WPF Historic Publication

The Downfall of the Ancient Christian Civilizations in the Heart of the Modern

Bishop Artemije December 31, 2004

Original copyright © 2004 by World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations

Copyright © 2016 by Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute

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Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute gGmbH Französische Straße 23 10117 Berlin Germany +49 30 209677900 [email protected]

The Downfall of the Ancient Christian Civilizations

in the Heart of Modern Europe

Bishop Artemije

Bishop of Raska and and and

Originally published 2004 in World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations Bulletin 1(2.1), 85–91. 2 Artemije, Bishop of Raska and Prizren and Kosovo and Metohija “The downfall of the ancient Christian civilizations in the heart of the modern Europe”

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the first place, I would like to thank the organizers of this magnificent meeting called “Dialogue of Civilizations”. Unfortunately, I am not going to speak about neither a dialogue of civilizations nor cross-roads of civilizations; I will speak of the downfall of the ancient Christian civilizations at the dawn of the third millennium of Christianity in the heart of the modern, democratic Europe. Yes, this is what is happening now in Kosovo and Metohija.

This February I was in Washington. My mission was to make American officials and public aware of the catastrophic situation with security and human rights in the Serb community in Kosovo and Metohija. People have realized the seriousness of my words but I am afraid that I was defeated by the promptly released report of the UNMIK chief Harri Holkeri, backed by other international reports, which described the situation as unreasonably optimistic. These reports failed to define real problems and treated the situation in a one-sided and biased fashion. Though I regret it, I must say that they were wrong and I was right. I would truly prefer reality to be as optimistic as it is seen by certain international officials, but unfortunately, the mass attacks of against in Kosovo and Metohija on March 17 to 19, obviously dispelled the illusions that UN observers, as well as some diplomats in , attempted to present as the absolute truth. During only those two days twelve Serbs were killed, and four thousand were forced to leave their homes, to go through the torments of an enraged, lynching crowd, saving their lives. More than 850 people were wounded, and about 600 Serb houses were damaged or burned down, including many recently rebuilt houses of Serb returnees paid for by the international community. Seven Serbian villages disappeared from the map. As a bishop I am especially horrified by the fact that on those two painful days a total of 35 Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries were destroyed or heavily damaged, including several true masterpieces of medieval architecture that dated back to the 14th century. My Bishop’s residence and my

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cathedral in Prizren were also set ablaze. Two 14th century monasteries were burned to the ground. As the U.S. cultural community admired specimens of medieval Byzantine and exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum, hundreds of precious icons and other works of art were being destroyed, dozens of cemeteries were being desecrated, even the relics of saints and the bones of Serbian rulers were dug up and scattered in Kosovo. The barbarianism, the monstrous violence against the Christian cultural heritage is absolutely shocking. Searching through the ashes that once were our churches, we find remains of the 12th or 14th century frescoes, crucifixes and burned medieval manuscripts. Such atrocities, ladies and gentlemen, happened not in wartime, but in an UN-protected territory in the presence of 18,000 well-trained NATO soldiers and several thousand international peacekeepers present, an unprecedented fact in the modern history.

I will allow myself to remind you that violence against Serbs under the UN protectorate and the KFOR did not begin just then. It went on, more or less intensely, for over almost five years, resulting in 112 destroyed churches, nearly 2,000 Serbs murdered or kidnapped, and one quarter of a million Serbs forced to flee from the entering in June 1999 and remaining in exile to this day. Let us not forget those victims of the so-called international peace! What happened last week is sequential to what was before the eyes of the world community for years. It is an immediate result of the UN mission’s lack of will to establish security and safety for all citizens regardless of their ethnic origin or religious affiliation, let alone to make the criminals face justice.

The last massacre, I emphasize, cannot be called “ethnic conflict between Serbs and Albanians” as some media chose to describe it, ostensibly lacking reliable information. Neither was it criminal action committed by few extremists who had previously attacked our churches and murdered families with children. The real criminals were tens of thousands Albanians led by ex-bosses of the Kosovo Liberation Army. They sought to demolish anything that bore the sign of the Cross, anything that was Serbian, anything that bore the sign of civilization. It was not just

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a demonstration; according to the KFOR reports, there were people armed with machine guns, hand grenades, grenade launchers and Molotov cocktails. Moreover, their targets were not only Serbian people, houses and shrines, but also the KFOR soldiers and the UN policemen who tried to protect the Serb enclaves. According to UNMIK, 117 of their policemen and 63 of the KFOR soldiers were wounded, and over 150 vehicles belonging to the UN and local police were burned or damaged. There are also reports, not yet confirmed officially, of fatalities among the international forces, including two policemen killed several days after the pogrom in a purely Albanian part of Kosovo.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the true results of the mission that only a month ago was called “a story of success”. Back then, the NATO generals were discussing further reduction of military presence and dismantling security checkpoints, while the UNMIK leaders were suggesting ceding authority to local, that is, Albanian provisional institutions. Serbian representatives, including us in the , were constantly warning that behind the facade of so- called democracy and apparent multiethnicity in provisional institutions there was concealed the hideous prospect of ethnic violence, discrimination, crime and lawlessness. We warned that the paramilitary organization of the former Kosovo Liberation Army was not really disbanded after the armed conflict ended and the NATO forces arrived. It was transformed into a large network of paramilitary and criminal organizations that went on with hoarding weapons and making plans for complete ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, aiming at setting a second Albanian state in the Balkans for ethnic Albanians only.

So how can this be called a spontaneous, let alone justified, outbreak of violence?

I will quote the official spokesman of the UN police, Mr. Derek Chappell, who was among the first to say that the scale of violence suggested that the attacks “could have been planned”. Also I, personally, received a confirmation from Mr.

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Holkeri a few days ago, though at first he, like many others, believed it had been a spontaneous demonstration of violence. A tragic accident of three Albanian children drowning in a river was used on the morning of March 17 by Albanian media as a pretext for announcing a general call to start attacking the Serbs, despite the fact that the very next day UNMIK police confirmed there were no indications that this was an ethnically motivated crime on the part of the Serbs. NATO's South-East Europe commander Admiral Gregory G. Johnson promptly told media: “The relentless wave of violence across Kosovo over the past two days now appears to be organized and orchestrated.” Moreover, Admiral Johnson told AFP on March 19 that, “to speak of inter-ethnic conflict in Kosovo is a big, hypocritical lie. What’s happening in Kosovo is called a pogrom against a people and its history.” On March 20 Admiral Johnson told media point blank, “this is an ethnic cleansing, and it must stop.” These words, said by a leading NATO official based on detailed reports from the field, completely disprove the numerous reports that unfortunately appeared in many respected newspapers throughout the Western democratic world. Those reports were apparently based solely on the false claims of Albanian media and had no objective verification. Nevertheless, the lie been discovered and the truth about the ethnic cleansing and the systematic destruction of Christian shrines could not be hidden any longer.

On the day the massacre began, Mr. Hashim Thaci was in Washington, talking about multiethnicity and the progress of democracy in Kosovo. Reality was proving his words wrong even as they were leaving his mouth. While Thaci spoke about democracy, thousands of Albanians belonging to his political party were ravaging entire Serb villages and churches, leaving graffiti including the acronyms of Thaci's party, the PDK, the terrorist AKSh, the and other organizations under the KLA label. Buses full of so-called war veterans armed to the teeth set off from Thaci's native region and headed for Pristina and Mitrovica, to attack international forces there.

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Seeing they could not cover up the scale of violence and barbarity, the Albanian leaders changed their strategy. They tried to explain the violence with the unresolved status of Kosovo and Metohija, unemployment and other social problems. By no means wishing to undermine these problems, I, though, would like to quote the NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, as reported by the Pristina Albanian language daily Koha Ditore on March 23, as well as by other international journalists: “I don’t believe that the unresolved status has anything to do with this. This is about people who think in a wrong way, about people who believe that they can fulfil their ambitions through crime and ethnic violence. These people must understand that the international community will never accept this.”

Scheffer, as well as other officials who point out that by their self-justifying talk the Albanian leaders simply try to decline all responsibility or transfer it to the international community and policy, are in fact pointing to the root of the problem of what is now happening in Kosovo and Metohija. I will use an analogy:

Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, that a jumbo jet is hijacked and the criminals threaten to start killing passengers and pilots or to crash the plane into a high-rise building if their demands are not fulfilled. Would your government give in? Would the hijackers be satisfied with the deal and the plane they have got or would they be encouraged to hijack more planes and demand more? Ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with organized terrorism in Kosovo and Metohija, and we must fight it in the same way that democratic countries are fighting terrorism in other parts of the world. As long as the Albanian extremists manipulate their own people and threaten peace in the region in order to create an independent state to conceal the rule of organized crime, there will be a serious instability not only in the Balkans but in the entire Europe. The international global interests will be endangered as well.

How, then, is this to be resolved, ladies and gentlemen?

Metaphorically speaking, I would suggest using the art of a surgeon who, instead of prescribing painkillers and vitamins to a seriously ill patient, would put

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him under profound scrutiny and then, by means of a radical surgery operation, eradicate the identified source of infection. So far, Kosovo problem was treated by "general practitioners" who have been treating the inflamed, cancerous wound of the patient with aspirin and band-aids, convincing others and themselves that the wound would heal by itself, saving money and labour. The results of this “therapy” can be clearly seen today.

In political terms, Kosovo needs radical surgery and shock therapy, consisting of the following measures:

1. Strong large powers military presence of the KFOR for discouraging further violence and ethnic cleansing attempts.

2. Urgent intelligence operations for identifying organizers, planners, assistants and perpetrators of criminal actions, trying the responsible, outlawing extremist organizations and preventing their military activity.

3. Urgent restoration of destroyed Serb villages, return of refugees, restoration of destroyed and damaged churches in cooperation with the Serbian Orthodox Church and competent Serbian and international expert teams.

4. Close supervision of mass media in order to prevent extremists from using them for promoting ethnic hatred, encouraging violence and spreading propaganda. At this exact moment, an Albanian radio program is broadcasting ultra-nationalist songs celebrating and the KLA. Foulest curses against Serbs are being uttered, generating enormous ethnic hatred.

5. “General practitioners” and “voodoo doctors” must be replaced by competent specialists with large powers and broad experience. Responsibility needs to be exercised. All members of the UN mission, police and the KFOR who in any way contributed to the escalation of violence either through their actions or lack of those must submit their resignations.

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6. Specific institutional and security systems must be determined in order to protect the Serb people and other non-Albanians from systematic genocide. The integration of Serbs into a society where they are exposed to physical, spiritual and cultural destruction is an absurd idea.

7. There must be a temporary dissolution of Kosovo institutions, which by their silence, awkward propaganda or complete inactivity proved immature and unable to participate in the political process.

8. Following the radical therapy, a political convalescence process must include only the politicians who are firmly committed to the principles and values of a democratic society. Only then would Serbs be able to participate as equals and contribute to the democratization of Kosovo society.

9. Finally, standards and programs must be redefined, the process of economic and political building of a stable democratic society in Kosovo and Metohija must begin. Thus it will make it possible to work out a mutually acceptable resolution of the final status of the Province where all peoples would enjoy all individual and collective human rights.

As for the policy of “accomplished fact” suggested by some experts, ladies and gentlemen, such ideas imply proclaiming full or so-called conditional independence of Kosovo or Metohija or, even worse, partition of the province along ethnic lines with so-called “humane relocation of the population”. This would set a dangerous precedent, destabilize the situation in the region, encourage radical forces in and , incite interethnic and inter-religious clashes involving the destruction of religious sites and impede the European integration of this part of Europe for decades. Recognition of an independent Kosovo would also give ground for extremists in other potentially unstable parts of Europe to use violence in order to impose institutional solutions without recourse to negotiations and international law, with unpredictable consequences.

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I would like to assure you that the majority of the Albanian population in Kosovo has been subjected to thorough brainwashing by their political leaders, former KLA bosses, as well as many Albanian media outlets. They are using the perfectly understandable discontent of young people who were promised a sort of Eldorado but found themselves in hardship and despair, channelling it against other ethnic communities and international missions, hoping to force international forces to abandon Kosovo and leave them in full charge.

In conclusion, as a bishop of the Church I appeal to the international community, which was always firm in protecting basic religious and human rights throughout the world, not to allow unprecedented ethnic violence to unfold under the flags of the most respected democratic countries of the world, first and foremost, the United States of America; to impede the destruction of centuries-old cultural and historical heritage, valuable Christian monuments and an entire people that has been there for centuries and represents an integral part of the global cultural legacy which our generation needs to preserve for the future.

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