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It Is Hard To Find A Traveller Who Does Not Speak Of The Peace And Tranquillity Of Cross Hill, Location Of The Supposed Apparitions That Turned A Remote And Beggared Village Into One Of The Most Famed Corners Of Bosnia.

MORE than a million folk visit Medjugorje every year, thousands of them Irish, and most come to climb the hill where 6 neighbors claim to have first seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary in June 1981.

It is hard to find a traveller who does not speak of the peace and tranquillity of Cross Hill, location of the supposed apparitions that turned a remote and pauperised hamlet into one of the most renowned corners of Bosnia.

Few visitors make the short trip from Medjugorje to Surmanci. It's just one or two miles from Cross Hill, but far removed from the roadhouses, restaurants and keepsake shops of its respected neighbour.

There is deep quiet in this place, but only people who 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, ladies and children in deep natural pits on this barren plateau. Ethnic cleaning may have entered the lexicon in the 1990s Balkan wars, although it was grimly familiar to a prior generation of families from this area.

In the 1940s, the rough hills of Herzegovina saw vicious fighting between the Ustashe who ruled Croatia as a Fascist puppet state Serb jingoist Chetniks and the commie Partisans controlled by Josip Broz Tito, who would eventually overcome and rule Yugoslavia till his passing in 1980.

Each side committed gruesome 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 larger Croatia, and several monks and Franciscan monks were charged with abhorrent war crimes.

After the war, Tito sought to neutralize the resentment between parts of the Yugoslav population by suppressing religion and nationalism. He depicted the inter-ethnic fighting as a straightforward struggle between fascist Ustashe and Chetniks and anti-fascist Partisans ; the second had won, fascism had been routed and so the roots of conflict had been removed.

In places like Medjugorje, though, the injuries never actually healed. Croats felt humiliated at being forced to build a testimony to the Ustashe's Serb victims at Surmanci, while official Yugoslav history depicted the Franciscans executed by Partisans at Siroki Brijeg as fascist villains.

The apparitions began at a tricky time for Yugoslavia : the stabilising force that was Tito had died the previous year and the Catholic Comradeship movement was roiling red Poland, provoked 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 roughed up by Croat extremists.

Local Franciscans quickly took charge of the Medjugorje phenomenon, declaring the children's visions to be genuine and installing themselves as intercessors between the young "seers" and a Croat public that was clamouring for spiritual experience after many years of official state atheism.

Legions of people were soon gathering in Medjugorje for daily "messages" from Our Lady ; the authorities arrested a local friar and others whom they suspected of involvement in the alleged hoax. Over time , however , the cash- strapped Yugoslav authorities realized the commercial potential of Medjugorje.

By the mid-1980s, Belgrade had no issue with the daily visions or visitors but the Catholic Church did.

The Bishop of Mostar, the senior church official in the area, has for dozens of years been at loggerheads with the Franciscans over their refusal to relinquish control of certain parishes in Herzegovina, where they've been present for decades and revel in the deep loyalty of area folk.

This dispute was raging when the visions started ; a few of the people believe the Franciscans used them or helped invent them to protect and reinforce their position in Medjugorje.

Unlike those at Fatima and Lourdes, the Vatican hasn't recognized the providence of the Medjugorje visions. In 2009 it defrocked a former Franciscan "spiritual director" to the visionaries amid allegations that he exaggerated the apparitions and had a kid with a nun.

Several other "disobedient" Franciscans have been expelled from the parish.

Like his predecessor Pavao Zanic, the Bishop of Mostar Ratko Peric is intensely 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 simply a lucrative hoax are posted in English on the diocese site (cbismo.com).

Nevertheless the Franciscans of Herzegovina will not give up Medjugorje without fighting. They're hard and stalwart, as everybody from the Ottomans to Bishop Peric has discovered . During the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Peric was kidnapped and beaten by Croat militiamen in a local Franciscan chapel, until UN troops and the mayor of Mostar secured his release.

The war released another wave of ethnic cleansing 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, lots of whom delighted in their Ustashe heritage.

A drip of pilgrims kept coming to Medjugorje throughout the war. Few maybe 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 symbolic of Croatian ultra-nationalism.

Medjugorje last week marked 30 years since the apparitions commenced and the crowds are as large than ever before.

The Vatican is now inquiring into 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 visionaries as well as millions of believers a good deal rests on its decision,writes tagza.com.
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