Wednesday, February 16, that the region "remains very explosive with high potential for ethnic violence." The warning came after Albanian defense minister Pandeli Majko told reporters Tuesday, February 15, that the United Nations-run province was a "lost cause" for Belgrade, which has vowed to resist the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demands for independence.
Serbia’s President Boris Tadic, who visited Kosovo this week, said however that his government would "never accept independence" for Kosovo, a statement welcomed by Serbian Orthodox leaders.
"Kosovo Serbs…quite reasonably fear that boosting Kosovo Albanian national pride with hasty promises of statehood will only increase ethnic pressure on other communities and not bring them long awaited relief," said the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raska and Prizren Kosovo and Metohija.
CHURCHES DESTROYED
Serbian Orthodox leaders say numerous ancient churches, monasteries and even Serbian graves have been ruined by ethnic Albanian militants since 1999 when the UN took control over Kosovo to end a war between independence seeking ethnic Albanians and Serb forces. Western observers have linked the attacks to ethnic Albanian anger over years of oppression under autocratic Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
Over 200,000 Serbs since fled Kosovo in the last five years, and only about 80,000 Serbs are believed to remain in scattered enclaves where they apparently live under constant fear of being attacked by ethnic Albanian extremists.
"Threats of violence through the press and direct attacks on the presidential convoy [of Boris Tadic this week] with rocks and icefalls in vicinity of holy sites demonstrated the lack of necessary security in Kosovo and Metohija which makes it evident that standards are far from being fulfilled," added the region’s Serbian Orthodox Diocese.
MASSIVE RIOTS
Last March about 19 people were killed in riots across Kosovo between ethnic Albanians. Despite efforts by the 18,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force and UN police in Kosovo to improve the security situation, "Kosovo still remains very explosive with high potential for ethnic violence," the church said in a statement monitored by BosNewsLife.
It stressed the violence originates "not so much from social problems of Kosovo Albanians, which exist elsewhere in the Balkans, but rather from the surprising lack of basic tolerance for others, who live beside them with a different culture and religion."
"Serbs still live on the margins of social life without access to institutions of health and education outside of their settlements," the Serbian Orthodox Diocese said. In addition, the church said, Kosovo’s Serbs are "very frequently also at a biological minimum – without electricity and water in freezing winter temperatures."
It also expressed concern that although Kosovo monuments bear Cyrillic inscriptions, the UN allegedly only allows Serb names of towns and streets as well as official documents to be written only in Latin alphabet. Serbian Orthodox Christians and other groups are suffering as Kosovo is "progressively being shaped as an exclusively ethnic Albanian society in which other ethnic communities may only be more or less tolerated but still cannot freely find their true home and preserve their identity," the Serbian Orthodox Diocese claimed.
CHILDREN SUFFER
"The situation is especially difficult for Serbian and other non-Albanian children, who for more than five years have been denied a free childhood and childhood joys." However the UN has said it will do all it can to protect Serbs and other ethnic minorities. The church concern comes ahead of Western backed status talks on the future of Kosovo.
This week President Tadic reportedly stressed the importance of a continued Serb presence in areas such as the Decani monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site and Serbia’s best preserved mediaeval church." Wherever I have been, when people thank me for coming, I have to say: ‘On the contrary, thank you for staying’," Tadic reportedly told
Decani’s Bishop Teodosije, who presented him with an icon.
Serbian Orthodox Christians have also been persecuted elsewhere in the region, including in neighboring Macedonia, church leaders and human rights groups say. Since December a hundred members of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Archbishopric of Ohrid in Macedonia were questioned by police and searched, after they backed its failed registration application, said Forum 18 News Service of the human rights group Forum 18. Some were allegedly threatened they would be kicked out of their jobs.
The Interior Ministry denied that police questioned anyone just for signing the registration application, the Forum 18 News Service said. (By: Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent, BosNewsLife with BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest, reports from Kosovo).
