officials call "an orchestrated campaign against religious minorities," a news agency reported Thursday, April 17.
Forum 18 News Service (F18News), which investigates religious persecution, said pastor Josip Tikvicki was beaten in the night of 15-16 April while challenging people who attacked his church in Zrenjanin, 65 kilometres (40 miles) north-east of the Serbian capital Belgrade.
Speaking about Wednesday’s incident, Dragan Ciric from Adventist headquarters in Belgrade said "Pastor Tikvicki heard some people stoning the windows at the church," the Beta news agency reported.
"He went out to ask for an explanation. At that moment, several persons kicked and hit him, he fell to the ground and lost consciousness," Ciric was quoted as saying.
INJURIES
Police found the pastor and rushed him to hospital where he was treated for injuries including a concussion to the head, several fractured ribs and a broken jaw that left him unable to talk, F18News said.
"This is the fifth such incident with Adventist churches in the last ten days. We believe there is an orchestrated campaign against us," Radisa Antic, president of the Adventists’ South-East European Union, told F18News.
Analysts have linked the violence to nationalism that was promoted by ousted President Slobodan Milosevic and backed by some Serbian Orthodox churches. A generation grew up without tolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, human rights workers say.
HATRED
"They hate ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, but no one is pointing out how we got here," said Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, according to F18News.
She also recalled demonstrations disrupting an Anglican Christmas service in Belgrade last year as part of a pattern of attacks against non Orthodox groups.
""Our young generation has its own value system that is, as is being proved here, incompatible with our plans for a new, European Serbia. These are merely the logical consequences," she said.
Human rights watch-dogs point out that incidents against especially evangelical oriented Christians have continued despite the state of emergency that was declared following the gang land style assassination of pro reform prime minister Zoran Djindjic last month.
