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Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Opening to religion
New government takes friendlier approach
The newly appointed religion minister in the interim Serbian government has signaled a new openness in the Balkan state’s religious policy, in a statement faxed to Keston News Service in Belgrade on October 27—just three days after the new government was sworn in.
Gordana Misic-Anicic signaled that she would reverse a decade of Serbian government refusal to hand back religious property confiscated from the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Communist period as a move “to start to urgently correct all the historical injustice done to our Church.” She also said that she would look favorably on the Orthodox Church’s desire for religion to be taught in schools. However, she also stressed that she intends to improve the government’s relations with other faiths in the country, of which she singled out the Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran communities “and other religious communities which legally operate in the Republic of Serbia.”
Rejecting the “ideological state” which for 55 years “systematically and without mercy broke the connection between the Serbian people and its spiritual base—the Serbian Orthodox Church,” Misic-Anicic declared that it was right for the state to help the Orthodox Church which, in turn, would help Serbia “stand up and proudly move toward the community of the Christian nations of Europe, where it always belonged.”
Among the proposed changes are the end of control of religious education by the government, the return to the Orthodox Church of the right to maintain registers of births, deaths, and marriages which it lost after 1945, and the institution of priests as chaplains in hospitals, prisons, and the military.
While maintaining that her “greatest attention” will have to be paid to solving the problems of the Orthodox Church, she stressed that “this does not mean that I will in any way neglect cooperation with other religious communities.” She said, “We will also contact the humanitarian religious organizations, for I believe that their activity in helping our population is very important and useful.”
The former government of Slobodan Milosevic was swept out of power in early October by a “people-power” revolt, when Milosevic declared invalid the results of elections which showed him losing to opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica, who was backed by most of the Orthodox Church’s leadership.
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