MORE than a million folk visit
Medjugorje each year, thousands of them Irish, and most come to climb the hill where six neighbors claim to have first seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary in June 1981.
It is difficult to find a traveller who does not talk of the peace and tranquillity of Cross Hill, location of the supposed apparitions that turned a remote and pauperised town into one of the most famous corners of Bosnia.
Few visitors make the brief trip from Medjugorje to Surmanci. It is only one or two miles from Cross Hill, but far removed from the boarding houses, restaurants and keepsake shops of its respected neighbour.
There is deep quiet in this place, but only those that don't know its history could speak of peace and tranquillity.
In August 1941, local members of the fascist Croat Ustashe organisation murdered some 600 Serb men, women and children in deep natural pits on this barren plateau. Ethnic cleansing could have entered the lexicon during the 1990s Balkan wars, but it was grimly familiar to a prior generation of families from this region.
In the 1940s, the craggy hills of Herzegovina saw vicious fighting between the Ustashe who ruled Croatia as a Fascist puppet state Serb patriot Chetniks and the red Partisans controlled by Josip Broz Tito, who would eventually overcome and rule Yugoslavia until his passing in 1980.
Each side committed hideous atrocities, including Tito's Partisans, who slaughtered 30 Franciscan friars at Siroki Brijeg near Medjugorje, as punishment for supporting the Ustashe.
The Croat Catholic Church backed the Ustashe and its drive for an ethnically pure bigger Croatia, and several clergymen and Franciscan friars were charged with heinous war crimes.
After the war, Tito attempted to neutralise the resentment between parts of the Yugoslav population by suppressing faith and nationalism. He showed the inter-ethnic fighting as a straightforward struggle between nazi Ustashe and Chetniks and anti-fascist Partisans ; the latter had won, fascism had been routed and so the roots of conflict had been removed.
In places like Medjugorje, though, the wounds never actually healed. Croats felt humiliated at being made to build a monument to the Ustashe's Serb victims at Surmanci, while official Yugoslav history showed the Franciscans executed by Partisans at Siroki Brijeg as nazi villains.
The apparitions started at a tricky time for Yugoslavia : the stabilising force that was Tito had died the year before and the Catholic Fellowship movement was roiling red Poland, inspired by a new east Western European pope, John Paul II.
The Yugoslav authorities immediately denounced reports of the visions which occurred just before the 40th anniversary of the Surmanci massacre as a "clerical-nationalist" conspiracy served up by Croat extremists.
Local Franciscans quickly took control of the Medjugorje phenomenon, declaring the children's visions to be real and installing themselves as intercessors between the young "seers" and a Croat public that was clamouring for non secular experience after a number of years of official state atheism.
Loads of people were shortly gathering in Medjugorje for daily "messages" from Our Lady ; the authorities arrested a local friar and others whom they suspected of involvement in the purported hoax. Over time , but the cash- strapped Yugoslav authorities realised the commercial potential of Medjugorje.
By the mid-1980s, Belgrade had no difficulty with the daily visions or visitors but the Catholic Church did.
The Bishop of Mostar, the senior church official in the region, has for years been at loggerheads with the Franciscans over their refusal to relinquish control over certain parishes in Herzegovina, where they've been present for hundreds of years and luxuriate in the deep faithfulness of area folk.
This dispute was raging when the visions began ; some people assume the Franciscans used them or helped invent them to guard and enhance their position in Medjugorje.
Unlike those at Fatima and Lourdes, the Vatican has never recognised the validity of the Medjugorje visions. In 2009 it defrocked a previous Franciscan "spiritual director" to the idealists amid allegations that he exaggerated the apparitions and had a child with a nun.
Several "disobedient" Franciscans have been expelled from the parish.
Like his predecessor Pavao Zanic, the Bishop of Mostar Ratko Peric is very suspicious about the "visions" and the way in which the Franciscans and other groups have behaved in Medjugorje. Their striking comments on the phenomenon which suggest it is merely a moneymaking hoax are posted in English on the diocese site (cbismo.com).
However , the Franciscans of Herzegovina won't give up Medjugorje without fighting. They're tough and devoted, as everyone from the Ottomans to Bishop Peric has found. During the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Peric was abducted and beaten by Croat militiamen in a local Franciscan chapel, till UN troops and the mayor of Mostar secured his release.
The war released another wave of ethnic cleaning in Herzegovina, much of it by members of the region's Croat majority, who flattened mosques and Orthodox churches as they drove Muslims and Serbs from their houses.
The memorial at Surmanci was blown up by Croats, plenty of whom revelled in their Ustashe heritage.
A trickle of travellers kept coming to Medjugorje across the war. Few perhaps realised that atrocities were taking place nearby, or that their Queen of Peace had been dubbed the "Ustasha Virgin" by Serbs and Muslims who saw her as representative of Croatian ultra-nationalism.
Medjugorje last week marked THIRTY years since the apparitions began and the crowds are as huge than ever .
The Vatican is now investigating the apparitions and the thousands of allegedly divine messages that have made Medjugorje's name.
For the church, the Franciscans, the people of Medjugorje and the idealists as well as millions of believers a good deal rests on its call,writes
tagza.com.
