The Orthodox Church

As it would happen, again, by default, I live in the cradle of the Orthodoxy here in Banja Luka. An aerial view of Serbska would look agrarian, some electricity posts, some crosses rivaling the seven-story Soviet apartment monoliths, and no buildings to speak of because there is no economy. As said before, this is the ghetto for those people who have know place else to be and I should add, can't go anywhere else.

Apart from the highly overrated, natural beauty, there is a whole lot of nothing here, which spells trouble for teens. Truth be known, the natural beauty in Serbska exists simply because it wasn’t ripped apart from the ground up by bombshells...

As history tells, people who are marginalized or oppressed will often organize around victimization. The Orthodox Church did suffer through some great vicissitudes, and from this collective suffering, the followers' remorse strengthened to the extent that to be a Serbian is to be sacred. If this sacred nature is not neutralized or integrated into an open society, it will only be met by zealotry. History evidenced this in: Hitler’s Germany, Liberia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and fundamentalist groups in Britain, Pakistan and East Asia.

In many cases, the church protects this population as much as a prophet or patriarch can, and in due time, the state gathers its flailing constituent parties for reasons of their own accords, flips the switch, creates an enemy, who purports some kind of threat, and the propaganda begins pumping like a pulp mill, relentless, into the atmosphere.

Thus together, the Orthodox Church and the Serbian State cultivated and used this collective victimisation stemming from the Ottoman to WWII to NATO, Kosovo and the hereafter, to create a sense of deserved retribution. More importantly, the form in which this duty was carried out to resurrect the Kingdom of Serbia, if you will, is boundless and knows no Geneva Codes. The cause at all costs is righteous, however blind-sighted.

This includes the movement of Bosnia-Serbs’ illegal creation of an autonomous state in the Federation, which was done out of resistance to Bosnia's independence from Yugoslavia. This unacknowledged state called the Republic of Serbska was carved out and in the process, Bosnian Serbs systemically terrorised Bosniaks in the region. Outside the state, they destroyed any semblance of Bosniak culture including historic buildings, libraries, museums and so forth during their occupation of Sarajevo from 1991-1995.

To hit it home, the only blowing up here in the cradle of Banja Luka was 16 Mosques and some 5 Catholic churches, all else is left unharmed. Of the 30,000 Muslims that once lived here, there are now less than 9,000. During the war, they were harassed, raped and lead to work camps or marched out of town.

Not the most charming of towns...