News | Serbian Unity Congress

August 15, 2007 on 3:59 am | У Desk Blog, Kosovo & Metohija |

Jasmina T. Boulanger

In mid-July 2007, the Serbian Unity Congress sent a delegation to Kosovo and Metohija so that we could get first hand knowledge of the conditions facing the minority Christian and Serb population. We drove through much of the area, visited three monastic communities and met with the US Chief of Mission in Priština. The BLAGO team traveled with us part way and stopped to do their photo-archiving work at the Patriarchate of Peć. The following is a description of my impressions of the trip.

The drive from Belgrade to Kosovo was long, hot and difficult. The first half took us through the heart of Sumadija - the Ibar river gorge, forested mountains, fruit orchards and fields. We drove south along the Lilac Trail - miles of lilacs planted by King Stefan Uroš to greet Helen of Anjou when she came to marry him in the 1314. In the southern Serbian the town of Novi Pazar the first minarets appeared as did store and street signs in Albanian. Shortly thereafter, we came to the “border” crossing.

The concept of a border crossing, while still on the sovereign territory of Serbia, was strange. We stopped on a bridge and a UN soldier from Nigeria inspected our passports and issued us entry documents. Then another soldier, whose shoulder markings included the German flag and the word “polizei” met us and drove in front of us to the first town. Here we unloaded our mini-bus and moved our luggage and the BLAGO team’s photo equipment to two vans that, for safety, did not have Serbian [Belgrade] license plates. These vans were old and tired, like much of this area. Two UN cars with flashing blue lights escorted us the many kilometers to Peć and the Peć Patriarchate. The “polizei” told us to follow them closely and disregard speed limits.

Peć

The Peć Patriarchate monastery is on the edge of town along a busy street. Here we stopped at a camouflaged checkpoint manned by Italian UN soldiers. They took and kept our passports, and after much crosschecking of lists finally let us onto the monastery grounds.

Walking through the checkpoint one enters a parallel universe. One moment: noisy, dusty streets, cement barriers and barbed wire; the next moment: the medieval wall and the dark, weathered wood entry gate. On crossing the threshold, we found ourselves in a quiet garden filled with shade trees, hydrangeas and the group of churches of the Patriarchate of Peć that date back more than 750 years.

Italian soldiers guard the monastery grounds and the monastics, about 22 nuns many of whom are elderly. A medieval stone wall surrounds the property. This wall is not high enough to provide adequate protection from the adjacent street, and the nuns have experienced shouted curses and insults and objects thrown over that wall. As a result, a new higher wall is being built to act as a final fortification to provide protection for the dreaded day when the UN and Nato troops leave. This wall is high, thick, fortified with a steel core, and its capstone is ready for attaching barbed wire (should that become necessary).

Igumanija [Abbess] Fevronija is 84 and has been at the monastery since 1957. Although there is much work that the monastery could use, the Igumanija says that all they need is to have the Serbian people return. She says that a monastery needs its people to come and keep it a living thing. Only if the people cannot come are times hard.

Few people can come. Besides the need for documentation and security checks, the remaining local Serbs have to run the gamut of the surrounding hostile Albanian Muslim population. One of the ladies in our delegation, who had left the area eight years ago, wished to go to the nearby cemetery to visit her husband’s grave. Thanks to the UN’s local municipal representative, she was able to go safely. This kind man drove her to the cemetery (which has suffered desecration), entered the grounds with her and stood guard.

Visoki Dečani

Our next stop was the Monastery of Visoki Dečani. Another drive with UN protection. Another lengthy document check before we can enter the road to the monastery. The drive started at a camouflaged and sand-bagged checkpoint manned by machine gun carrying Italian soldiers wearing maroon caps with blue wool tassels. We had to zigzag through concrete barriers and slowly drive over road bumps to a second document check at the gate. While all the delays are for the protection of the monastery, it is still an aggravation.

Then we walked through the gate into another world - quiet, pristine, surrounded by spectacular forested hills. The monastery of Visoki Dečani, built between 1327-1335, is a magnificent holy place. The beauty of the Romanesque church with its phenomenal frescoes is beyond words. We were also privileged to venerate the holy relics of St. King Stefan of Dečani, who built and endowed the monastery. Visoki Dečani has been in continuous use as a monastery since it was built, and Stefan of Dečani’s remains have been there since his death in 1331. Now lying in a carved marble sarcophagus, his remains are intact and covered in red velvet cloth embroidered in gold and silver. A fragrance reminiscent of sandalwood and incense comes from the relics — mysterious, strange, yet pleasant and comforting in an inexplicable way.

To talk briefly about the frescoes in the church would be inadequate. They are rich in color, symbolism and subject matter. Go to www.srpskoblago.org/Archives/Decani for a virtual tour.

One of the monks gave us a tour of the premises. Less than ten years ago, Visoki Dečani monastery, while rich in history, was poor in its physical plant. Since the end of the last war, it has received donations from individuals and some support from the Serbian government. There have been improvements in the facilities - farm, kitchen, visitors’ quarters. There have also been improvements in the walls around the farms — for protection. The monks, like the nuns in Peć are very pleased with the work and attitude of the Italian soldiers who are providing round the clock protection. But, they are very worried that if there is trouble only American troop presence will save the day. There was a recent incident in Kosovo in which Romanian soldiers using rubber bullets killed two Albanians. So, now it seems that the KFOR troops cannot use rubber bullets, and the monks think that they can be overwhelmed if worse comes to worse. However, there is the belief that even if the KFOR troops cannot shoot, the US flag still has enough influence here that the Albanians will not risk angering the Americans.

In the midst of living in a small, protected space, the monks maintain some humor. When asked how it feels to be isolated, they reply that the whole world comes here - a reference to the international troop presence. They joked about the time German and Italian troops were working together, that it was not “a marriage made in heaven,” especially when it came to food: the Italians never stood in the line for German food but the line for Italian cuisine kept getting longer. They also joked with some of the Turkish soldiers that the reason more Serbs go to Turkey on vacation than to Montenegro is that Serbs and Turks were in a “political union” for a longer period of time.

The intelligence, subtlety and sophistication of Bishop Abbot Teodosije and Father Sava would be rare to find in any milieu. They speak softly and never in anger, though sometimes with disappointment. Their understanding of what it takes to live well with ones neighbors and what it takes to survive is both deep and sensible. They are too far from the rest of Serbia to expect any protection or for Serbs to come to the area and work at the monastery; consequently, they have to make certain accommodations. They freely admit that without a continuing international presence their very survival would be at stake. Even with the KFOR presence around the monastery, a few months ago a rocket propelled grenade hit a wall near the church.

The monks will not leave their monastery; after all, they say, St. King Stefan Uroš Dečanski is not leaving. However, like the nuns at the Patriarchate of Peć, they too are building a fortified wall for protection. When US diplomats tell them that they should build friendships, not walls, the Abbot says, first the wall then they will be free to build friendships. My colleague Dushan and I told the Abbot about the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” and its refrain: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

In many ways the monks are self-sufficient and grow their own food, make cheese, have honeybees and a vineyard. We drank their wines, which could have a label saying “Established 1310.” But amid their work and prayers, the monks carry a general disappointment of the lack of understanding of their situation by the outside world and even by their own government.

Gračanica

Our third stop was Gračanica. On the way we drove through the village of Kosovo Polje near the actual place of the famous battle. The Gazimestan monument was visible from the road but is daily getting more crowded by haphazard real estate development. Everywhere one drives in Kosovo and Metohija, one sees a need for urban planning and zoning regulations.

The monastery in Gračanica is in an urban setting. A community of about 8,000 Serbs lives precariously in the area around it. The monastery’s rocky medieval walls have seemingly random patches of three bricks placed either vertically and horizontally. From a distance the patches are not random, they occur in regularly spaced intervals at standing height and kneeling height. These are old defensive openings for guns. Today, the guns are carried by UN troops and by the nearby Albanian Muslims. In addition to the wall, the monastery is defended by small traffic barriers, barbed wire and KFOR troops from Norway.

Gračanica with its current church, dating from 1321 with its famous fresco of Queen Simonida with the gouged-out eyes, has a very different feel from the other two monastic communities we visited. [See, www.srpskoblago.org/Archives/Gracanica] This is the seat of Bishop Artemije, whose jurisdiction covers Kosovo and Metohija. The grounds are tired looking and not as pristine as those at Peć or Dečani. The small sisterhood tends a large garden and a recently planted fruit orchard.

There are many visitors and events on the enclosed grounds surrounding the church. This walled refuge is a small breathing space for the beleaguered Serbs still left in the area. Yet, normal urban services such as refuse collection are random. Electricity brown-outs occur daily as do water outages. The Albanians control the water and power, and say that every one is subject to these inconveniences. They also claim that the Serbs do not pay regularly so their brown-outs and water outages are longer than those of the surrounding Albanian community. With so few jobs available and with the danger of going to and from work, the Serbs’ livelihood in the area is bleak. When the Belgrade government tries to pay for their utilities, the Albanians and their facilitators do not want to accept it since they say that end-users are supposed to pay for such services. The political powers play their games. In the meantime, the community is slowly being strangled.

Departure

The process of “return” to Serbia was also difficult. Our UN escorts left us in Kosovska Mitrovica. Next we had to go through the “border” crossing once more. This time our van with Kosovo plates had to pay an insurance fee on the Serbian side and get “temporary” license plates to be allowed on roads in the rest of Serbia. Serbia does not recognize plates issued by the authorities now controlling Kosovo. The clerk collecting the fee for the temporary plates was out of application forms - he had been out of forms all day and had been turning back “unlicensed” cars. We insisted that he call his manager for forms, which arrived after an endless hour during which time we sat on the side of the road. While treatment like this was inconvenient for us, it only underscores the isolation of the Serbs in Kosovo - this time by their own people.

Later while in Belgrade, the director of our office was describing the many steps and papers (including invitations to visit) that she had to contend with in order to get a visa to go to an EU country. After rather successfully and peacefully working on its democracy for almost years ten years, Serbia itself has a wall around it. Ingress and egress throughout the region are fraught with bureaucracy and frustration.

The entire visit to Kosovo and Metohija was an experience of walls — some protective, some exclusionary. A people that must live behind walls to survive is a people under siege. It is elementary to conclude that such a life, deprived of liberty, is not good - not good psychologically, economically, physically, spiritually. The devastatingly sad thing is that the US administration has concluded that the road to liberty does not apply to the Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo and Metohija.

There are two parallel ways to look at Kosovo: (i) as an independent country with a tiny Serb and other minority populations or (ii) as part of an intact Serbia with a sizable Albanian and other minority population. In Serbia, Albanians have the right to government-funded schooling in their language and to attend their mosques and go to work unmolested. In an Albanian dominated Kosovo, Serbs are clinging to the edge of an abyss: they cannot come and go without risk and thus cannot work outside their enclaves; they recently have seen their homes, villages and churches burned and their neighbors and friends beaten and killed. Yet, in defiance of logic, the US and much of Europe want to reward the KLA. When speaking with State Department functionaries, they sometimes bring up Milosevic as a reason for siding with the Albanians. When we counter that Milosevic is dead, and before he died he was overthrown by the citizens of Serbia and then sent to The Hague to face a form of justice, they have no answer. When we point out that the burnings and beatings of Serbs in Kosovo are ongoing, they worry about Muslim rioting and sound as sensible as Neville Chamberlain .

I am truly disappointed in the policies being pursued by my country. Nonetheless, we are finding a small but growing understanding of the issues in Congress. Our efforts in educating our Senators and Congressmen about the facts cannot stop. If we do not do our part then the US will succeed in promoting a fast independence for the terrorists in Kosovo. If the US pursues this blind policy, alluding to Robert Frost once more, in years to come it is sure to regret “the road not taken.”

Related posts:

• Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo: An Abbreviated History, Richard Jansen (Colorado State University)
• Jihad in Kosovo: a Response to Critics, Jihad Watch
• Albanian Love Gets More Expensive: Toll Booth, Georgia, Republican Riot blog (Julia Gorin)
• The Demonizing of a Nation, The Trumpet
• More on Eagleburger’s Bloody Hands in the Balkans, and: The Conservative Hoover Institute — “All Serbs Are Nazis…Croats Should have Exterminated the Serbs”, Republican Riot blog (Julia Gorin)