Sarajevo: Pope Francis today condemned “the atmosphere of war” around the world as he urged Bosnians to step up reconciliation efforts, 20 years after a conflict that ripped the country apart on ethnic lines.

Many conflicts across the planet amount to “a kind of third world war being fought piecemeal and, in the context of global communications, we sense an atmosphere of war”, the pontiff said during a mass at Sarajevo’s Olympic Stadium. His Holiness was on a one-day visit to the Bosnian capital.

“Some wish to incite and foment this atmosphere deliberately,” he added, attacking those who want to foster division or profit from war through arms dealing.

“But war means children, women and the elderly in refugee camps, it means forced displacement, destroyed houses, streets and factories: above all countless shattered lives.

“You know this well having experienced it here.”

“The cry of God’s people goes up once again from this city, the cry of all men and women of good will: war never again,” he said at the stadium that was once a symbol of ethnic and religious diversity in socialist Yugoslavia.

This unwound in the war and Bosnia remains hamstrung by its legacy, divided along ethnic and religious lines. He issued another criticism of the weapons industry, condemning “those who speculate on wars for the purpose of selling arms”.

Pope Francis arrived in the city with a  skyline  dotted by mosques and churches days after a EU agreement on closer ties with Bosnia came into force. It is part of a new western initiative to encourage political and economic change.

Earlier at a meeting with the three-member Bosnian presidency, Francis said peace initiatives between Bosnia’s Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks showed that “even the deepest wounds can be healed by purifying memories and firmly anchoring hopes in the future”.

Catholics, the vast majority ethnic Croats, account for about 15 per cent 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 US-brokered peace deal in 1995 and plagued by nationalist politicking.

  Bosnia, Catholic Church, Church, Pope Francis