic success. Thus, the 
different economic and cultural environments set 
up by the respective churches of these two regions 
further polarized them. 

History of Conflict in the 20th Century
This extensive history of religious tensions 

also transcends the antiquated past into the more 
modern day. An example of continuing pressures in 
more recent times can be found when examining the 
events that led up to the outbreak of World War I. 
After the Ottomans were driven out of the Balkans in 
the early 20th century, an independent Serbian state 
was created. Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, however, 
were incorporated in the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire (“Yugoslavia,” 2014). This incorporation 
was relatively well-received by most Croats, as the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire was favorable to them 
given that its population was 90% Catholic (Bloy, 
2013). Serbs, on the other hand, felt wronged by 
this apparent disregard of their perpetual strife 
against the Ottomans and the role that they played 
in driving them out. For nationalistic organizations 
like The Black Hand, Bosnia and Croatia were 
Serbian lands and they should have been integrated 
into the Serbian state when Ottoman property was 
reapportioned (The Constitution of the Black Hand, 
1911). Because this integration did not take place 
initially, the Black Hand and other organizations 
took drastic measures to try to make their dream of 
a “unified Serbdom” a reality. 

On perhaps one of the most infamous days 
in history, group member Gavrilo Princip shot 
Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand 
in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in a demonstration of the 
displeasure that he and other Serbs had for the 
Austro-Hungarian occupation of “Serbian” Bosnia. 
This event triggered the First World War for reasons 
of European alignment that are outside the scope of 



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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201832

this paper, but it also shows the great length to which 
nationalists at the time were willing to go when it 
came to making their claim on land in the region. 
The occasion thus demonstrates the important role 
that claims over land played at this point in history. 
In a world without an Ottoman occupying force, the 
designation of which religious and ethnic groups 
should have which land became a rallying point for 
many nationalistic organizations (Slack, 2001). 

This struggle over land did not cease with the 
onset of the war or even its conclusion. Over the 
course of World War I, “both Serbian and Croatian 
nationalist movements emerged within Bosnia, 
each with aspirations for absorbing Bosnia into a 
Greater Croatia and a Greater Serbia, respectively” 
(Slack, 2001). By the war’s end, these movements 
were largely unsuccessful and a new Kingdom of 
Yugoslavia that incorporated Bosnia, Croatia, and 
Serbia was established. The success of this kingdom 
was short-lived, however, as World War II soon 
broke out and ethnic and religious tensions flared 
once again in the Balkans. 

During World War II, two major nationalist 
groups competed for dominance in the region. One, 
the Ustase, was “an ultranationalist political group 
that blended elements of Fascism with Catholic 
Fundamentalism to empower the Croats against 
their perceived Serbian oppressors” (Ferraro, 2011). 
This group, as Ferraro explains, “never accepted 
the legitimacy of the centralized, Serb-dominated 
Yugoslav state and campaigned continually for 
greater autonomy.” Their main goal was to produce 
a “racially pure” Croatian state, which entailed 
widespread persecution against Serbs, gypsies, and 
Jews. Interestingly, though, the Ustase movement 
promoted ethnic Muslims as a constituent people 
of Croatia alongside Catholics (Jelic-Butic, 1977). 
Fikreta Jelic-Butic attributes this decree to a desire 
to oust and defeat the Serbs at all costs. Had the 
Ustase not reconciled differences with the Muslims, 
it would have been very difficult to combat the Serbs 
who had tried to conquer their more developed 
region previously. 

The Ustase used a comparable alliance with 
the Axis Powers—who shared similar ideologies of 
fascism and racial purism—during the course of the 
war to grow their power and exact their vengeance 
on the Serbs (Ferraro, 2011). When the Croatian 

state declared its independence from the Kingdom 
of Yugoslavia in 1939, Ustase extremists reached out 
to the Axis Powers with an outline of their beliefs and 
expression of backing. In return, they were supplied 
with support that afforded them the ability to seize 
control of the new nation’s government. Thus, 
the movement which had previously been fairly 
underground and employed a great deal of guerrilla 
fighting now had access to all the resources of full 
nationhood. With their new resources, the Ustase 
constructed concentration camps very similar to 
contemporary ones in Germany and Poland where 
they systematically killed ethnic Serbs en masse. The 
death toll of the largest of these camps—Jasenovac—
is estimated to be between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs, 
in addition to 27,000 to 40,000 Jews and people of 
Roma ancestry (United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum, n.d.). Estimates for the total number 
of Serbs killed by the Ustase are still a matter of 
controversy, but range from at least 200,000 to as 
many as 500,000 (Yeomans, 2013). Several estimates 
place this figure at approximately 400,000 (Ferraro, 
2011; Mirkovic, 1999). This war crime would later 
serve as a rallying point for Serbian nationalism and 
rising anti-Croat sentiment in the republic. 

On the other side of the conflict were the Serbian 
Chetniks, a resistance movement fighting mostly 
against Nazi Germany and the Independent State of 
Croatia. With very similar goals and methodologies 
as their Croatian counterparts, the Chetniks sought 
to establish an enlarged “Greater Serbia” state and 
were notorious for terrorizing citizens (Ferraro, 
2011). To counter the violence against Serbs by the 
Ustase, the Chetniks targeted and murdered Ustase 
or those sympathetic to their cause. In addition, they 
concentrated violence against Muslims from Bosnia, 
Kosovo, and Albania, who they viewed as historical 
enemies from the aforementioned Ottoman 
conquest. 

These two groups engaged in nearly constant 
fighting that spanned the entire region during the 
course of the war (Ferraro, 2011). The movements, 
however, eventually lost their traction among their 
respective native populations for the extent of the 
violence in which they engaged (“Yugoslavia,” 2014). 
This was compounded by an increasingly dominant 
Ally performance in Europe and the advent of a new 
Communist Partisan movement which was Ally-



The Role of Religion in the Yugoslav War

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201833

backed. The Ustase and Chetniks were therefore 
replaced by the more united Communist Partisans 
who routed them in battle after battle near the end of 
the war. The Partisans, led by engaging Communist 
Party leader Josip Broz Tito, took control of 
Yugoslavia when the fighting ceased and established 
a new multinational, multiethnic country with semi-
autonomous republics (Djilas, 1995). 

Tito and his advisors initially tried to establish a 
comprehensive Yugoslav identity among the populace 
by which all peoples in the nation could identify, 
regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation. They 
did this by redirecting focus from ethnic tensions to 
the shared success that the new country could have 
as a Communist powerhouse. Concentrating on the 
idea that nationalism was a capitalist construct and 
that religious divides limited the productivity of 
the workforce, the Communists tried to eradicate 
the notion of religious or ethnic divisions that had 
played so major a part in Yugoslavia’s past (Djilas, 
1995). Tito encouraged members of each republic 
to embrace Communism’s stance on egalitarianism 
and to look upon their brothers in sister republics 
with favor. As the popular saying went, however, 
President Tito still seemed to be the only Yugoslav in 
the nation after numerous policies trying to change 
Yugoslavian culture were laid out. In this way, the 
Communist government was eventually forced 
to recognize the important role of religions in the 
nation and began to work more closely to keep the 
different religious groups appeased and not at odds 
with one another. 

The Road to War
This policy of appeasement worked relatively well 

for nearly a half-century and no major outbreaks of 
violence plagued the tumultuous region. In the few 
years preceding the onset of the Civil War, however, 
things began to change for the worse and tensions 
grew more heated. Much of this change has been 
attributed to the rhetoric and political action of 
young Serb politician Slobodan Milosevic (Doder 
& Branson, 1995). At first just an elected member 
of the Communist Party in Serbia, Milosevic rose 
to prominence after becoming a vocal supporter 
of limited autonomy for Muslim Kosovans within 
the Serbian republic (“Yugoslavia,” 2014). His fiery 
speeches and impassioned addresses drew many 
Serbs to him, and he was elected to the presidency of 
the republic in 1989. 

As president, Milosevic continued to supply the 
Serbian people with heated dialogue like, “At home 
and abroad, Serbia’s enemies are massing against us. 
We say to them ‘We are not afraid.’ ‘We will not flinch 
from battle’” (Milosevic, 1989). He combined this 
rhetoric with tangible action by following through 
on his campaign promises and enacting reforms 
that constrained the Kosovan sub-republic. In 
March 1989, the crisis in Serbia deepened after the 
adoption of amendments to the Serbian constitution 
that allowed the Serbian republic’s government to 
reassert effective power over Kosovo (“Yugoslavia,” 
2014). This action in turn sparked a hunger strike 
among miners in Kosovo in protest of the new limits 
placed on Kosovan freedoms. The strike soon gained 
support in both Slovenia and Croatia, as leaders in 
both countries called for Milosevic to redact his 
reforms and meet the desires of the Kosovans. 

Milosevic refused, instead choosing to speak in 
Kosovo on the 600th Anniversary of the Battle of 
Kosovo Polje. In his famous Gazimestan Speech, 
Milosevic addressed the nearly two million Serbs 
gathered while flanked by ornately-dressed Serbian 
priests. In his speech, he explained to the gathered 
masses the importance of Kosovo Polje and Vidovdan 
in Serbian history, making numerous references to 
the valor and honor with which the Serbs fought 
their Ottoman oppressors. Drawing on the memory 
of the battle that had been imbued in the minds 
of the Serbian people by the Orthodox Church, 
Milosevic discussed the perseverance of the Serbs 
and asserted that no one would ever be able to again 
conquer them. As Doder points out, “he identified 
with a holy cause and invoked a spirit of violence” 
that provided the beginnings of a nationalistic 
spirit which would divide the country (Doder & 
Branson, 1999). Perhaps the most telling sign of the 
conflict to come was the phrase that Milosevic said 
near the end of his speech: “After six centuries we 
are again waging struggle and confronting battles. 
These are not armed struggles, though that cannot 
yet be excluded” (Milosevic, 1989). Historians of 
Yugoslavia’s dissolution identify this moment as one 
of the most pivotal when discussing the ensuing 
conflict (“Yugoslavia,” 2014). For the first time since 
World War II, a Yugoslav politician on the national 
stage had suggested violence as a possible measure 
to assert dominance within the region and subdue a 
rival religious and ethnic group. 



The Role of Religion in the Yugoslav War

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201834

This statement and others went over poorly 
in other republics, namely Croatia, where new 
president Franjo Tudman was elected on a 
platform of “protect[ing] Croatia from Milosevic” 
(Perica, 2002) and his nationalized intentions. The 
statements also exacerbated the religious and ethnic 
divide in places like Croatia, where Serbs who lived 
in the south of Croatia demanded to join their 
land with that of Milosevic and the rest of Serbia, 
despite having peacefully lived with their Croatian 
neighbors for decades. Milosevic capitalized on 
this desire by insisting that such unification was 
necessary. Again relying on historical developments 
to excite emotionally-charged actions, he quipped 
that if the unification did not take place, then the 
Serbs in Croatia would be treated as they were by 
the Ustase government of World War II. Eventually, 
the extent of this warmongering and nationalistic 
rhetoric on the part of Milosevic forced the hand of 
Croatia and Slovenia, who both called referendums 
on independence and subsequently declared their 
cessation from Yugoslavia. 

Conclusion
From the research presented, it can be concluded 

that religion and religious differences in the Yugoslav 
War were more the tools of political actors like 
Milosevic to nationalize their people than they 
were differences which would have inherently led 
to conflict on their own. While it is true that the 
region has an extensive historical record of conflict, 
politicians had to pull on violent acts from decades 
if not centuries prior to incite the kind of hatred 
and tension needed to begin a civil war. At the same 
time, it is important to understand these historical 
occurrences, as they played a major role in defining 
how the congruent religious and ethnic identities 
of Yugoslavia were first formed and how historical 
animosity between these groups was created. A long 
record of bloody and brutal interaction between 
the peoples of the different areas—and the constant 
reminders of the misdeeds of other religious groups 
provided by religious institutions like the Orthodox 
Church to their adherents—served as the powder 
that made the Balkans a keg ready to explode. When 
fiery speeches and impassioned commentary on 
historical conflict and perceived differences ignited 
the powder, one of the most deadly and harrowing 
civil wars of recent memory began. 

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