BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA (ACN News): In the past two months 800 Catholic refugee families living abroad turned to Bishop Franjo Komarica of Banja Luka for assistance for their return to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thousands of refugees are likewise ready to return.
The chairman of the Bishops’ Conference for Bosnia and Herzegovina reported this information at a recent meeting with the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need.
Those willing to return expected assistance from the Church in rebuilding their houses and restoring infrastructure.
“That is, in fact, the job of the government,” Bishop Komarica said.
However, Catholics received only a minimal fraction of the international aid.
The bishop complained about the lack of political will on the part of the Bosnian Government and the international community to enable Catholics to return to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In this context he referred to a “well formulated strategy” aimed at eradicating the Catholic presence in the country.
Bishop Komarica said politicians openly admitted in personal conversations that they felt Catholics had “no business being in Bosnia”.
He said he had been struggling for many years to “create a state founded on the rule of law”.
The Church simply wanted to have the same rights as other sections of the population and “meet its obligation to work together for a better future for the country”, he said.
It is “not good for Bosnia to exclude an entire ethnic group”, he said.
In his view the Catholics of the Croatian origin are “not guests, but the oldest ethnic group”.
Of the 835,000 Catholics who lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina before the war between 1992 and 1995, only 450,000 have remained.
Forty per cent of the population is Islamic and about 31 per cent belongs to the Serbian Orthodox Church.
The rest belongs to other religious communities.
Catholics still make up about 10 per cent of the population.
