Kosovo for publicly encouraging non-Albanians to return, despite reports of renewed violence against Serb Orthodox sites.
Kovoso President Ibrahim Rugova and Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi signed an appeal last week to all non-ethnic Albanians who fled the province during the 1999 war to return. They said anyone who calls Kosovo home can build a new and better Kosovo.
U.S. State Department spokesman Phil Reeker called the appeal an "unprecedented invitation" to 200,000 Serbs and other non-ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo after NATO air strikes and the deployment of UN peacekeepers, said the Voice of America (VOA).
His statement, published Thursday, July 10, came just days after Forum 18 News (F18News), which closely monitors religious persecution, reported new attacks against Orthodox religious sites in the troubled Serbian province.
An Orthodox church in Kosovo’s capital Pristina was apparently stoned again late last month, while tombstones in an Orthodox graveyard in Kosovska Vitina were said to have been destroyed.
WAVE OF ATTACKS
"This latest wave of attacks is further proof that Albanian extremists are using all means to intimidate and throw out of Kosovo the remaining Serbian population," Fr Sava (Janjic), deputy abbot of the Decani Monastery, told F18News.
"The international community is doing little to prevent it," he added. Elsewhere in Kosovo nuns and monks are afraid to leave their premises without military escorts, and there have been cases of bombings and grenade attacks, BosNewsLife and F18News have established.
In a statement the Serbian Orthodox church said that Kosovo "is a unique postwar area in which four years after the conflict the restoration of Christian holy sites is impossible due to the prevailing intolerance of the Albanian Muslim majority."
DOZENS OF MOSQUES
"While at the same time dozens of new mosques have been built, many of them with ample funding from Arab states, Orthodox Christianity remains under persecution," the church said in a statement published by F18News.
"Nuns are stoned and verbally abused, priests cannot normally visit their flock, parish churches are stoned, the theological school in Prizren – which worked even in the times of the Ottoman Empire – is closed without any hope of reopening. Cemeteries are being systematically desecrated, crosses are broken and holy icons burnt."
However spokesman Garry Bannister-Green of the NATO-led Kosovo force KFOR said the peacekeepers "deplore all such acts of mindless vandalism", a view reflected by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
IMPORTANT ROLE
"The church has an important role to play in this regard," said the OSCE Head of Mission to Serbia and Montenegro Ambassador Maurizio Massari this week after talks with the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church Pavle.
While he understood the tensions, Massari suggested that "rather than looking into the past we should look towards a future where human values and integrity will be fully respected."
He stressed "this country carries a special responsibility to promote human values not only towards its people, but towards the region as well."
The violence against Serb Orthodox churches have been linked to anger over the regime of ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who waged a bloody campaign to ethnically-cleanse the province of non-Serbs. He is now on trial at the United Nations tribunal in The Hague on charges of war crimes.
