Kosovo Left with issues bombs could not resolve

National Catholic Reporter, April 7, 2000 by Patricia Lefevere

A European journalist tells of asking her Kosovo Albanian interpreter if he can show her any place in his land where Albanians and Serbs live at peace with one another. The interpreter drives her 29 kilometers southwest of this capital city to the town of Stimlje. "Here," he says, pointing at an asylum for the insane, "here Serbs and Albanians live in peace, laughing all the time."

If the story is grim, so is the landscape. Mosques and churches that once pushed their minarets and domes heavenward now lie in ruins -- towers toppled, icon screens scarred by fire, bullet holes, excrement. In Djakovica, not far from Stimlje, entire blocks of Albanian shops, houses, mosques and the marketplace have been gutted by Serbian army, police and paramilitary forces during the 78-day NATO bombing attack last spring.

Those who were able fled in terror. Almost overnight 860,000 displaced Kosovar Albanians swarmed across neighboring borders. Most of the displaced found shelter in hastily built tent cities or with families in Albania and Macedonia. Several thousand others climbed the mountain road into Montenegro by foot, mule, on tractors or in a convoy of cars and buses.

Just weeks after the Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo -- in the wake of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia -- the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army drove the remaining Serbs from Djakovica and other centers. Many Serbs had already fled, fearing reprisals for the executions of Albanians and the looting and burning of their homes, crops and businesses. Ordinary Serbs, who took no part in the terror, ran too as Albanian revenge spread like spilled gasoline and, once ignited, destroyed areas previously populated by Serbs, Gypsies, Slavs and Muslims.

One year later -- after the aerial pounding, after the procession of exiles, after the carnage of Serbian ethnic cleansing and the retribution of returning Albanians, Kosovo remains a display of human horror. In a land where Serbs and Albanians have coexisted -- not without tension and bloodshed -- for 800 years, an army of 40,000 international "peacekeepers," a force referred to as KFOR, now has the job of keeping the two peoples from any further killing.

This is the peace beyond understanding in Kosovo one year after the bombing by Nato forces started last March 24. Three European and one U.S. journalist recently traveled throughout the region to view the tensions and fallout from the war, the issues that bombs could not resolve.

Interviews with religious leaders, with KFOR officials, with refugees, displaced people and with representatives of the church and other non-governmental agencies assisting them raise powerful questions: Why should anyone care about these Balkan "madmen" and "terrorists," as they've been called? Are they indeed our brothers and sisters? Was the U.S.-led bombing to save them from the abuses suffered under Yugoslav Federation President Slobodan Milosevic a misguided strategy that may require a partitioned Kosovo under global management for a generation?

"We have to care," said Alexander Belopopsky, Europe secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, who helped arrange the weeklong trip. "There are 10 Kosovos waiting to happen in Europe alone," Belopopsky said. He pointed to the war between Russia and Chechnya, to conflicts in neighboring Dagestan, unresolved ethnic claims in Armenia and Azerbaijan, internal struggles in Georgia and tensions between fundamentalist Islamic elements in many of the former southern Soviet states who want to govern these republics according to Sharia (Islamic law).

In the Balkans no one addresses the current instability without first unfolding centuries of history. The past lives on here, no matter how disturbed and violent. Southeast of Djakovica is Prizren, the 14th-century Serbian capital, a city steeped in religious history. Today it stands as witness to a deep betrayal of religious instincts and testament to the viciousness of religion when it is placed in service of hatred. Here Serbian homes have been plundered and burnt, as have those of the once-large Roma (Gypsy) community. Prizren's Serbian Orthodox churches, many of them dating to medieval times and having withstood five centuries of Turkish rule, are today necklaced in barbed wire and guarded by KFOR troops and tanks.

German soldiers sit behind sand bunkers in front of Ss. Ciril and Methodius Theological Seminary. They guard the handful of elderly Serbs and Gypsy families and the lone monk who still inhabits the spacious dormitory and classroom building. Fr. Miron Kosach, a Serbian Orthodox monk, tells NCR, "Everyone in the house lives like Salman Rushdie."

Tables have turn

The tables have turned in the wake of the bombing. Months earlier Miron might have said that the Serbian Orthodox church had stayed neutral, the way the minority Catholic church had tried to conduct itself during the crisis leading to NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle, who was bishop in Kosovo 34 years before being called to head the church in Belgrade, had appealed for an end to violence. But in a land without a free press, Pavle's statements were not widely known. When the patriarch appeared on television with Milosevic at a New Year's event, many saw the Serbian Orthodox church as anything but neutral.