BOSNIA-POPE/MASS UPDATE Pope compares current conflicts to 'third world war' during Sarajevo mass

Record ID: 150243

  • Title: BOSNIA-POPE/MASS UPDATE Pope compares current conflicts to 'third world war' during Sarajevo mass
  • Date: 6th June 2015
  • Summary: BELL RINGING POPE WALKING ONTO STAGE WOMAN PRAYING CROWDS IN STADIUM
  • Embargoed: 21st June 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA70IEADPEMWEWN4S0FKQRMJYV3
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Pope Francis warned Bosnians on Saturday (June 6) that current world conflicts are generating a 'kind of third world war' which is being fought in fragments and is damaging people's desire for peace.
    "Even in our time, the desire for peace and the commitment to build it collide against the reality of many armed conflicts presently affecting our world. They are a kind of third world war being fought in fragments. In the context of global communications, we sense an atmosphere of war," the pope said during his mass in the Bosnian capital.
    Some 65,000 people gathered at an Olympic stadium that was once a symbol of ethnic and religious diversity in socialist Yugoslavia, to attend the religious ceremony, where the pope also urged Bosnians to seek lasting ethnic and religious harmony to heal the deep, lingering wounds of the 1992-1995 war.
    Francis arrived in the city whose skyline is dotted by mosques and churches days after the entry into force of a landmark EU agreement on closer ties with Bosnia, part of a new Western initiative to encourage political and economic change.
    Catholics, the vast majority ethnic Croats, account for about 15 percent of Bosnia's 3.8 million people. They share power with Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Serbs in an unwieldy system of ethnic quotas laid down by a U.S.-brokered peace deal in 1995 and plagued by nationalist politicking.
    While Bosniaks would like a more centralised and stronger state, Serb leaders in their own autonomous region are growing bolder in threats to secede. Croat nationalists, too, are calling for the creation of their own entity within Bosnia.
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