by Sadik Mehmeti and Valon Shkodra
The destruction of a country’s cultural and historical heritage, as is universally recognized, is a violation of the international law of war and may be prosecuted as a war crime. According to the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, these crimes include the occupation, destruction and intentional damage of institutions of a religious, educational, scientific nature, historical monuments and works of art.
Such crimes, as will be seen in the continuation of our report, also occurred during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, where through Serbian military actions, a large number of objects of cultural and historical value were destroyed. This destruction of Kosovo’s cultural heritage, together with the destruction of other most valuable components of Kosovo’s identity, – and this should be emphasized from the beginning, – was planned and organized in a systematic manner.
During the Serbian aggression against Kosovo, urban centers (Prishtina, Gjakova, Peja, Mitrovica, etc.) and cultural heritage institutions in these cities were attacked, destroyed and looted, but rural settlements and their infrastructure, along with religious and cultural objects, were not spared at all. The damage caused to the historical cultural heritage can never be fully investigated and cannot be realistically presented, especially since almost a quarter of a century has already passed since then.
And not only for this reason, but also because in Kosovo, violating all the norms of international law that protect cultural heritage, a systematic and continuous method of destroying monuments of culture and heritage of Kosovo has been developed, which began long ago, even before 1998 and not only against Kosovo. Serbia has been implementing such scenarios for more than a century against its neighbors, including Albanians and their civilizational values.
This manifestation of systematic destruction cannot be called anything other than culturicide. And, intentional culturicide against a people or a country is nothing more than one of the features of genocide, which aims to destroy the indigenous heritage of a people with the aim of losing its cultural and ethnic identity and the loss of collective memory. That is why culturicide is often known and used in literature as “cultural genocide”.
Genocide, however, does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. Rather, it means a coordinated plan of various actions aimed at destroying the main foundations of the life of ethnic groups, with the aim of annihilating those groups themselves.
The objectives of such a plan are therefore the dissolution of political and social institutions, institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion and economic existence of an ethnic group, as well as the destruction of personal security, freedom, health, dignity, and even the life of the individual belonging to such a group.
Based on this fact, the Polish lawyer, Mr. Raphael Lemkin, who is also the initiator of the Genocide Convention for the period of World War II, emphasizes that a genocide is always preceded by “attacks on culture”, and for this he also quotes the famous saying of the nineteenth-century German poet, Heinrich Heine, that the aggressors: “When they start burning books, they will soon start burning people too!”.
This statement by Heinrich Heine fully represents the case of Kosovo. However, beyond this, it should be added that Serbia in Kosovo for a century, before burning books and then killing Albanians, it tortured, convicted, imprisoned and killed those who wrote the books, those who read the books, those who taught the books.
The Serbian government has historically hindered the language of Albanian books, which is why in the last decade of the last century it closed schools and faculties to them (i.e. Albanians), and declared Albanian books banned. And not only that, but the Serbian government has also massively poisoned thousands of Albanian students (we recall here the spring of 1990, when over 7,000 students were poisoned, a crime that was never punished), and has even killed Albanian students.
In the years 1998-1999, meanwhile, based on data from the international non-governmental organization “Human Rights Watch” and other international sources, it is said that the regime of Slobodan Milosevic killed over 12,000 Albanians, of whom 1,024 were children, nearly 20,000 Albanian women were raped, thousands of men were arrested and disappeared in Serbian prisons, over a million Albanians were forcibly expelled from Kosovo, as part of the strategy and plan of the Serbian police and military forces, otherwise known as the “Horseback” plan.
From this war, mass graves of killed Albanians continue to be discovered to this day, while another 1,647 people, 109 of them children, are considered missing and do not have a grave to remember them.
While the cultural genocide caused by Serbia, particularly pronounced and intense during 1998-1999, among other things, looted, damaged and destroyed:
– Cultural objects (old residential houses, towers, etc.)
– Cultural monuments (House of the Albanian League of Prizren, House of the Writers’ League, etc.)
– Educational institutions (primary schools, secondary schools)
– Scientific institutions (Albanological Institute, etc.)
– Cultural institutions (libraries, theaters, galleries, archives, museums, publishing houses, etc.)
– Sports institutions and societies
– Religious institutions and objects (mosques, tekkes, masjids, etc.)
In a word, there are few cultural objects left in Kosovo that were not looted, damaged, or destroyed by the Serbian occupier in the last war.
Based on several published sources about the number of damages caused to buildings (although not complete), it is said that “the Serbian occupier in Kosovo burned and destroyed 200 thousand houses, apartments, business premises, craft workshops, factories, schools, ambulances, libraries, religious buildings, etc.
During the burning of a considerable number of houses and private properties (often including innocent civilians, pregnant women, young children, the elderly, people with disabilities, etc.), important cultural objects, which occupied a valuable place for the state of Kosovo in general and cultural heritage in particular, were not spared and were also destroyed.
According to the renowned researcher Andrásh Riedlmayer, by the end of the war in Kosovo in 1999, 65 of the 183 public libraries in Kosovo had been completely destroyed, while the losses of the library fund, according to the same author, are 900,588 volumes. According to the authors (Fredericksen & Bakken, 2000), more than a third of school libraries in Kosovo have been destroyed.
During its withdrawal from Kosovo, the Serbian army and paramilitaries also burned the headquarters of the Presidency of the Islamic Community of Kosovo along with its entire archive and library.
When we add to these the burning of private libraries, which, according to our data collected from the literature, show that 175 libraries with a book collection of 1.7 million units have been burned, then you can’t help but say that just by burning libraries and their books, Serbia has committed cultural genocide in Kosovo.
But Serbia, in addition to burning and destroying the cultural heritage of Kosovo, has also committed numerous robberies of this heritage. Not even the archival material stored in our private and institutional archives was spared from this robbery. Only from the Archives of Kosovo were some archival funds looted and stolen, never to be returned.
In 1999, the Serbs also looted ethnological and archaeological artifacts and exhibits from the Kosovo Museum, which they sent to Serbia where they are still kept to this day without any legal basis. Although their issue has been part of the Finnish diplomat, Mr. Martti Ahtisaari’s plan agreement since 2007, their return has not happened even today.
The Serbian aggression in Kosovo during the years 1998-1999, as was said, did not spare institutions and objects of worship either. Only mosques were demolished, damaged, burned and destroyed, 218 of them, most of them monuments of our centuries-old heritage, not to mention the mosques and tekkes, and hundreds of other objects of priceless cultural-historical value, which we will never have again, because they have gone into irretrievable ruin.
In conclusion, we can say that although 23 years have passed since the end of the last war in Kosovo, we have not been attentive, either in collecting facts and evidence or in publishing them, to prove the deliberate and systematic destruction of our cultural heritage by Serbia, that is, to prove the Serbian cultural genocide in Kosovo. Just as we have not managed to prove the culturicide and urbicide that Serbia has committed against Albanians for decades and centuries, throughout Albanian lands.
This paper was presented at the scientific conference, “Serbian Genocide against Albanians during the 19th-20th centuries”, which was held on April 7 and 8, 2022, in Pristina.
Sadik Mehmeti is a doctor of historical sciences and a senior research associate at the History Department at the Institute of Albanology in Pristina. He is the author of several monographs and scientific papers published in scientific journals, both inside and outside Kosovo.
Valon Shkodra has completed his university studies in ethnology. He works at the Institute of Albanology in Pristina, in the Department of Ethnology, as an independent scientific researcher. He has published several monographs and has participated in conferences and cultural activities in Kosovo and abroad.
Source
https://kallxo.com/kulture/kulturocidi-serb-ndaj-shqiptareve-rasti-i-kosoves-1998-1999/
