ARTICLES

Behind the Balkan Curtain

Religious Communities Carry On Gjon's Mission

By Stephen Schwartz

Gjon Sinishta was a remarkable Catholic, and as dedicated a defender of conservative, anti-Communist principles ever to live in San Francisco. At the time of his death in 1995, at age 65, he was known locally mostly to the staff of the University of San Francisco, where he served as sacristan of St. Ignatius Church, and to the small Bay Area community of his fellow Albanians. Sinishta founded and nurtured a small Albanian Catholic Institute at USF, which published an annual Albanian Catholic Bulletin reporting on the martyrdom suffered by Catholics in the Albanian-speaking lands of Albania proper, Kosovo, western Macedonia, northern Greece, and southern Italy.

In 1999, I quit the San Francisco Chronicle, where I had worked for ten years, and moved to the Balkans. In the past eight months I have made two pilgrimages following the path of Gjon Sinishta. In October 1999, I journeyed by car from my home in Sarajevo, through the so-called "Republika Srpska" into Montenegro, where Gjon was born, and further on to Kosovo. More than 50 years before, Gjon had fled from northern Albania, where he was a Jesuit seminarian, across the border into Kosovo, in the aftermath of the ferocious Albanian Communist suppression of Catholicism.

In March, I traveled along the same route to Kosovo, with two Franciscan fathers from Bosnia, Fra Marko Orsolic from Sarajevo and Fra Ilija Stipic, from the rural parish of Lepenica, and a Bosnian Muslim woman, Nada Dzankic. I accompanied the Franciscans on an interfaith mission and inspection tour of the Albanian Catholic churches and monasteries in Kosovo, which are under the jurisdiction of the Franciscan province of Bosna Srebrena. The suffering is visible on all sides. Serbs are frightened, living behind the protection of soldiers from the Kosovo Forces or KFOR, whose armored cars ring the Orthodox monasteries. When I asked a Serbian refugee living in the spectacularly-decorated Pec Patriarchate if he trusted the Italian KFOR troops to protect him, his answer was simple: "We must." For their part, Albanians must deal with the destruction of up to 70 percent of their dwellings by the Serb forces, leaving great numbers homeless, as well as with the grief caused by their loss of family and friends in Serb massacres.

Interethnic conflict between Serbs and Albanians is especially acute in the northern industrial city of Mitrovica, which has been divided with the Serbs north of the river Ibar and the Albanians to its south. Numbers of people have been killed or injured in recent months in Mitrovica. French troops, who visibly side with the Serbs, and German and American KFOR detachments, who have attempted to assist the Albanians, have been ineffective in imposing peace on the area. When one leaves the Mitrovica region, and travels elsewhere in Kosovo, it is clear that ethnic violence has diminished considerably. Although cynics claim this is because Serbs have mainly been driven out of Kosovo, this is not the case. In many parts of the embattled province, Serbs continue to live without KFOR protection.

Binca is a Catholic village surrounded by Albanian Muslim-owned farmlands; arriving on Thursday, market day, we found the streets filled with the locals' horses, loaded down with produce. Binca, like other Albanian Catholic parishes, is administered in cooperation with the Bosnian Franciscans. Its priest, Father Lush Gjergji, is a Franciscan and prolific author, best known for his work for the abolition of "gjakmarrja," or blood feuds. Father Gjergji regularly visits a local Serbian Orthodox priest, who remained. Binca is well known in Albanian Catholic affairs as the birthplace of bishop Mark Sopi, now the leading Catholic cleric in Kosovo. Father Gjergji, told I was Jewish, welcomed me with the words of the Holy Father: "You are the elder brother. I welcome you." Turning north, one drives an hour or so to Janjevo, an outstanding historical and spiritual center in Kosovo history. Janjevo has welcomed all the differing currents of human culture in Kosovo. It was once a center of Jewry, although the Jewish community vanished after the Austro-Turkish conflict of the 18th century, leaving no trace, not even a graveyard. In the same period, it was known for its links with the Adriatic city of Dubrovnik, from whence the Jews, as well as Croats, came to Janjevo. Until the 1990s, it had a significant population of Croats -- 3,700 in 1991. But more than 3,000 left during the ensuing political conflicts, leaving only 370 after the war.

The Croatian church of St. Nicholas in Janjevo has a Croat priest, Don Matej Palic. He, like Lush Gjergji, keeps up a regular relationship with the Serb Orthodox priest in the larger town of Lipjan, although Father Palic laments that there is only one Serb left in Janjevo itself, a teacher. The Catholic and Orthodox priests meet every two weeks with the local Albanian imams, encouraged by the chaplain of the KFOR battalion, which is Finnish. "There were problems between the Albanian and non-Albanian residents of this area during the first month after the war, but none since," Father Palic said.

Heading south again, one follows a long road, covered with snow in winter, past more abandoned mines, to Letnica. Once among the most famous spiritual destinations in Kosovo, known for its Black Virgin, an object of veneration and pilgrimages by Croats and Roma as well as Albanians, it now seems deserted, guarded by a contingent of friendly U.S. troops. Here the priest, a Croat born in Janjevo, is preparing to abandon his parish. "I will move to Croatia, and the Mass will now be said in Albanian," he told us.

Letnica had, before the rise of Milosevic, a population of 4,500 Croats, but only 56 remain. The foreign authorities ruling Kosovo claim they are doing their best to establish civility between Serbs and Albanians. More will be accomplished by Albanian Catholic religious, who are more closely linked to their Albanian brethren by nation, and to their Serb neighbors by Christianity.

The wounds of the war are still fresh throughout the region. Djakovica, a major Kosovar interreligious center for centuries, was very badly hit by the Serb terror. The Orthodox diocese of Raska and Prizren, in its publicity campaign aimed at America and other countries, has detailed the vandalism of some 70 Serbian holy sites in the months following the arrival of NATO troops. This omits documentation issued by Dr. Rexhep Boja, president of the Islamic Community of Kosovo, that 209 Islamic structures were destroyed or seriously damaged in the 1998-99. In Djakovica, the Orthodox cathedral of the Holy Trinity was completed in 1999, paid for by taxes levied on the local populace, Albanian and Muslim as well as Serb and Christian. Last summer, the church was blown up by Albanians. But the older and smaller Serbian Orthodox church only blocks away was left unharmed, and is now guarded by Italian KFOR troops. The Italian commander forbade me from photographing the undamaged church.

But if the destruction of the Holy Trinity cathedral was a detestable act, it does not measure up to the atrocities carried out by Serb forces in the Djakovica region beginning in 1998. In one incident, Serb irregulars, known as chetniks, descended on the village of Korenica near Djakovica on April 27, 1999. They arrived in buses, with red bandanas tied on their heads or as armbands, according to a local resident, Tom Dedaj. Korenica's population is 90 percent Catholic and 10 percent Muslim. After the chetniks had completed their assault on Korenica, at least 129 people, and as many as 155, were dead, all unarmed, including women and children. One survivor said every man in the village over 1 had been killed. The ratio of victims was approximately the same as that of the living: 90 percent Catholic, 10 percent Muslim.

When the inhabitants of Korenica returned to the village, in June 1999, they found graffiti on one house reading: "Keep quiet or we'll be back," signed with the name of the Serb extremist Zeljko Raznatovic, or Arkan, who was assassinated in Belgrade in January. The scene they encountered was still horrendous. The returnees found mass graves filled with bones and hair, although many of the dismembered corpses lay where they had fallen. In a burned house, limbs and other parts of men's bodies lay on the top floor. The local Serb army commander lived in Korenica. When the survivors of the massacre first came streaming into the Catholic church at Djakovica, one of the priests, Father Ambroz Ukaj, went to the officer and demanded to know what had happened. "I was interrogated as to how I knew anything had happened at all, and I replied that women in the village had come to me reporting the mass arrest of all males," Father Ukaj said. "I was told to shut up. Then I said that there were injured people in my church. Thank God, I had already sent them to a hospital, because the Serb officer was prepared to take them away." Other victims at Korenica included members of the Dervishdana family, prominent Albanian patriots and leading local members of the Sadi brotherhood of Sufis. The tomb of Baba Dan, founder of the Sadi community in the village, today contains the bodies of several children killed in the Serb attack.

Today, the Franciscan authorities in Vienna are financing reconstruction of the destroyed homes of the people of Korenica, Catholic and Muslim alike. And Fra Marko Orsolic, the Bosnian Franciscan, is working to establish a primary school nearby that will be open to Serb and Roma children as well as Albanians. In the nightmarish aftermath of the Kosovo war, the Christian vision of Gjon Sinishta is being realized. His church is alive and well, fulfilling its historic, sacred, and let it be said, traditional mission.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of a book on the Balkan conflict, Kosovo: Background to a War.

TOP