Page 954 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

Chaos and Disorder
SaintJohntheBaptist,
icon painted by Georgios and Cosmas, 1619, Dečani
young and educated people will leave their homes in search of a place where people are valued on the basis of their hu- man qualities, not on the basis of their ethnicity.
in this Balkan story, Kosovo seems to live in a different time and place even though it is in fact the only part of the territory of Tito’s former Yugoslavia under the administra- tion of a United Nations civil mission and a NaTO-led peacekeeping force. in Kosovo, crimes not only continue to occur but for the past four years they have been a si- lently accepted legitimate means of pursuing the policy of ethnic cleansing which Kosovo albanian extremists are carrying out against Serbs and non-albanian minorities. Their goal is to achieve what dictators such as Milošević and Tudjman failed to accomplish: to carry out a revision of the Balkan borders along ethnic lines and to divide the towns and villages that not even the five centuries of Otto- man rule or Milošević’s regime were able to divide. While
in Belgrade, Zagreb, Banja Luka and Sarajevo politicians are painfully and with difficulty, but also with increasing courage and determination, confronting the legacy of the past with the intent of joining the rest of europe, in Kosovo key figures among the Kosovo albanians not only persis- tently deny ethnic terror against Serbs but, in the case of the most recent attacks resulting in the deaths of children and helpless old people, are once again accusing phantom Serb forces, as if time for them had stopped back in 1999 when Milošević ruled the fate of Balkan peoples. Many Kosovo albanians simply cannot accept the fact that the new government in Serbia has sent almost the entire Milo- šević establishment to The Hague Tribunal and that Serbia is not governed by those who brought them pain, but by those who themselves suffered under Milošević’s regime.
Living in a nightmare
Serbs in Kosovo continue to live in the nightmare of the 1990s when the blood of innocent civilians flowed from Knin and Sarajevo to Peć and Uroševac. investigations of crimes committed against Serbs are at a standstill; for them there is no freedom of movement or life; their children live in perpetual fear; and old people enclosed in their isolated homes await every twilight in fear. Under the so-called “in- ternationally guaranteed peace” Orthodox Christian church- es and cemeteries continue to be destroyed and desecrated as if Kosovo were not in europe but in the land of the Tali- ban. While albanian journalists compete in producing the most fantastic theories about invisible Serbian paramili- tary units making diversions in various parts of the Prov- ince, unnoticed and unseen by thousands of NaTO-led troops and almost two million ethnic albanians, their poli- ticians doggedly accuse UNMiK and KFOR, claiming that they would do a better job themselves of dealing with “Ser- biancriminals.”Thusyetanotherattemptisbeingmadeto deceive the international community with the already frayed story of how the Serbs are to blame if it snows in the month of October. at one time, when the first diversions by mem- bers of the KLa began in 1996 and 1997, ibrahim Rugova, the present president of Kosovo Province, swore that they were carried out by the Serbian secret service although everyone in the world knew about the shadowy rebel group of albanian extremists. after june 1999 the same story was warmed up again in newspaper articles in order to prove to the world that despite the fact that ethnically motivated crimes were occurring every day, Kosovo was now “free.” in fact Kosovo was becoming more and more a Serb-free territory. albanian politicians who in june 1999 were abso- lutely certain of their complete victory are now growing increasingly nervous and fearful because they have demon- strated that their vision of Kosovo is not much different from Milošević’s. With their narrow ethnocentric and anachronistic views they are hardly welcome as a future part of europe.
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