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Croatian Chic

EXTREMIST BALKAN UNIVERSITY BOASTS SUPPORT OF USF

By Stephen Schwartz

The institution calling itself "the University of Mostar" has been described as "the only racist 'university' in the world," yet it benefits from an apparently unwitting blessing by the Jesuit University of San Francisco, a school known for its commitment to "multiculturalism."

To understand the "University of Mostar," one must first examine some Bosnian background. Until the outbreak of the Bosnian wars, the Djemal Bedic University was mainly a technical and agricultural school, located in the striking old city of Mostar. It was the only college in Herzegovina, of which Mostar is the main town. The first university-level institution in Mostar, a Franciscan seminary, had been closed by the Communist authorities after World War II.

Students from the area of Mostar, which is near Medjugorje, typically went to the University of Sarajevo for academic training. In 1992, Serbian Communist dictator Slobodan Milosevic, having conducted war against Croatia, launched an assault on Croats and Muslims of Bosnia. Yugoslav Communist troops and Serb ultranationalist terrorists poured into Bosnia and began a three-year rampage of mass murder, rape, cultural vandalism and pillage.

Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims united with Jews and pro-Bosnian Serbs to defend Bosnia. But in 1993, the Croatian authoritarian regime of Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (its acronym in Croatian is HDZ) decided the time had come for the Croats to break the alliance with the Muslims and to try to carve off Western Herzegovina, which has a Croatian majority, for themselves.

Croat troops attacked Muslims all over Bosnia, and although they did not engage in mass rapes, thousands of Muslims were driven from their homes in terrorist raids, and Croats carried out wholesale destruction of old mosques, Turkish-style dwellings, and other priceless monuments. In the worst such incident, the Old Bridge at Mostar, which symbolized the role of the city as a link between East and West (Mostar takes its name from the Slavic word "most" or bridge) was blown up by Croat troops.

The intent in this criminal act was simple: to make the division of Mostar between the Croat zone on the city's West side and the Muslims in the East zone permanent. And to a great extent, the effort succeeded -- Mostar remains the only truly divided city in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Trips across the line by locals are rare and risky, and even some foreigners are in danger if they travel back and forth.

But the splitting up of a multireligious community that had existed for half a millennium could not have been accomplished by artillery fire; the survival of Sarajevo proved that. To make segregation of Herzegovinian Croats and Muslims work, a cultural division was necessary as well.

It was then that Croat authorities in West Mostar seized the Djemal Bedic University and declared it the "Croatian University of Mostar." Muslim professors and students were driven out and obliged to reestablish their institution in the ruins of a former military barracks.

The Croatian facility was branded "the only truly racist 'university' in the world" by one Bosnian scholar and teacher who requested anonymity. Its curriculum is plainly ultranationalist. It exists, according to its catalogue, "to assure the survival of Bosnian Croatian culture as part of Europe."

The 'university' has adopted a curriculum that is anything but universal and humanistic. Its literary section offers only three options: Croatian studies, Anglo-American studies, and German studies. In examining its catalogue one would never imagine that Serbian, Yugoslav, general Slavic, Islamic, or Jewish culture played any role in the history of Bosnia. Instruction is carried out exclusively in the Croatian dialect, using linguistic norms first set out under the pro-Hitler Ustasha regime of World War II.

Indeed, one of the greatest ironies present in West Mostar is that the local, new Franciscan Theological Seminary, which is a separate institution, offers courses on Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam in an ecumenical spirit, as part of sacerdotal training. However, the so-called 'university' conducts its affairs as if it were located a million miles away from any Orthodox or Islamic believers, though there was once a time when Mostar had a Serbian majority, and its next-largest community was Muslim.

This extremist orientation has made the so-called 'university' the object of considerable criticism in Bosnia, in that its aim seems to be to make the breakdown between Croats and Muslims in Mostar irreversible, and the absorption of Western Herzegovina into Croatia -- in violation of the Dayton Agreement that ended the war -- inevitable.

One example of the ideological approach followed by the so-called 'university' is that its rector, Dr. Zdenko Kordic, is not a humanistic scholar, but a professor of construction engineering, who owes his appointment to political reliability rather than academic excellence. In this regard, the Croat nationalists in HDZ follow the pattern of the former Communist regime, with one major difference. The former regime would have bought off a historian or literary scholar, and some of those were committed Marxists and would have been glad to serve.

An interview with Dr. Kordic proved enlightening. The rector defended his institution's commitment to cultural segregation by citing various European and American principles with which few would argue. There is, he said, a recognition of separate facilities for separate ethnicities in many countries -- Switzerland and Spain being the main examples. In the former, separate school systems exist in four languages (German, French, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romansh, a Latin offshoot). In Spain, Catalonia, the Basque country, and Galicia maintain separate educational systems in their languages, and other such programs exist in smaller minority cultures.

But Dr. Kordic also let the mask of European progressivism and enlightenment slip. "I look forward to the day," he declared, "when students from Italy, Portugal, or Germany, will come here to study," leaving out any mention of students from the other side of the line, a mile away. Pressed on the issue of his institution's openness to Bosnia Muslim participation, he insisted, "we have teachers and students here from the other side." But, according to him, no Catholic Croat "studies over there." The implication was dual: we know what our people are up to, and none of them would want to do such a thing.

The real revelation in Dr. Kordic's interview came when he produced, as evidence of his institution's excellence, a document from the Jesuit University of San Francisco, signed by Father John Schlegel and board member Louis Giraudo, which hailed the 'university' as a descendant of the old Franciscan Seminary and as a contributor to Bosnia's reconstruction.

The 'university' is neither. Dr. Kordic admitted that the old Franciscan seminary had been shut down under Communism and that his school has no connection with it. And intellectuals who are committed to the revival of Bosnia insist that the 'University of Mostar' exists only to further the country's further breakdown.

How did USF's endorsement come about? And what will USF do when it finds out that the Mostar 'university' exists to defy and defeat universal, humanist Catholic education embodied in the term 'university?'

Perhaps Dr. Kordic, to whom the endorsement was addressed, presented his arguments about Switzerland and Spain to the authorities at USF. But Switzerland and Spain differ from Bosnia-Herzegovina in two major ways. First, the separate linguistic communities have lived in more or less compact majority areas of both the Alpine republic and the Iberian kingdom for generations, while Bosnia has been characterized by mixed local communities of Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.

Thus, Bosnia-Herzegovina could only be turned into a Switzerland, with well-established ethnic regions, forcibly. Second, aside from terrorism in the Basque region, Spain -- and Switzerland -- are both free from interethnic conflict. Nobody is attempting to break Italian Switzerland away and unite it with Italy. And nobody in Switzerland or Spain have conducted military campaigns against differing communities, replete with artillery attacks, mass expulsions, establishment of concentration camps, or the murder of refugees trying to return to their own homes.

USF, given its sensitivity to ethnic diversity, appears to have given its support to the University of Mostar without due examination or consideration of its significance.

Unfortunately, a Jesuit endorsement, even an unwitting one, of an ultranationalist operation undermines the future of Catholic culture in Bosnia. A Muslim Bosniak author, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, has noted that traditional Bosnian culture draws on three critical sources: Franciscan mystical thought, Jewish Kabbalah, and Islamic Sufi philosophy. No serious scholar in Bosnia can act as if this combination can be trimmed down to one element alone.

Further, the Bosnian Franciscans and the Bosnian Catholic Church stand against the Croatian plan to split Herzegovina off from the rest of Bosnia. Bosnian Catholic culture traditionally encompassed western-rite Christians in the country's entire territory. In the words of a major religious leader who requested anonymity, Catholicism in Bosnia always saw its eastern border on the Drina river, where Serbia, and Eastern Orthodoxy, begin. The Croat extremists want to withdraw to a compact area west of the Neretva river. They seek to restrict the work of the Church to a region in which they enjoy political -- and gangster-dominated -- control.

Every expression of support for the 'University of Mostar' strengthens the barrier to an enlightened civil society in Bosnia. The worst consequences are visible in informal discussions on the campus of the 'university.'

An elegant, educated, and articulate young woman, Dijana L., who works as a computer sciences instructor, put it eloquently. Somewhat shy, conservatively dressed, she said, yes, she speaks English, though not well, and, yes, she wants to learn more English, more computer theory, and more about the new world of technology, the better to instruct and assist the young people in her charge. But when asked if the line between the two communities was within easy walking distance, she waved vaguely toward the east, and, her eyes blank, said, "I don't think it's far. I don't know. I've never crossed the line. I don't think I ever will."