ARTICLES

Sheep v. Goats

KOSOVO RELIGIOUS PARADOXES

By Stephen Schwartz

The U.S. and NATO launching of an air campaign against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic has fostered unity among many religious communities of the Bay Area. But fissures caused by reaction to the NATO mission divide the Bay Area's religious communities along ethnic and sectarian lines. While many Bay Area churches are aiding the Kosovar Albanians refugees, wide opposition to the U.S plan to bomb Serbia to the negotiating table can be seen, including the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II's opposition to the NATO bombing concomitant with silence and pro-Serbian agitation from the Bay area's Orthodox community presents a wide front against NATO action. But support for the bombing campaign can be found locally, particularly among Albanian Muslims and Albanian Catholics.

In Berkeley, on April 10, two-and-a-half weeks into the bombing campaign, St. Joseph the Worker Church threw its facility open to a protest meeting led by Michael Parenti, author of pro-Soviet, pro-Cuban, and anti-American propaganda. Members of the audience, which reportedly reached a thousand, heard Parenti say that U.S.-NATO intervention in Kosovo was motivated by designs on Caspian sea oilfields, thousands of miles away, as well as by manipulations involving the International Monetary Fund. Parenti claimed that Western powers had carved up former Yugoslavia because it was a successful Communist country. "It's just standard anti-Americanism," said one attendee. "He wants everybody to ignore the crimes of the Serbian regime because Milosevic is defying Clinton, and he thinks that's great."

Across the Bay in San Francisco, a small group of volunteers, associated with the *Daniel Dajani, S.J. of the Albanian Catholic Institute at the University of San Francisco, followed a more traditional path. The leading institution of the Albanian Catholics in exile, it was founded by Gjon Sinishta, a Jesuit-trained poet from Montenegro who is considered the outstanding figure of Albanian Catholicism after World War II. Sinishta died in 1995 in San Francisco. The calls attention to the fact that Albanian victims of Serbian aggression in Kosovo include a large number of Catholics, as well as Muslims. "In north Albania the population is in its majority Catholic, and the church plays a major role in Kosovo, as well," said Ray Frost, sacristan of St. Ignatius Church and a leading figure in the Albanian group. "Mother Teresa, as we remember, was an Albanian from Macedonia, whose own father was a victim of hatred in an earlier chapter of this conflict. Our founder, Gjon, never stopped reminding us that Holy Father has declared Albania and the Albanians closest to his heart, not only because of the suffering caused by Communism in Albania but also because of the martyrdom of the Franciscans and other Catholics in Kosovo."

Frost said the institute does not take a position on the military aspect of the present crisis. But the Holy Father's comments have been anything but one-sided. While appealing for a cease-fire, His Holiness expressed solidarity with Albanian victims in his Easter preaching, asking, "How can we speak of peace when people are forced to flee, when they are hunted down, and their homes are burnt to the ground?" Frost noted that Catholic institutions have taken the initiative in succoring Albanians. "Catholic Charities is desperately looking for local Albanians with relatives among the refugees," he said. "Anybody who knows of such people should contact the Catholic Charities office immediately." The Albanian-American community in the Bay Area counts in the hundreds, but its members have been active in supporting their kin in the Balkans, as well as the U.S.-NATO decision to confront Milosevic. The most active personality among Kosovar patriots locally is Zana Ibrani, a former professor at the University of Prishtina who now teaches at Las Positas College.

Mrs. Ibrani expressed dismay at the failure of non-Albanians to grasp that Muslims are not the only victims of Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. "It's true that the majority of Albanians are Muslim," she said, "and we certainly express our gratitude at the efforts being made by Muslims in America to help. But I feel strange when I hear so many people referring to 'Kosovar Muslims' as if Albanians were members of only one faith," she went on. "In Kosovo especially, we are very aware that the struggle of our people has been led by Catholics as well as Muslims. Gjergj Fishta, the national poet of the Albanians, was a Catholic priest. His book The Mountain Lute is the great epic of our national resistance; in Yugoslavia it was completely banned, although we had copies that had been made on xerox machines. We hid them in the very back of the closets, under the blankets, under the floorboards," she said.

Catholic priests and political leaders were influential throughout the 19th century national rebirth, or "rilindja," of the Albanians, as pointed out by Frost and Mrs. Ibrani. "Gjon often spoke of the irreplaceable work of Catholics educating patriots like him and the great poet Martin Camaj," Frost said. The St. Ignatius sacristan calls attention to a galaxy of Albanian Catholic intellectuals. "Luigj Gurakuqi, a Christian Democratic politician, was a leader in defending the Albanians against Yugoslav attempts to annex them in the 1920s. Many of the greatest names in Albanian culture are Catholic. Father Shtjefen Gjecovi, whose family was originally Slavic but who was a Catholic priest, codified the traditional law of the highlands, the 'Kanun' of Leke Dukagjini. Father Donat Kurti was the greatest Albanian folklorist. Father Lazer Shantoja was one of the best 20th century Albanian poets. Most of them were martyred for the faith, murdered by the Communists."

A major book published in France, Albanie: Ils Ont Voulu Tuer Dieu, La persecution contre l'Eglise catholique, 1944-1991 (Albania: They Wanted to Kill God, The Persecution of the Catholic Church, 1994-1991), is a detailed pocket encyclopedia of Christian martyrdom under Enver Hoxha's dictatorship. Building on The Fulfilled Promise, a collection of testimonies, it has accumulated updated facts on the fate of many outstanding Albanian Catholic intellectuals. The collection informes Catholics of the previously-unknown death of Franciscan Father Kurti, the folklorist, who disappeared into Hoxha's prisons in 1969, and whose traces were lost until 1991 (he had died in 1983).

The Albanian Catholic Institute holds an annual Mass for the Albanian martyrs at Xavier Hall on the USF campus. This year the observance fell two days before the bombing began, on Tuesday, March 22. A small group of Balkan Catholics attended, as Mass was said by Jesuit Father Paul Bernadicou. One Albanian present, who identified himself as Plume, asked, "Will it happen? Will NATO act? And what will happen then?" Others with relatives in Kosovo feared that the Serbs would react to the bombing with atrocities against Albanians. In the first week of the bombing, Mrs. Ibrani sent an e-mail to friends: "I don't know where my family is. Today my mom had to leave her home in Prishtina at gunpoint.

Local Albanian-Americans have turned out in small but vociferous counter-demonstrations in response to picket-lines called by anti-NATO groups. On March 31, Albanian-Americans and anti-NATOites faced off in separate groups, kept apart by the San Francisco Police, across from the San Francisco Chronicle building. While young, angry Albanians chanted "Thank you, USA," the anti-NATO forces yelled "Stop the bombing, stop the war." The "antis" included delegations from leftist organizations in the Bay Area, along with Serbian-Americans.

But the March 31 ruckus at the Chronicle also included two novel features. At the head of the procession Marxists marched several Orthodox priests, who happened to have come from the Russian Church Abroad, a schismatic branch of Eastern Christianity known for its anti-Jewish views. The anti-NATO action, which was supported by radical elements in the union movement at the Chronicle, gained the support of John Sias, the Chronicle's CEO. Considered enemy Number One of newspaper labor in the region, because of his union-busting tactics in the 1994 strike at the San Francisco dailies, Sias left the building and joined the pro-Serb picket line, thus, attacking his own paper. Examiner columnist Rob Morse, wrote, "That really was John Sias, chairman of the board, president and CEO of the San Francisco Chronicle marching in front of his own building with a 'Stop the bombing' sign during Wednesday's demonstration against so-called media bias in covering the war in Serbia. "Sias said he was outside talking to a demonstrator and held her sign while she wrote down an address where she could send a letter to the editor. Then he walked around with the sign for a while. "I'm not in favor of what the Serbs are doing," he said, "but I don't like it when America is in the front line of bombing countries."

The presence of schismatic Russian Orthodox priests in a Communist-organized demonstration dramatized the pro-Serbian stance adopted by the Orthodox churches who represented, in addition to Serbs and Russians, local Greeks, Romanians, and some Christian Arabs. While the rest of the religious communities in the U.S. have committed to interfaith efforts at promoting understanding, reconciliation, and peace, Orthodox priests have been absent from such efforts. A member of the Orthodox religious leadership in the Bay Area spoke on the promise of confidentiality, said, "You just can't bring it up at all. You can't mention it. You have to pretend it isn't happening -- the war, the expulsions, all of it -- unless you want to be attacked and labelled a traitor to Orthodoxy. That's why there hasn't been a single Orthodox priest willing to appear at an interfaith event for peace. I'm literally afraid for my life."

Because of the shocking nature of the expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians, Serbian Americans in the Bay Area have assumed a quieter profile than they did during the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia. When they are interviewed by media, many Serbs disclaim any allegiance to Milosevic. However, Greeks have organized to press the Serb cause; at the end of April, a radio town meeting on Kosovo organized by San Francisco talk-show host Bernie Ward was disrupted by a group of Greeks in the audience, who yelled, "Lies! Lies!" when it was mentioned that the Albanians are Catholic as well as Muslim.

Bay Area Jews, with the exception of a few leftists and Serb sympathizers, have reacted almost unanimously in defense of the Kosovar Albanians, viewing so-called "ethnic cleansing" as a parallel to the Holocaust. Albanian community groups, including Muslim groups, report a steady stream of telephone calls and checks with donations to help the victims from individual Jews in the Bay Area, as well as congregations. Jack Sarfatti, a theoretical physicist born in a distinguished family of Spanish Jews (Sephardim) from Macedonia, said, "It would be appallingly immoral for any Jew to defend the Serbs. Jews don't need to be convinced; we look at trains filled with people expelled from their land and we know what it is: genocide. We'll do anything we can to stop it, and anything we can to assist the victims. Our faith teaches us to care for our neighbor as we would for our brother. On the planet, Albanians are our neighbors."

If any local religious community has been polarized by the events, it is that of the Muslims. Many Arabs oppose the NATO action, with arguments that come down to opposition to anything the U.S. and NATO do in the world. Some Muslim Arabs claim horrors visited on the Albanians are the will of an angry creator punishing them for insufficient Islamic devotion. In April, Farhan Memon wrote in a widely-distributed Internet polemic, "It may sound harsh, but I truly believe that the expulsion of Kosovars from Kosovo, is nothing short of a punishment from Allah. "This argument touched off a fire-storm of replies. Kamilat, an Islamic women's organization which advocates for women against domestic violence in the Muslim community, issued a statement declaring that "Kamilat categorically supports the NATO bombing in Serbia as the only sustainable approach to restoring peace to the region."

Jesse Jackson's success in gaining release of three U.S. prisoners of war, has not gone unnoticed in the Bay Area. Both local daily newspapers, as well as television and media, put his activities the center of their reporting. But while many locals were happy to see the prisoners released, others agreed with NATO representatives that the fate of three million Albanians in Kosovo outweighs that of three American soldiers. And David Gladstone, a Bay Area writer on comparative religion, commented, "there was one unqualifiedly good thing about the Jackson mission. He forced Milosevic and his bunch to pray to God with them. It's doubtless the first time for them."