Crossing Continents, Indeed

Well, there it was, such as it was. Medjugorje is a hard one for the likes of the BBC, since the Church does not approve of it, so "let's all laugh at the credulous Popish peasants (who educated us to Oxbridge entry level, but what the hell?)" cannot really be made to wash. Nor can Auntie or her ilk begin to explain why, with or without approval, the world's fastest-growing Marian shrine in 2010 is on the European of all continents.

But this was mostly about Bosnia-Herzegovina as a failed state, though bizarrely about blaming that on the Croats, who were accused of having tried to "dismember" that country, which never existed as an independent entity until the wars of the 1990s, and the combined Serb and Croat population of which significantly outnumbers those with the slightest cause to wish to live in the creation of a Wahhabi rabble-rouser nostalgic for his own Nazi past.

The dismembering was, and astonishingly still is, of Yugoslavia, and it must be said that the Croats were not without a share of the blame. But those who thus found themselves trapped in Izetbegovicland, in Ganicistan, are more rueful practically by the day. As a Franciscan priest interviewed put it, "The Serbs have Russia, and the Muslims have Turkey, but who have we?"