[kcc-news] News: Protecting Kosovo's Cultural Treasures -- ARTICLE (fwd)

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PROTECTING KOSOVO'S CULTURAL TREASURES

By Michael Sells

(Michael Sells is the author of "The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and
Genocide in Bosnia," second edition, 1998.   He is professor of
comparative religions at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.)

Members of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Yugoslav government are
making a grave allegation.  They claim that NATO is bombing the great
Serbian Orthodox monasteries dating to the medieval Serb kingdoms. The
web site of the Belgrade government's Institute for the Protection of
Cultural Monuments of Serbia shows pictures of monasteries allegedly
damaged by NATO strikes and includes two black spaces with the word"
destroyed" ominously written across them.  The web page of the Serbian
Orthodox Church, entitled "The Bombing of Serbian Shrines," is even more
provocative. The site features a map of the major Serbian shrines in
Kosovo, with icons of bomb blasts over each of them, as if NATO's bombs
were falling directly upon them.  The religious and historical importance
of the monasteries in Kosovo  -- an area called by some "the Serb
Jerusalem" -- gives such claims a powerful impact, especially in
countries with large Orthodox Christian populations.  In addition,
threats to sacred sites symbolize threats to the existence of the people
who value them.

Yet these web sites offer no evidence to justify the "destroyed" labels
or the title "The Bombing of Serbian Shrines."  The sites show pictures
of the monuments before the alleged destruction, but no images of the
damage they claim was inflicted by NATO -- except for items like masonry
cracks that could have been caused by anything.  Serbian authorities
have not been shy about showing graphic details of civilian destruction
wrought by misguided NATO bombs.  If NATO were bombing the monasteries,
images of the blasted ruins would be broadcast around the world.

These new allegations against NATO are ominously similar to Serb
nationalists' charges in 1986 that Kosovar Albanians were destroying the
monasteries. This charge was combined with other inflammatory allegations
that Kosovar Albanians were illegal immigrants who should be expelled;
that Albanians were using their high birth rate as a tool to commit"
demographic genocide" against Kosovo's Serb minority; and that they were
carrying out widespread rapes of Serb women.  In 1986, Serbian Orthodox
bishops repeated these allegations and charged that genocide was being
carried out against Serbs in Kosovo. The same charges were repeated in
the famous "Memorandum" written by Serbian intellectuals attacking the
Yugoslav constitution and the autonomy of Kosovo.  In this inflamed
environment, Slobodan Milosevic made his leap to power by promising he
would protect the Serb people and their shrines against their enemies.

What was the truth of these frightening allegations?  There were genuine
grievances by both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, and both groups felt
threatened.  But Serb independent journalists and human rights workers
found the more inflammatory charges to be total fabrications. A study of
police records in Kosovo showed only one rape of an ethnic Serb by an
Albanian in an entire year.  Similarly, the alleged destruction of Serb
shrines turned out to involve isolated cases of vandalism, graffiti, and
cutting of trees on church property --  hate crimes, perhaps, but surely
not the organized, genocidal annihilation that was claimed.

Yet the charge that Albanians were out to destroy Serb sacral heritage
had a life independent of any evidence to the contrary.  The charge fed
into a mythologized history that presented the Ottoman Turks and native
Balkan Muslims as obsessed with eradicating Serbs and Serbian sacred
sites.  Serb nationalists make this charge repeatedly -- despite the
survival of this magnificent heritage through five centuries of Ottoman
rule amidst Albanian neighbors and despite the Ottoman record of
supporting the Serbian Orthodox patriarchate and authorizing the
building and repair of Serbian churches.

To understand the full power of the accusations of monastery destruction,
we need to note the other symbols that were attached to the monasteries.
The medieval Serb Prince Lazar was portrayed as a Christ figure and his
death at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 was presented as the "Serbian
Golgotha."   Serb nationalists began accusing today's Balkan Muslims of
having the blood of the Christ-prince Lazar on their hands. At the same
time, the bones of Serbs killed by the Nazis and their Ustasha
collaborators during World War II were ritually exhumed amid nationalist
propaganda demonizing all Albanians, Slavic Muslims, and Croats as
inherently genocidal. Mythic time (1389), historical memory (World War
II), and false allegations of contemporary Albanian genocide all became
symbolically attached to the monasteries.

For the momentous June 28, 1989, 600th anniversary of the battle of
Kosovo, Lazar's relics were solemnly transported from monastery to
monastery to arrive at the Gracanica monastery (one of the shrines now
claimed to be under attack by NATO).   A massive crowd viewed the
unveiling of the relics at the monastery and then moved to the nearby
battle site. There an even larger crowd of more than a million Serbs
heard Slobodan Milosevic's belligerent speech sealing his plan to revoke
Kosovo's autonomy.  The symbols brought together with such ritual and
theatric power were then instrumentalized through the purging of the
Yugoslav army, government protection of extremist paramilitary groups,
and media propaganda. In a mass psychology of fear and rage, Serbian
society was radicalized. Serbia's most popular celebrity today is the
indicted war-criminal Arkan, and its most popular politician is Vojislav
Seselj, an open advocate of the annihilation of Kosovar Albanians and all
Balkan Muslims.  At first the violence conceived in Kosovo was channeled
into the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia.

In Bosnia, Serb militias --  urged on by the allegations of destruction
of Serb monasteries -- annihilated non-Serb sacral sites.  All mosques
and other Muslim shrines (more than 1,400) were destroyed, including
world-class masterpieces built in the 15th and 16th centuries.  In some
towns all the mosques were destroyed in a single night's coordinated
dynamiting. The Ferhad Pasha Mosque (1583) in Banja Luka was re-dynamited
three times, the rubble pulverized with jackhammers and trucked away to
deny the surviving Muslim community a shard of its heritage.  In the town
of Foca, the 16th-century masterpiece known as the Colored Mosque and all
other Muslim shrines were blown up, the sites turned into parking lots.
When the new Serb nationalist mayors of Foca and Zvornik were asked why
all the mosques had been destroyed, they responded that there never had
been any mosques in those towns.

Where the Serb army could not occupy an area, they targeted cultural
sites with shelling, burning the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo -- with
its priceless collection of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Slavic
manuscripts -- and the National Library, with more than a million volumes
-- the largest book burning in history.  In three years Serb militias
eradicated five centuries of Bosnian Muslim heritage and all evidence
that Muslims and Serbs had shared a common civilization. Meanwhile, the
Serbian monasteries of Kosovo survived intact, even as they had survived
centuries of Ottoman rule and Albanian neighbors.

Now we hear similarly inflammatory charges that NATO is bombing Serbian
monasteries.  In all the talk about the monasteries, we tend to forget
that the Albanian community has its own Muslim and Catholic sites.
Muslim sites include mosques, madrasas (religious schools, often with
manuscript libraries), tekkes (dervish lodges), turbes (mausoleums,
frequently sites of pilgrimage), hammams (bath complexes for men and
women), and bazaars (often built next to a mosque to support pious
endowments).  Many date from the 15th and 16th centuries.  Kosovar
refugees interviewed on the border offer consistent reports of having
witnessed the destruction of mosques and shrines.  In the case of Bosnia
such reports turned out to be horrifyingly true.

The Belgrade regime insists that Serbian forces must remain in Kosovo in
order to protect the monasteries.  The Serbian monasteries survived five
centuries without Milosevic's army and special police.  But non-Serb
peoples and monuments in the area have not fared well under Belgrade's
"monument protection."  Since 1986, Serb nationalists have manipulated
concern for the shrines to motivate, justify, and implement "ethnic
cleansing" and annihilation of centuries of non-Serb artistic and
religious monuments.  In exploiting Serbian monasteries and the Serbian
heritage the represented to foment hate and violence, they desecrated a
great Serbian heritage that deserves better.

All sacral sites in Kosovo should be protected by a multinational force
that includes peacekeepers from countries with large Orthodox
populations. UNESCO and other organizations should monitor them and
catalogue any damages.  Deliberate destruction of monuments should be
prosecuted as a war crime in The Hague.   As for Belgrade's  army, its
special police, and paramilitaries -- the world has seen enough of their
"protection of monuments."


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