MOSTAR, April 24 (Hina) - Dignitaries of the Catholic Church in Bosnia-Herzegovina have lately initiated discussions and speculation about the number of Croats in that country after the war.
MOSTAR, April 24 (Hina) - Dignitaries of the Catholic Church in
Bosnia-Herzegovina have lately initiated discussions and speculation
about the number of Croats in that country after the war.#L#
Under the national census conducted in 1991, there were 760,000
Croats, namely 18 percent of the entire Bosnian population at the
time.
Mostar Bishop Ratko Peric said last Thursday at the presentation of
his book that the share of Croats in the country's population had been
reduced to ten percent (after the war in 1990s).
A leading Catholic theologian, Rev. Franjo Topic, has recently written
in a magazine that according to data the CIA released in July 2003,
the number of Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina was put at 570,430 (14.3
percent in the entire population).
"It is interesting that the CIA has made a list of citizens according
to their religion which differs from a list of citizens according to
their ethnic background," Topic wrote in the Easter issue of the
catholic weekly called 'Katolicki Tjednik'.
Thus, forty (40) percent of citizens in Bosnia-Herzegovina are
Muslims, 31 percent are Orthodox believers, 15 percent Roman Catholic,
four percent Protestants and 10 percent others, Topic said.
Sarajevo Archbishop Cardinal Vinko Puljic has said at a recent meeting
with Slovene Ambassador to Bosnia, Tadej Labernik, that in the
archdiocese of Sarajevo the number of Catholics had been reduced by 59
percent in comparison to the situation in 1991.
There are proposals for organising a new census, but at the moment
Bosnia has neither sufficient financial means nor relevant law for
this.
(Hina) ms