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Crucified Kosovo

Serbian Orthodox report routine destruction of Christian churches
in areas supervised by Western forces.

On April 28, as the Orthodox world began its celebration of Good Friday, a bomb ripped through a Serbian Orthodox parish church in Grncar, a town in Kosovo that is currently under the control of an American peacekeeping mission. The blast brought most of the church building crashing to the ground.

That explosion was the work of a bomb which had been planted inside the church and set to detonate at 8 am: the time when the members of the local Orthodox community were scheduled to gather for a morning prayer service. Fortunately, the timing device on the bomb was flawed, and it exploded 20 minutes earlier than its designer had hoped. At that time, the Orthodox parishioners of Grncar were in the town’s center, waiting to greet a priest whose car had broken down. As a result of that happy coincidence, there were no casualties.

However, the message of the Grncar bombing was obvious: once again, the Serbian Orthodox Church was under attack. No one in Grncar had any doubt that the bomb had been set by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian separatist group.

The bombing in Grncar was anything but an isolated event. Since NATO forces intervened in Kosovo to curb a Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanian majority in that province, the Christians who remain living in Kosovo—most of them Serbian Orthodox—have frequently complained that the pendulum has swung wildly to the opposite extreme. Where once the Serbs intimidated Albanians, they say, today Albanian militants are busily settling scores, at the expense of the Orthodox community. The violence continues, they stress, despite the presence of Western peacekeeping troops.

In November 1999, the Serbian Orthodox diocese of Raska and Prizren prepared a thorough report on the destruction of Orthodox churches in Kosovo. Their report, entitled Crucified Kosovo documented the bombing and desecration of 76 churches and monasteries in the province. (The report is now available on the internet at www.kosovo.com/crucified.) As the Good Friday bombing in Grncar demonstrates, that number is still climbing.

In an introduction to Crucified Kosovo, the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle pleads with Western leaders to take note of the latest campaign of destruction and intimidation in Kosovo, and treat it as seriously as the earlier Serbian aggression. The Patriarch writes:

It is distressing to learn that in the year of the greatest Christian Jubilee, at the end of two millennia of Christianity, Christian churches are still being destroyed—not in a war but in a time of peace guaranteed by the international community. We hope that these photos of the destroyed and desecrated Orthodox shrines will stir the consciousness of those who are in a position to stop the crimes, and we believe that those who already stood up against one evil will not remain mere witnesses passively watching another kind of evil take place before their eyes.

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