Authored by Adnan Caka. Translation Petrit Latifi.

This article examines the Serbian Orthodox extremism against Albanians, motivated by the church, and the violent displacement of Albanians. It also examines the responsible role of this church in the genocide against Muslims in the Balkans. It was a co-participant in the drafting of most of the 32 Serbian programs for genocide against Albanians.

Her contribution to the promotion of Serbian fascism is very great throughout history, especially during the recent wars in the Balkans, she was a motivator and blessing of Serbian criminals. During this paper I have presented several hypotheses and some questions related to this research:

Hypothesis 1.

The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) had a very destructive role in the Kosovo issue and she was one of the main architects of the Serbian genocide against Albanians.

Hypothesis 2.

The collaboration of the Serbian Church in massacres, genocide and ethnocide against Albanians, from 1912 to the present day.

The Serbian Orthodox Church during the last war in Kosovo waged a religious war against Muslim Albanians. The Serbian Church is a collaborator with the Serbian government in the massacre, genocide and Serbian ethnocide against Albanians, from 1912 to the present day.

With the blessing of the church, Serbian paramilitaries, as well as with the support of the police and the army, killed and massacred thousands of Albanians. With the scorched earth strategy, they first looted and razed hundreds of villages during the re-occupation of Kosovo in 1918.

The data speak of 12,371 Albanians killed and 22,110 Albanians arrested and imprisoned within a year, from the re-occupation of Kosovo in 1918 to the beginning of the work of the Versailles Conference in 1919. With the blessing of the church, Serbian paramilitaries and police, in September 1920, confined around 1,100 Albanians in mosques and burned them alive of the village of Pesoqan in Ohrid, headed by the imam mullah Qamil Efendi.

In 1920, in Jablanica in Peja they burned the imam with the entire congregation in the mosque, while in 1921, they also burned the imam mullah Hasan Blaku in the mosque of Istog, along with 98 congregations. On the same day, in Lower Istog, they also shot 96 women, children and the elderly. On January 6-7, 1921, on the Orthodox Christmas Eve, Serbian soldiers, led by the voivode, the priest, and the police and military commander, slaughtered and burned alive 1,020 Albanians (including 440 children and women) in Prapshtica, Prishtina.

The next day, on Christmas Day, they slaughtered another 490 children, women, and elderly people from Keqekolla and other villages in Gollap, as well as members of Mullah Adem’s family, before his eyes. A Danish correspondent reported on 5,000 Albanians slaughtered and massacred in the Pristina district and 3,000 others in the Skopje district at the beginning of 1921.

The late military officer, Kalicanin, at the moment when he was supposed to leave Mitrovica and Kosovo, on April 13-14, 1941, slaughtered and shot 1,300 Albanian soldiers in the military units of Yugoslavia. This crime was never tried by the Serbian church, but it blessed it (the massacre of Bihor in Sandzak) on the Orthodox Christmas Eve of January 5/6, 1943. In this massacre, within 3 to 4 hours, the Chetniks, accompanied by many priests, massacred with knives and bayonets and burned 3,741 Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, women, children, the elderly, and injured 634 others.

They took 251 girls and young women with them and after the bestial rape they lost their bodies. On this day, 82 Albanian and Bosnian villages were completely looted and burned. They continued with the massacres, and according to the Intelligence Service, the number of victims reached 6,625 people.

The representatives of the municipalities, such as Biellopoj, Korita, Zoton and Rasovë, in a statement to the Tirana government on January 27, 1943, specified:

“On behalf of the entire people, the entire people of Bihor, we insist on being connected to mother Albania, since we are descended from this race and 90% of the population of this area are Albanians, otherwise there would be nothing left for us except the part that escaped to be captured and drowned. So, on January 6, 1943, groups of Serbian and Montenegrin Chetnik formations, about 5,000 of them (soldiers, officers, under the command of Voivode Pavle Đurišić) surrounded the villages of Bihor where they committed an unprecedented massacre. In this massacre, they killed and massacred women, the elderly, and children. They massacred them in the most barbaric way with knives and bayonets, there were cuts of body organs while they were still alive and there were carbonized ones, where some victims had their limbs cut off and some organs while still alive and then thrown into the fire.”

The attack was carried out suddenly, and with the consent of the Italian command. The Chetnik formations that carried out this massacre were forced to withdraw from the devastated areas of Bihor only after the opposition of 800 men from Tutin and the municipalities of Delimegje and Suhadoll, immediately after this massacre took place.

The shedding of light on this massacre was undertaken by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of World Affairs in the Albanian government, Iljaz Agushi, who formed a commission to collect data. The commission collected four boxes with children’s heads, hands and other limbs, eyes, ears, noses and breasts of women.

These boxes were sent to the sub-prefecture of Tregovishte (Rozhajë) and from there to Tirana and to the highest organs of the Italian occupying power. However, the indifferent and pro-Chetnik attitude of the Italian command caused a strong anti-Italian position in Kosovo, which the communists also tried to exploit for their own purposes.

In this period, in the annihilation of Albanians and the incitement of hatred among non-Slavic peoples, in addition to the Chetnik movements, the Serbian Orthodox Church also played a very aggressive role. For the Serbian clergy:

“…the Albanians were poisonous snakes that had to be exterminated, drowned or their heads had to be crushed”.

Drazha Mihajović’s agents warned that:

“…the Chetniks will liberate Kosovo from the Albanians and we will exterminate them all, without leaving a single one alive”.

The Serbian Church never denounced the massacre of Tivar, on 1 April 1945, during the months of March-April 1945, where 8,000 Kosovar boys were killed by the Montenegrin X Brigade, on the orders of Ramiz Ali, who accompanied them as the commissar of Division V.

The communist leadership of Kosovo, headed by the deputy commander of the Kosovo Operational Headquarters, Fadil Hoxha, was also responsible for the Tivar massacre. The Tivar massacre is a serious event, a black mark, which Albanian historiography should consider as such and call it national treason, the work of collaborators of Albanian communist politics with the Serbs.

In this great confrontation, the V and VI Divisions of the National Liberation Army (UNÇ) of Albania played a major anti-national role who were placed under the orders of the General Command of the Army in the UNC of Yugoslavia and served the Serbian-Montenegrin-Macedonian occupiers, for the reconquest of Kosovo and Albanian territories as well as the massacres against the Albanian people and against their freedom struggles.

The Serbian Church also bears part of the burden for the displacement from Albanian territories and the enslavement of one million Albanians by the Serbian-Yugoslavs between 1912-1976. The victors of the anti-fascist war in Yugoslavia (1944-1945) would use the conclusion of the allies at the Tehran Conference that:

“For those people who have collaborated with fascism, it is the right of the respective states where they live to be deported or exterminated, as long as the war operations continue”.

Based on this principle, Serbian political circles engaged a team led by priest Vlade Zeqević to liquidate the Hungarians of Vojvodina and the Albanians in southern Serbia. The project is found in the collection of Vlada Zeqević entitled “The Right of Deportation 1945”, the collection of Vlada Zeqević-AJ, Belgrade”. During the years 1918-1941, the Serbian government, in cooperation with the Serbian Orthodox Church, appropriated 381,245 hectares of fertile land from the Albanians.

They colonized that land by violent means with 17,679 Slavic families, with the aim of Serbizing Kosovo. In 1935, the Serbian priests initiated the so-called “Interministerial Conference” in Belgrade, because in 1934 they had managed to convince the government to integrate all prominent Albanian politicians from Yugoslavia. As a result of this interministerial conference, the priests began the most terrible campaign against the Albanian people in the Serbian Cultural Club, in 1937, and managed in 1938 to publish the convention between Royal Yugoslavia and the Republic of Turkey for the displacement of all Albanians from their homeland until 1944.

After the Second World War, due to the even greater state and royal terror and the 1938 agreement with Turkey, many Albanians left Kosovo. This is rightly stated by the scholar Doc. Dr. Hfz. Hajredin Hoxha, in his book “Barriers to dialogue and the causes of its failure in modern times”. The alliance of the League of Communists of Serbia with the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Serbia and the Serbian Orthodox Church, built on the ghost of the Serbian myth of Kosovo after Tito, is the force that destroys coexistence and the Avnojist Yugoslavia. In the SANU Memorandum (1985), the Serbian Orthodox Church was assigned the role of the reviving force of the spirit of the myth of Kosovo and heavenly Serbia.

The fate of Kosovo remained a vital issue for the entire Serbian people, and priest Dimitrije Bogdanović, in 1986, would call out on behalf of the Serbian Church and the Serbian ecclesiastical and national future of Kosovo: “The Serbian myth for Kosovo must be like a liberating conscience, and German, the Serbian patriarch, is the spiritual supporter of the movement.”

The role of the Serbian Church in the manifestation of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo

The Serbian Church took the most important role in preparing the manifestation of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in Gazimistan. All Albanian-language institutions were closed by the Serbian government in 1990 and the priests never reacted.

The policy of the Orthodox Church went so far that, through the government, they transformed Kosovo into an industrial facility for the construction of various churches, which had political purposes, in every corner of it. This industrial project began with the burning of books in the Albanian language, as in the time of the Inquisition.

The Serbian scholar, Milorad Tomanić, in his book “The Serbian Church at War and the Wars Within It”, says:

“During the 80s of the last century, under the thick smoke of tobacco and bottles of brandy, plans were drawn up for the creation of Greater Serbia. During the 80s, Kosovo was the central topic, which was mostly talked about in Serbia. But unfortunately, not from the historical aspect, but from that of myths and mysticism”.

All that had happened in Bosnia during the nearly 4 years of Serbian aggression there was dismissed and camouflaged by all Serbian associations. The leaders of the Serbian church were also silent about the fact that in Banja Luka, a city where there was no war, 16 mosques and 5 tombs were demolished, as well as the clock tower, the first public clock in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

At the end of 1992, explosives were placed in the Ferhadija mosque, and the most beautiful mosque that Bosnia had, as well as the Pasha tomb near the mosque, were damaged. This was only the beginning, the real demolition would begin on April 9, 1993 with the burning of the mosque on the outskirts of Banja Luka, then two more famous mosques were burned down in turn, Ferhadia and Arnaudia, of which Ferhadia was the real beauty and under the protection of UNESCO.

Both were destroyed by their undermining on the morning of May 7, 1993. All this passed without any clear official condemnation from the SOC.9 From the end of World War II until the early 1980s, the Serbian Orthodox Church was indifferent to social events. Its public and official statements were rare, mainly on occasions of celebrations of important anniversaries.

The then Serbian Patriarch, German, as well as most of the archbishops, tried not to give rise to disagreements and conflicts with the authorities. In the newspaper “Pravoslavjle” (Orthodoxy), the newspaper of the Serbian Patriarchate, one can also find open praise for the laws in force in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Serbian priests throughout history, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, violated the sacred principles of Orthodox religion. In the norm 65 of the holy apostles it is stated:

“A cleric who in a quarrel shoots someone and kills him with a fall, then he is dismissed because he was in a hurry…”.

Valsamon explains that the specification “with a fall” means that the cleric is dismissed even if he committed unintentional murder, that is, that “the cleric is subject to dismissal regardless of the manner of killing the person”.

For the clerics, – says Bishop Nikodim, – the key moment here is the shedding of human blood, regardless of the circumstances and motives that caused the bleeding. The shedding of human blood is in complete contradiction with the service that the cleric generally performs. In norm 7 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council it is stated:

“We order that those who once became clerics or dedicated themselves to the monastic vocation, should not enter either military or secular service: those who act otherwise and do not return repentantly, where they chose to be for the sake of God, let a curse fall on their heads”!

Let us also mention norm 5 of Gregory which requires:

“He who has been defiled by murder, even if unintentionally, thus becoming impure due to the crime, must be forcibly excluded by canon from clerical blessing”.

So, at least as far as clergy are concerned, the canons of the Orthodox Church are strict: no possession or use of weapons or participation in war (as a soldier) is allowed. Meanwhile, in the history of the Serbian Church there are many examples of this. In 1594, in Banat, the armed uprising against the Ottomans was led by Theodore, the bishop of Vershac.

Another bishop, Peter Petrovic I, also fought against the Ottomans with weapons in hand. At the beginning of the 19th century, Matej Nenadovic, together with Karadjorgji, was one of the leaders of the first Serbian uprising. In his “memoirs” we find the names of many priests who were military superiors throughout the war.

“They knew that such a thing did not suit them, but when the weapon speaks, the laws are silent,” says one of the issues of the newspaper “Pravoslavjes”. In the middle of the same century, Sava Decanov, bishop of Žiča, took part in the battles against the Ottomans for the unification of the Serbs, as commander of the Deževe and Ibar battalion.

Even in the war waged by King Obrenović against the Bulgarians in 1885, Bishop Sava commanded the second detachment of volunteers. Finally, although their line does not end here, let us mention priest Bogdan Zimonjic, leader of the Nevesinj uprising of 1875.12 In September 1991, near the Kamogovina Monastery in Croatia, the future bishop Filaret appeared in a photograph with a machine gun in his hand. It is a well-known fact that Bishop Anifilohije, who was the uncle of the wife of the former Prime Minister of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, in 1991 had converted the Cetina Monastery into barracks for members of Arkan’s volunteer guard.

Arkan also had no debt to the church. He had said that his supreme commander was Patriarch Pavle. Thus, after so many wars, tortures, massacres, the victims of which were innocent people of all nationalities and beliefs from the areas of the former Yugoslavia, in which the role of the KOS was more than clear, no one was held responsible. This church and its scholars, even to this day, do not find the moral strength to distance themselves and ask for forgiveness from other peoples for all the evils they have done to them.

Serbian politics drafted 32 programs, from 1844 to 1995, with the aim of undoing the Albanian people. Half of these programs passed through the hands of priests or, moreover, were their product.14 Serbian politics, inspired by Orthodox fundamentalism, 213 Universalizing reality, trying to realize the goal of its self-deception, it seemed to become a determining factor in most social conflicts in the Balkans.

On the historical level, from this fundamentalist Pan-Serb-Slav policy, it resulted that D. Pavić, A. Popović, D. Tanosković, M. Jevitić, D. Kollajić and many others worked to identify Islam as something foreign on European soil. At the beginning of 1993, several hundred Russians fought on the side of the Serbs. Also, there is information circulating that the Russian army supplied Serbia. So, this suggests that the support given to Serbia by Orthodox countries was a perception that a religious war was taking place in the Balkans and that they should help Orthodox Serbia to the detriment of Catholics and Muslims.

Slobodan Milošović came to power with the help of the UDB and the Serbian church in 1987. At this time, Serbian church circles would immediately promote the slogan: “Serbia in danger from Albanian irredentism”! This slogan was public during the years of Serbian rallies (1988-1990), which were organized and directed by Milošović’s machinery. In that machinery, the Serbian church was first injected through the shaking of Lazarus’ bones in all the territories that were later involved in the war.

This means that the church prepared the fire, while the Socialist Party of Serbia and the Serbian Academy of Sciences pushed the army and police into colonial war. Thus, the Serbian church became a mysterious cadre institution for the entire politics and space of the former Yugoslavia.

The Serbian Orthodox Church involved in the genocide against the Muslims of the Balkans

The role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo was quite destructive. For example, at the time when about 100,000 Bosniaks were fleeing from Srebrenica and Žepa from Karadžić’s rapists, somewhere on the outskirts of the front, the Serbian priest Lavrantije blessed Ratko Mladić on July 14.

Clearly, it was intended that Dr. Michael Veninger (Austrian Ambassador in Belgrade) would decorate priest Lavrantije with the Gold Medal a day later, on July 15, in Belgrade (Nasha Borba, 16, VII, 1995, p. 2). According to reliable sources, that blessing and that decoration were accompanied by the highest Serbian ecclesiastical circles.

The role of the Serbian Church during the last war in Kosovo

At the extraordinary meeting of the Holy Synod of Bishops in January 1991, it was decided that no political decision concerning the Serbs would be made without the presence of the Church. The same Synod, in January 1992, decided not to recognize the borders between the Yugoslav Republics.

During the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, many bishops and priests of the Serbian Orthodox Church openly served the Serbian army. At that time, Archimandrite Fillaret openly called for war through the media and went to the hotbeds of war, encouraging Serbian volunteers. For the Serbian Orthodox Church, this was the reason for his later elevation to the rank of bishop of the Eparchy of Milesevo.

The Serbian Orthodox Church, which had actively campaigned for the creation of Greater Serbia, continuously sought the unification of the Orthodox world against the Muslims in the Balkans. 20 It should be noted that the process of Serbization of Kosovo was carried out by the Serbian state in many areas in Kosovo, especially in the process of colonizing Kosovo with Serbo-Montenegrin inhabitants, a process that intensified from 1990-1997.

In these years, the Serbian Orthodox Church built 67 Serbian religious buildings in various parts of Kosovo, even though such buildings had never existed in those places before, so all of these churches were political. Unfortunately, the incrimination of the SOC during the war in 1998-1999 took on such great proportions that the cross, as the highest symbol of seeking forgiveness among Christians, was turned by some Serbian police, soldiers and military into a symbol for the mistreatment and terror of young Albanians of the Islamic faith, by drawing the cross with a knife on various parts of the bodies of young Albanians.

What is most tragic is that the Serbian Orthodox Church never raised its voice to denounce the crimes against Albanians. The Serbs, in every village they penetrated, first burned the village mosques and drew the Serbian cross surrounded by four c’s, which symbolized that only unification would save Serbia or Greater Serbia.

It is worth noting The statement of Patriarch Pavel, who in March 1999, on the occasion of the massacres of Albanians by Serbian forces in Kosovo, among other things, declared: “The Gospel says there are just and unjust wars. The defense of Kosovo is a just war, therefore the Albanian invaders must be expelled by any means and at any time”. Likewise, the Serbian criminal, nicknamed “Arkan”, had said that we are fighting for our religion, the Serbian Orthodox Church, for the creation of a great and united Serbian state.

Zeljko Razhnatović became a political figure only when on October 11, 1990, with some friends and acquaintances, mainly Belgrade hooligans, they founded the Serbian Volunteer Guard in the Orthodox monastery “Pokajnica”, becoming its commander himself. 24 The mafia boss Arkan, at the peak of his career, in the official uniform of a general, was decorated with the great cross of the Serbian Patriarchate, for valuable service to Orthodoxy.

A large number of documents testify to the extremely destructive role of the Serbian Orthodox Church during the war in Kosovo. I would like to quote some of them, such as: The document of October 25, 1998, signed by the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian resistance movement for Kosovo, which called on the Serbian people not to recognize any agreement with the internationals and that in Kosovo, according to them, the Serbian police and army should act strongly against the people of Kosovo.

Document number 371, dated October 29, 1998, signed by the bishop of Rask-Prizren, calls for war against the Albanians. Meanwhile, document no. 38/3625, dated 29.05.1999, shows that the Serbian Orthodox extremist organizations were fabricated by the state and financed by the state. It is important to emphasize that the Serbian Orthodox Church is one of the four most destructive factors of the Kosovo issue throughout history, along with Serbian politics, Serbian academia and Serbian Orthodox extremist organizations.

In conclusion, we can say that: The Serbian Orthodox Church, throughout history, was in the service of anti-Albanian politics in Kosovo. Therefore, it had in its program the construction of many churches in the villages and cities of Kosovo in order to Serbify these areas.

With the same claims, the Orthodox Church has usurped the University grounds in the center of Pristina (the place where the Orthodox Church was built). These churches have a political, tendentious character, and were not built for the needs of Orthodox believers, nor for the honor of God, but for the needs of the anti-Albanian, expansionist, chauvinist Serbian policy, for the honor of its political leadership.

The role of the Serbian Church throughout history has been very destructive in destroying the cultural, ethnic and religious identity of Albanians in the Balkans. From what was presented above, we can conclude that the Serbian Orthodox Church is not a national church, but a nationalist one. It remains more of a political organization than a religious institution, always in the service of the idea of ​​Greater Serbia, in the service of imperialist politics, violating even the very norms of religious morality regarding respect for the rights of other faiths.

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Original article (PDF)

https://albanica.al/univers/article/view/624/7274