Introduction

In December 2015, the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade hosted a public debate on religious tolerance in Serbia. It gathered highly ranked representatives of four important religious communities in Serbia, namely the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Islamic community of Serbia and the Jewish community. As the debate was organised at a time when Serbia was experiencing the consequences of a wave of refugees and forcibly displaced people from the Middle East who were using the Balkan route to reach their final destinations within Western Europe (Stojić Mitrović and Đurić Milovanović 2019a, 2019b), this issue was raised in the Q&A session. In particular, one attendee wondered what exactly the country's main religious communities were doing to help the refugees during their time on Serbian territory. The responses of the religious officials were almost the same: we did our best, but that was obviously not enough. They also shared something very interesting, claiming that in order for religious communities to use their full potential in supporting the population in need, they should work together with the state. Close examination of the response of Serbian religious communities to the mass population movements of the early 1990s reveals some striking similarities with responses to the refugee crisis in more recent times.