wfn.org | Kosovars, Serbs Face a Very Different Future

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

99250 
5-August-1999 
 
    Kosovars, Serbs Face a Very Different Future 
 
    For Kosovo, fresh winds of freedom; for Serbs, it's more of Milosevic 
 
                     by Duncan S. Hanson 
                 Worldwide Ministries Division 
                  Area Coordinator for Europe 
 
PRISHTINA, Kosovo--For many there wasn't even time to say good-bye. 
 
    CNN had reported that Serbs were leaving Kosovo in droves and that the 
towns and villages where refugees had lived before they fled the war 
suddenly stood open. 
 
    All over Albania and southeastern Europe it took only a few minutes for 
most Kosovar refugees to reach the same conclusion: They needed to get back 
to their homes as soon as possible to protect them from looting or 
vandalism either by the departing Serbs or by other returning Kosovars. 
 
    So they piled into cars, buses, trucks, tractors and horse-pulled 
wagons and left.  The next morning they were already into Albania's rugged 
Kagjin mountains by the time Albanian and Presbyterian Church (USA) 
volunteers arrived at mostly empty camps with their land rovers filled with 
bread and coffee and stew. 
 
    A couple hours later when other volunteers who had not yet gotten the 
word of the Kosovars' hurried return to Kosovo arrived at the camps to 
continue the previous day's English lessons or to play with kids who had 
been traumatized by violence, many of the Kosovars were already jamming the 
mountain passes at Librazhd and Kolsh. 
 
                       What they found there 
 
    When the Kosovars arrived at their homes, a lucky few simply unlocked 
their doors to find everything exactly as they had left it. 
 
    Many other Kosovars found, however, that their apartments had been 
stripped of valuables and that their family photos, like their sons' soccer 
gear or their daughters' raggedy-ann dolls, had been carelessly dumped 
behind neighbors' sheds.  Others discovered that motor oil had been poured 
into the wells from which they got their drinking water ... or that the 
carcasses of dead animals or even of murdered human beings had been dumped 
into those same wells. 
 
    Many others -- including up to 60% of the population in some areas in 
western Kosovo -- came back to find that their houses had been burnt to the 
ground or blown up by mortar shells or hand grenades.  The most unlucky of 
the returning Kosovars came back to houses that had been booby-trapped with 
explosives. 
 
    Some boys in Prizrin, for instance, reached home safely only to be 
blown up by a bomb that went off when they tried to put a tape in the 
family tape player. 
 
    In Djakovica some French doctors were invited for coffee by a family 
that had just returned to their home.  As the doctors were leaving, a 
member of the family moved a table in order to clean up.  Unfortunately 
there was an explosive device that had been taped to the bottom of the 
table that no one had noticed.  The father of the family and three children 
were killed instantly.  The French doctors, who were outside the house, 
escaped physical injury. 
 
                   The relief work doesn't stop 
 
    The relief agencies that had been responding to the refugee crisis, 
including Action by Churches Together (ACT), a World Council of 
Churches-related agency that is a key Presbyterian Church (USA) partner in 
the region, had been head-over-heels in work in Albania, Macedonia, 
Montenegro and other countries in southeastern Europe and were not prepared 
for the Kosovars' sudden return to Kosovo. 
 
    Prepared or not, all the agencies recognized immediately that the needs 
in Kosovo would be enormous.  Not only would many people find that their 
houses had been destroyed or mined or were otherwise unliveable, but the 
departing Serb forces had also planted mines in many agricultural fields to 
make it more difficult for the returning Kosovars to reap the harvest. 
 
    There had also been, of course, some damage from bombing, although in 
the several days my colleagues and I crisscrossed central and southern and 
western Kosovo, we saw only a couple factories and one oil storage depot 
that appeared to have been struck by aerial bombs.  In contrast we saw 
literally thousands of destroyed houses. 
 
    Except in Prishtina, Prizrin and Decani, we did not travel much off the 
main highways, so our estimate that there is relatively little damage in 
Kosovo as a result of NATO bombing must be considered somewhat tentative. 
We traveled without accompaniment by anyone outside our group and were not 
in any way restricted in our choice of places to visit. 
 
    Just a few weeks after the Kosovars' return, many relief agencies are 
already hard at work in Kosovo.  As it did in Albania, the PC(USA) is 
hoping to take a leading role in providing personnel and financial support 
for trauma care and psychosocial ministry in various places in Kosovo under 
ACT's auspices. 
 
    As I write, Presbyterian mission worker Kathy Angi is still in Kosovo 
making a psychosocial needs assessment for ACT that will be critical in 
shaping the specifics of PC(USA) work in Kosovo.  Another PC (USA) group 
will be joining evangelical Christians from various European countries in 
children's play therapy in Prizrin in late August. 
 
    The PC(USA) is hoping that Presbyterian mission worker Bob Baker, who 
has just been chosen to serve as Administrator of the Albanian 
Encouragement Project, will be able also to find ways for Presbyterians to 
assist the relief work of those seven Kosovar congregations. 
 
                 This time it's the Serbs who are leaving 
 
    In the little town of Decani in western Kosovo my colleagues and I were 
invited for coffee in a little caf‚ that had been reopened exactly one week 
before.  The caf‚ manager told me we were the first Americans to be in the 
caf‚ since it reopened.  In recognition of that fact he gave us a bottle of 
12-year-old sherry that he had saved, as he said, for the day that the 
Kosovars would again have a reason to celebrate in Kosovo. 
 
    Until nine years ago, the caf‚ had served Kosovars and Serbs alike. 
Then, in 1990, the ruling came down that only Serbs could enter the caf‚. 
Now it is again - officially at least - open to members of both national 
groups, but thus far no Serb has been there. 
 
    The main reason is that there are very few, if any, Serbs left in 
Decani, or for that matter anywhere else in Kosovo.  Except for a few Serbs 
in Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, those Serbs who remain are reported by 
refugee workers to be waiting until it is safe either to come out of hiding 
or to leave United Nations-protected enclaves to travel through Kosovo to 
Serbia. 
 
    These unwelcome Serbs know also that the Serbs of Serbia can ill afford 
to take them in and so they face an uncertain future wherever they go.  But 
they have no other realistic choice except to go to Serbia, so they will 
go. 
 
    The PC(USA), like many European churches, has tried to call attention 
during the past several years to the needs of the Kosovars.  Now, the 
PC(USA), as well as other churches with relatively long standing 
involvements in southeastern Europe, will need to speak out also for these 
Serbs who are as much victims of Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic and his 
policies as are the Kosovars. 
 
                 The Orthodox Church survives in Kosovo 
 
    In one city my colleagues and I visited an Orthodox monastery that had 
been founded in 1327 - when the city that now surrounds it was just 
uninhabited woodland.  In 1327, the monks at that monastery, like most of 
the inhabitants of southeastern Europe, were still subjects of the 
Byzantine empire. 
 
    In the intervening centuries, as Ottomans, Serbs, Albanians and Germans 
have come and gone, and as a city has built up around it, the monks of the 
monastery have continued to work and pray together in that same spot. 
Indeed, whatever the changes outside the walls of the monastery, 
very little has changed inside the monastery. 
 
    In the weeks since the end of the war, several Orthodox churches in 
other cities in Kosovo have been burned by angry Kosovars in retaliation 
for the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of Serbs.  Yet this 
monastery has remained unscathed. 
 
    A cynic might say what makes this monastery different is the squad of 
Italian soldiers complete with a tank and an armored personnel carrier that 
guard it.   Still, that's not the primary reason I believe this monastery 
will survive the present troubles. 
 
    The monks at this monastery, like a number of other brave monks and 
priests and hierarchs as well as lay people of the Serbian Orthodox Church 
in Kosovo, have long been outspoken opponents of Milosevic's policy toward 
the Kosovars.  We know that criticism did not go unnoticed by Milosevic 
since a member of his government raised the matter with the Orthodox 
Patriarchate in Belgrade.  The monks hope that their Kosovar neighbors will 
remember how they stood up against the Milosevic regime. 
 
    But perhaps even more important for the future of this monastery was 
the decision of the monks to offer housing to Kosovars who had been driven 
from their homes by Serb military and police.  It is easy to imagine that 
the monks did a lot of praying when they opened their massive wooden doors 
to the Muslim Kosovars. 
 
    When the war ended and the Kosovars who had been in the monastery left 
to return to their homes, the monks decided to give shelter to Serbs and 
Roma who now suddenly felt themselves to be endangered.  Now these Serb and 
Roma refugees have also mostly moved on and the monastery is considering 
taking in yet another new group. 
 
    Is this monastery representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church as a 
whole, either in Kosovo or in Serbia itself?  I don't know how many, either 
within the church or outside the church, have actively resisted the 
Milosevic government.  In any case, faithfulness is a theological and not a 
statistical question.  The church may be tested by persecutions and 
tribulations and many thereby may fall away, but theologically we know that 
where the true church is there also will always be a faithful remnant.  We 
have seen that remnant in Kosovo. 
 
                      Final thoughts from Prishtina 
 
    I am writing in my room at the Grand Hotel Prishtina.  It's 11:00 p.m. 
and hundreds of people are gathered on the square under my window chatting 
happily with each other and half listening to the rock music that is 
blaring from an aging speaker fixed to a building on the other side of the 
square.  It is a cool night, very pleasant after a hot day. 
 
    Even though there is no water tonight anywhere in downtown Prishtina 
and a sign in the hotel lobby apologizes in advance in case the electricity 
goes off, the happily milling crowd gives the feeling that somehow 
everything is almost normal again in Europe's newest capital city. 
 
    As I stare out at the happy crowd, I cannot help but think of how 
differently the future must seem now for the people of Belgrade than it 
does for the inhabitants of Prishtina.  In Prishtina the future is open in 
a way it has not been since the Middle Ages. 
 
    Although I've not been in Belgrade -- the capital of the Federal 
Republic of Yugoslavia -- 
since the end of the war, communications coming from that city reflect 
anything but normal life there. 
 
    During the war, crowds had gathered nightly in Belgrade's central 
square to show their resolve in face of allied bombing.  Now that the war 
is over there are no reports of happily milling crowds in that city but 
rather growing signs of discontent with Slobodan Milosevic.  When will 
Belgrade and Yugoslavia become normal again? 
 
    Nominally, of course, Prishtina, like all of Kosovo, still belongs to 
Serbia, but the Kosovars, like everyone else, know that Kosovo will never 
be returned to Serbia against their will, and they know that they will 
never agree to it. 
 
    In Belgrade, on the other hand, eight years of economic sanctions and 
ten weeks of bombing have not only destroyed that city's economic 
infrastructure but also, according to reports from Milosevic critics in 
Belgrade, the spiritual life of the people. They know that as long as 
Slobodan Milosevic is the leader of their country they cannot expect their 
life to return to normal.  They also know that Milosevic will never give up 
power voluntarily. 
 
    Even more significantly, the inhabitants of Prishtina see themselves as 
the more or less innocent victims of Serb repression and terror.  They 
believe - with a good deal of justification - that most of the rest of the 
world sees them the same way. 
 
    The Serbs know they, too, have suffered but they see very little 
sympathy for them coming from anyone.  Most Serbs still do not believe that 
their army and police committed genocide in Kosovo, in spite of a growing 
mountain of evidence indicating that they did.  They do know that the rest 
of the world thinks they are guilty of gruesome crimes against humanity. 
 
    So while the Kosovars can devote themselves to building a better 
future, the same cannot be said of the Serbs. 

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