Page 864 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

Metropolitan amfilohije (Radović)
people’s choice for Kosovo was confirmed on St. Vitus Day by the martyring of all its believing champions from whose blood the peonies of the Serbian Christian covenant spring and bloom even today. They will be sprouting and bloom- ing unto the end of the world and time.
This book [here only partly presented] is the first part of the new Kosovo Chronicles written in the months and years of the heaviest sufferings from 1999–2004. it has been verified and updated with subsequent findings, which had to be divided into two parts due to the vast amount of the material. it represents only one of the pages of the Holy Kosovo book on which a dramatic, Golgotha like history of the Serbian people and their Church in the territories of Old Serbia, the present day Kosovo and Metohija, is writ- ten. The living and true testimonies of the Kosovo and Me- tohija crucifixion gathered in this book in the year of ag- gression by NaTO. The actions of the military alliance and the occupation of Old Serbia are new attempts to tear out the living heart of our people. But the truth is even stron- ger than the sun and will show and reveal first the real spir- itual and then the earthly causes of all that has happened and is happening in Kosovo and Metohija today.
From these records it can be seen that today’s ethnic and other inequalities in these fateful european regions isn’t the consequence of natural processes or a healthy his- torical development. it is not independent from spiritual flows, but is rather a product of an uninterrupted chain of violence. expulsion, abduction and destruction of the Ser- bian Orthodox Christian people, their holy places and their property through centuries. The extent and duration of this suppression has always stood juxtaposed in a mysteri- ous relationship with the spirit and deeds of the faith in God and the denial of God of our own people as is the case in any other Christian nation on earth.
The basic rule of God’s as well as that of the human jus- tice is: the crime never grows old. The bombardment of Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija, the very heart of the Ser- bian lands, in the year 1999 of our Lord was carried out with the intentions and inclinations of the world’s centers of power to ruthlessly and at the cost of each and every crime, advocate and extort the granting of independent status to the quasi-state of “Kosova.” a region almost en- tirely ethnically cleansed of Serbs. This very bombardment represents the very legalization of both old and new crimes and violence. With the difference that, these crimes were not committed in the name of jihad, Nazi-fascism or Bol- shevism but, alas, in the name of so called human rights and democracy which have become the only benchmark and criteria of justice and righteousness in today’s post- Christian world. These crimes were carried out with the help of bombs and missiles and the deceivingly and cyni- cally called “Kosova Liberation army,” “UÇK” (“Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës” in albanian)!
The goal of the testimonies presented in this book is to serve as an alarm clock for the consciences of this world’s
strongmen which have been obscured by recalcitrance and violence, so that they finally start judging and passing judg- ments on Kosovo and Metohija not by “bearing false wit- ness to please either the father or the uncles, but according to the judgment of the true God!” as mother jevrosima tells her son Marko in the Serbian epic poem.5 and this means: according to the incorruptible justice of God and genuine humanity.
The writer of these Chronicles is aware of all its numer- ous limitations, first of all of the inevitable incompleteness of the list of the victims of pogroms and expulsions in Ko- sovo and Metohija from 1998/1999. The limitations of these records partly come from the conditions in which The Chronicles stemmed from. in the peak of the albanian po- grom and the dodging of all the pillars the Serbian state provided for the protection, connection, sustenance, and care of her people in Kosovo and Metohija as their guard- ian and defender. They come partly from the conditions in which the chronicles grew after checking and updating the data that was recorded first hand during the months and years that followed. Limitations caused in part by the ab- sance of a comprehensive and thoroughly proven and cer- tified list of victims by the state. Limitations caused by the weakening and even broken connections with the scattered exiles whose sad everyday life we all somehow less actively worry about and whose memories we less and less care for, record and make public.
This is why the writer warmly asks for forgiveness of all those who cannot find in these records the names of their children, parents, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends who were killed. Therefore, praying for the repose of the souls of the new Kosovo sufferers, known and unknown, recorded and unrecorded here, and of those known only to God, reminds us all of David’s words of God’s Holy Scrip- ture: When I cry unto Thee, then shall mine enemies turn back [...] Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into Thy bottle: are they not in Thy book?... In the Book of the eternal life of the living pre-eternal God
ON NaTO-aGGReSSiON aGaiNST SeRBia aND MONTeNeGRO (FRY)
Records from the Period of NaTO-agression March-May, in the Year of the Lord 1999
in early February 1999, with the blessing of the Holy archierarchical Synod, we leave for Paris together with the Bishop of Raška and Prizren and others, so that the voice of the Serbian Orthodox Church may also be heard in the negotiations and decision making on the destiny of Koso-
5 an excerpt from the Serbian epic poem “Uroš and the Mrnjav- čevići.”jevrosimaisthemotherofthejugovićbrothers(heroesofthe Battle of Kosovo), a symbol of justice, morality and Christian virtues. See the Ballads of Marko Kraljević, transl. by D. H. Low, Cambridge 1922: 16—transl note
862