Orthodox Christian terrorists are engaged in a holy war against Muslims and Catholics in the Balkans. Foreign analysts once thought that nationalism is dead, but extreme nationalism now observed in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and other post-communist regions clearly shows that nationalism remains a powerful force. Serbian nationalism and terrorism is seen as religious in nature...

I wrote once in these pages that "the great revenge of imperialism was nationalism." It was the modern stage on which antique hatreds were played out, clothed in contemporary costume. But in the industrialized world, where nationalism was long ago supposed to have been supplanted by socialism or some such universalism, it is very much alive, in many places altogether decently, and in others murderously. This is befuddling to the post-national theorists and policymakers. They have seen their most ingeniously crafted designs for betterment and uplift--the European Union, say--frustrated continually by national sentiment.

But, if the nation is a difficult concept for these rationalists to appreciate, the resilience of religion is, quite simply, incomprehensible. But it is religious passion that still exerts the most volatile authority over the minds of men and women. If you cannot understand that, you cannot understand the grim news from Bosnia.

The Serbian war against the Bosnians is a religious war not only because most Bosnians are Muslims but because the Serbs are Orthodox Christians. The best scholarship I have been able to find about Serbian Orthodoxy and Serbian nationalism is the writing of Sabrina Petra Ramet. (A professor of politics at the University of Washington, she is the author of Balkan Babel: Politics, Culture and Religion in Yugoslavia, Cross and Commissar and an essay on Yugoslavia in a book edited by Pedro Ramet, Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and Eastern European Politics.) Ramet discloses some small but telling details. For example, the mug of ex-communist Slobodan Milosevic, who seized power in Serbia eight years ago and turned himself into a nationalist, is carried aloft in Orthodox services as a religious icon, along with the saints.

The post-communist states are particularly prone to religious revanchism, because it was there that God and His servants were most persecuted. It is true that in many countries, Yugoslavia included, certain "patriotic clergy" were indulged by the regime in return for service. But the church was still the most stable refuge for ideological resistance and memory. Serbian nationalism is rich in symbols of the past, humiliating symbols like battles, in Kosovo and Constantinople, lost centuries ago. These were battles lost to infidels as those fought today, however brutally, are victories of the faithful avenging the past.

The Russians have supported Serb aggression and want Bosnia diminished because they, too, are Orthodox Christians, which is also the fuel that fires Moscow's war against the Chechens and others. It is true, of course, that Stalin, who was not motivated by religion at all, inflicted the most excruciating suffering on the Chechens. But in so far as Yeltsin's war against them is a gesture to his ultra-nationalist right, it is also a gesture to the church for which Russification has always meant Christianization. The harmony of church and state was the very definition of pre-communist rule, and Yeltsin has tried to evoke that harmony. And it should not be overlooked that the nostalgists share not only memory but fears. These fears rivet on the Muslim outlands of Russia, geographically close to the Turks and the Persians, old enemies of the Czars and their dreams.

The other Slavic churches (and the states they sway) are, to a greater or lesser extent, all now allied in the Orthodox revanche. The border with Bulgaria, one of these states, is the porous frontier through which international sanctions against Serbia are violated. Even the Greeks are involved, cheering on fellow faithful of the Eastern rite against "the Turks," a phrase applied indiscriminately to virtually all neighboring Muslims.

Balkan cartography is patchwork. But one clear psychological line running through it is the line between the Orthodox churches and Islam, that is to say, the line between their believers. It is now a line drenched in Muslim blood. There is, of course, another dividing line in this region, and it is the one that runs between Orthodoxy and Rome. This line runs deep, and not only in the former Yugoslavia. A Serbian victory in Bosnia does not leave the Catholics of Croatia safe. The shadow of clerical fascism in Nazi-era Croatia is now stalked by the reality of clerical fascism in present-day Serbia. So what about the Muslims? Once upon a time the Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi helped pay for a mosque-building program in Yugoslavia. But that was a long time ago. The oil-Arabs are, of course, poorer now. The Islamic states have been eerily quiescent about the agony of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). To be sure, Saudi Arabia has sent some money and maybe, just maybe, some arms. Saudi men of the particularly pious persuasion have also gone as volunteers. 

The Organization of Islamic Conference, composed of fifty-two Muslim member states, has campaigned against the arms embargo but has not attempted to break it. That's it: Bosnia, after all, is not Kuwait, either to Riyadh or, for that matter, to Washington. Turkey, because of ethnic affinities, history and the presence of a small Bosnian lobby, is the one Muslim country that has been significantly touched by sympathy for the Bosnian Muslims. When it tried to move against the genocide, its initiative was squashed by the NATO alliance. Still, it has a much better record than other Muslim countries. Take Iran: it sent mullahs to the Bosnians, but it was caught red-handed selling oil to the Serbs. The Muslims of Bosnia are, in fact, very Europeanized. They drink beer and even abide women in the clergy. They are tolerant, so tolerant that Muslims elsewhere think them heretics. But this has not kept the Serbs from waging a holy war against them. They are the ultimate victims of a jihad: too complicated to be defended, too alien to be tolerated.