Our Lady of Yugoslavia

Richard West

Thecameramen of the world, who gave such publicity to the Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, to Torvill and Dean and the rest, have so far ignored the happenings which attract up to half a million people a year to another part of Bosnia- Hercegovina: the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six young people at Medjugorje (Med-joo-gore-ye), a previously unknown mountain village that is now a legend in Yugoslavia. The contrast between the publicity for the Games and the ban on publicity for the apparitions was remarked on by Tommy, the leader of one of the groups of pilgrims that travel to Medjugor- je from Britain and all over the world: 'Doesn't it show that Satan controls the media, which made such a fuss of the Games when the Queen of Heaven's ap- pearing just down the road?'

Our party of twelve pilgrims, kindly looked after by Pan-Adriatic travel, half of them Irish people living round Bedford, gathered at Heathrow Airport, but not with the chanting of hymns and wearing of badges normal with pilgrims to Lourdes or Fatima or Jerusalem. We had read the war- nings published by earlier pilgrims that groups had been turned back from Yugoslav airports when it was found they were going to Medjugorje; that hotel and tourist agency employees might report to the government; and that at Medjugorje itself we should 'beware people who look out of place in or around the church and ask a lot of seemingly friendly questions'.

These warnings were justified, though it is fair to say that the Yugoslav government has so far behaved no more harshly at Med- jugorje than did the French at Lourdes or the Portuguese at Fatima.

Since we were being discreet, on a flight of the Yugoslav national airline JAT, we made each others' acquaintance slowly. There was Tom, his wife Mary and 12-year- old daughter Karen, all of them very jolly and spirited and intelligent, especially Karen. The same was true of Ted, who was to drive our minibus, and Anne and Frank, all Irish; indeed, in the best sense, very Irish. Tommy had been for a long time a publican, first in Ireland then in south Lon- don, and now runs a bookshop. Ted is in the building business, and Frank is retired. The rest of the pilgrims went in a separate vehicle and stayed in a different town, but 'You'll like the Diet of Worms.' they comprised three ladies from the Chan" nel Islands and Peter, a serious and ascetic man from Calcutta, who was sitting aer°55 the aisle from me. 'I was an deacon,' he told me, 'and my father was 8, clergyman. He was heartbroken wile% converted to the Catholic Church. Snl'` then I have known sorrow and misfortune in a temporal sense but I have never for one moment regretted conversion.' • This group of pilgrims promised to ee

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Anglican diverse and interesting as Chaucer's coin: pany in the Canterbury Tales, but Ithought it prudent during the flight to talk insd tea , with the two English businessmen oa right. As usual, the conversation got rot" to every traveller's least favourite countli Nigeria. They described a recent taxi ride t' , 80 mph in the dark during which they ed a truck with no lights parked in the fas,; lane: they went on to discuss the standar; of driving in Yugoslavia, which all agreed was a bit Nigerian. At the end of the pilgrimage, this frivolous conversation returned to mind with sombre connota. tions. At Zagreb we waited to change planes for, the flight to Dubrovnik, which is Eh: nearest big airport to Medjugorje. newspapers and conversation were full 0 inflation and the impending devaluatiall; which may be by as much as 100 per cent- r‘ newspaper cartoon showed a man leavinS4 shop with only one shoe and telling his wl t that if she had let him spend his money las month he cciuld have bought the pair. , Next morning I joined the Irish Pilgrirlie minibus for the journey to Mostar' tile capital of Hercegovina and nearest rail t town to Medjugorje. Whereas Lourde,s' a,e the last count (by Patrick Marnham, wuch.f recent book Lourdes is a fine studY apparitions), has 204 hotels, Med.ing09,1 has no hotel, one pub, one hot-dog stall one public lavatory consisting of titre` sheds with doors that do not shut, enclost-i ing three holes in the ground coveredwit., excrement. The sign to this WC is scrawleit: on the side of the nuns' residence, whie was recently burned out ___ by the authorities, some say, though I found fin proof of this. On the way to Mostar, a graceful town built by the Turks, the Irish party said the rosary and talked about Prev`,.°n:„ pilgrimages. Tommy's stories were lurid: 'In France (on the way to Lourdes!, we saw such a natural disaster, after a flO of 16 inches of rain. There were cars pilec, up like garbage cans with cocks of haY 011 top of them.' On pilgrimage to the 14°1Y Land, he had gone to Masada, 'the Plac,e where the Israeli officers go to swear the oath of allegiance, like the Nazis in tile Thirties'. Last year he had gone to Garabandal in Spain, where the apparitions had come in a region much more primitive,' so he said, than Bosnia-Hercegovina. '91°' you see the film of Garabundal? It's onlY afl amateur job but you see the children flYing through uogf our ig e pilgrimage: on the corr f.; '

Malachy who went down twice icetonoRorne

e., occurred to me that these modern pilgrilrls t1 k followed the old tradition of going partly as tourists, like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, a fun-loving person who spent most of the money left to her by her husbands on jaunts to Rome or even Jerusalem. Soon after leaving the coast, the road began to ascend the green Neretva River, between limestone mountains speckled with scrub or completely bare. 'No grass grows Where the Turk trod', Yugoslays say, but erosion is due as much to goats, and early rulers such as the Romans and the Vene- tians, who cut down the forests for houses or ships. Yet even round Medjugorje one can see there is good red earth for anyone with the setnenregy to remove the stones. Where the o s have been taken out and turned into houses or walls, there are plots of vines, tobacco and fruit trees. The roads are good and sometimes have police radar traps. At Citluk three miles from Medjugorje, there are banks, a department store, a hotel, a HUnters Club and many fine houses. The six young witnesses to the visions at Medjugorje are sometimes described as Poor shepherds and shepherdesses, and one or two of them may be, but there are few sheep left in Hercegovina. Twenty years ago, hundreds of thousands of sheep were driven each spring from the coast tothe then the the Bosnian mountains; but since ;_uen the government, through the banks, nas discouraged agriculture in favour of ,i.i...ginedruesetroi

industry andthe cities. The peasants of

Wet naanreysfonded by going to work in Germ Belgium and Sweden; by saving up capital and coming back to set up shop as self-employed or 'independent' but- cher, baker, or candlestick-maker — more commonly as electrician, mechanic or inn- "per — with fruit trees, vines or tobacco on the side. 'We don't live badly at all, a c. ar mechanic at Medjugorje told me, grinn- ing to imply that they lived well. „Although -Medjugorje has not been allowed(Yet) kYeti to exploit the apparitions, fter the fashion of Lourdes, by erecting hotels restaurants, cure resorts, shops for r ehgious trinkets and so on, the village pro- sPers more than a town like Mostar. All hills the wide valley between two ranges of hills (the word Medjugorje means 'between tnountains'), ontains'),ne sees half-finished bUildings higgledy-piggledy stacks of stone have brick, and pipes for the drains that nave been dug but not yet filled. The people °I Medjugorje, as 'independents', were rich tehne deouhgiheovuens before the apparition to build twin-towered church where, everY evening, some of the six youngsters hwh° first saw the Virgin claim that they see "er again and sometimes converse with her. At this stage I must emphasise that it is necessary to be very discreet in discussing these six, who have for three years been subject to long, sceptical and distressful questioni by ng, .. ,. the Church and by the civil authorities _.._ as was Bernadette at Lou. rdes. The whole affair is now under ex- amination by a commission of the hierarchy and the Vatican. It is politically sensitive. A-ncl anything rash that appeared in a

foreign newspaper might have a harmful effect on all concerned. Even if we had not been warned of the tensions at Medjugorje, our group of pilgrims would soon have learned. Just before getting there on the first day we of- fered a lift to a woman who turned out to be the sister of Medjugorje's parish priest, now serving a prison sentence for 'harmful political activities'. The original sentence was halved when the Bishop of Mostar (whose own predecessor was jailed) agreed with the authorities to stop the crowds from gathering at the place on the hillside where the children first saw the apparition. The Franciscan brothers who run the church now keep the six away from the hillside, but some of the pilgrims go there. Our Irish group did, some of them twice, in part because of the penitential nature of climb- ing a slope of jagged boulders and stones which even St Malachy would have had to admit were heavy going. Young Karen skip- ped up the hill. The children who saw the apparition said that they felt they 'were car- ried up'. I felt the opposite, though not so badly as some of the elderly pilgrims who literally had to be hauled to the place where wooden crosses mark the scene of the apparition. On the day I went there were only a dozen pilgrims kneeling beside the crosses; but this was enough to attract the interest of the helicopter that chatters most of the time over Medjugorje. On the way back to the church, we passed one of the two (sometimes more) police cars that hang about the village, supplementing the fairly obvious plain-clothes men. (Once again should emphasise that this harassment is less than at Lourdes and Fatima in the early years.) On the way from the hillside, an old woman of 82 begged for money because, so she told me, she and her husband had never had children. Beggars are normally rare in Yugoslavia. A little later, an old woman of- fered us some delicious red wine from her own vineyard with the implied suggestion

that we pay for it, and we accepted. A few houses on, a boy offered us white wine, but

we did not accept this further 'gift'. The six young witnesses do not accept gifts of money or anything else. I saw an Italian pilgrim trying to buy an intercession from one of the friars, who answered caustically that the Virgin Mary did not answer requests. She only demanded prayer, fasting and penitence. The Church at Medjugorje does not go in for simony, or selling indulgences to get to heaven quicker, the practice so wittily castigated by Chaucer. Nor is Medjugorje strictly a place of pilgrimage, since nobody but the six children claims to have witnessed a miracle.

It is rather a holy place where people go to

revive their faith. It is also a place of penance, for which this part of Hercegovina is well endowed by nature. It is oppressively hot in summer, murderously cold in winter, and wet in bet- ween. There are wolves and giant bears one of which recently broke into a Muslim village and smashed the only TV set. There are lethal crested vipers. In a mountain village on the other side of the river, I asked whether the scarecrow was used to protect the fruit. No, it was used to prevent the eagles raiding the hen-coop.

If nature is red in tooth and claw in Bosnia-Hercegovina, man is still redder. It was the scene of the fiercest battles and worst atrocities during the second world war, between Germans, Italians, Com- munist partisans, Serbian Orthodox Chet- niks and Croatian Catholic Ustashe, with the Muslims joining in on different sides. It is estimated that from 1941-45 in Bosnia- Hercegovina, some 300,000 men, women and children were murdered, quite apart from those who died in battle, or from disease, starvation and cold.

The museum in Mostar shows many photographs of Communists shot or hang- ed by the Germans, Italians, Ustashe and Chetniks — whose flag carried the skull and crossbones, over the slogan 'For Belief in God, for King and for Fatherland'. The museum does not show photographs of the killings done by the Communists, but these have been described by Milovan Djilas, the former Partisan leader who later quarrelled with Tito. He recounted how he and his partisans shot Italian prisoners and threw the corpses into the green Neretva to frighten other Italians downstream. He still thinks the story is funny.

(To be continued)