"This is our private property which belongs to the Church. I will be standing in the doorway to prevent the eviction. They can get it only over my dead body," the archbishop said in an interview on Wednesday evening.
The Sarajevo municipal court has recently ruled that the Sarajevo Catholic Archdiocese has no longer the right to use a part of the building housing the Archbishop's Residence and has issued an eviction order.
Cardinal Puljic said that this ruling was a message to the Catholic Church in Sarajevo. He cited the judge who issued the eviction order as telling him that they would show him "who is in power here".
Expressing his outrage at the ruling, Bosnian Bishops' Conference spokesman Ivo Tomasevic told Hina on Tuesday that the Sarajevo Archdiocese had become yet another victim of the unjust law which gives preference to tenancy rights over ownership rights. The building was constructed by the archdiocese for its needs, but a part of it was expropriated by the Communist authorities and allocated as a flat to the family of Fadil Smajlovic.
The two dignitaries also criticised the state authorities for failing to pass a law on the restitution of property to religious communities which had been unjustly expropriated during Communist rule.
The flat given to Fadil Smajlovic was not nationalised but only allocated to him. To make things worse, the flat was used by Smajlovic to listen in to what was going on in the Archbishop's residence. The surveillance equipment was found in the flat after Smajlovic left the flat following the outbreak of hostilities in Sarajevo in 1992.
After Smajlovic's departure, Cardinal Vinko Puljic and his aides began again using that part of the archbishop's residence. The family of Fadil Smajlovic, who had died in the meantime, has filed a court claim seeking back the flat under tenancy rights law.