Is this what Amerika calls "regime change"? Amerika goes in and makes
things WORSE...

Prayer and Politics
Serb fears grow as Albanians dynamite churches.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

GRACANICA, Kosovo--The ceremony was elaborate. First came espresso cups,
filled with sweet, viscous coffee. Then glasses of faintly cloudy water.
Finally the priest who was serving us--a bearded giant about 6-foot-4,
sheathed dauntingly in a black cassock--brought us thimbles of plum
brandy. He must have seen eyes light up (it was four in the afternoon,
well in advance of cocktail hour), for he allowed himself a brief, toothy
smile. "Please!" he said to our small group, beckoning us to partake. He
then withdrew to a corner, where he stood sentinel, an adamant Serb
statue.

The little old man presiding nodded his head hospitably, and once we'd
each reached for our liquid of choice, he began to speak his mind. "They
killed two of our boys recently," he said, in the clipped sentences of a
dignitary accustomed to an interpreter. "Shot them while they were
swimming in a river." He shook his head mournfully, and his acolytes
murmured their revulsion. "We asked parliament to have a minute's silence
in their memory. They refused. They refused!"

The emphasis in the little old man's last words was disconcerting. Until
that moment, he, Bishop Artemije--Serb Orthodox bishop of the Kosovo
region of the former Yugoslavia--had seemed only to whisper. Now he
appeared to want to be heard. The boys were Serbs, his parishioners;
their killers were Kosovar Albanians, Muslim separatists who are hell-
bent, Bishop Artemije believes, on driving the Serbs out of Kosovo, where
they now constitute only a small minority in a demographic sea of
Albanians--the same Albanians who dominate Kosovo's parliament, where a
technicality, that the rulebook only allows silence for dead legislators,
was used to frustrate Bishop Artemije's plaintive request for a formal,
public mourning for the murdered Serb boys.

"This is what I spend my time doing," the bishop said ruefully, as if
apologizing for the temporal nature of his business. His measured tones
were in contrast to the feelings of some of the parishioners present at
the meeting, who, it was clear, saw their lives as an irreducible
conflict between Christian Serbs and the Albanian Antichrist. The gloom
in their hearts was palpable, as if they knew that their days in Kosovo
were numbered and that their only option now was to stage an elaborate
theater of outrage--in hopes of getting the outside world to come to
their aid. "They will dynamite everything, even our church in
Gracanica," one told me. "They" are the Albanians; and the church is one
of a score of Serb Orthodox churches, dating from the 13th to the 18th
centuries, whose presence imbues Kosovo with near-mystical importance for
many Serbs, making Kosovo, as one Serb told me, "like our Judea and
Samaria."
Gracanica is five miles from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and is the
bishop's seat. He lives in the monastery adjacent to the church, a
haunting place--now afflicted also with that contagious Serb gloom--built
in 1321. The Byzantine frescoes inside the church are stunning and, as
Edith Durham once described them, "old-world, barbaric, and decorative,"
with gaunt saints, their cheeks made more sunken still by the ghostly
light. The iconography even explains, in a curious aesthetic way, the
Serbs' stubborn atavism. Ars longa, vita brevis, Serbia forever.

History is but a flash to the Serbs, for they still kindle themselves
with fuel from the 14th century. They were defeated in battle by the
Turks in 1389--in a place near here, called the Field of the Blackbirds--
and have turned that defeat into an elaborate myth, a kind of Balkan
"nunca más," or "never again," an eerie, vengeful national myth of regret
and reprisal. "Losing" Kosovo to the Muslim Albanians today is
unthinkable because it evokes the loss of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks 600
years ago. So when prayers are conducted at Gracanica, they are not so
much an attempt to transcend political conflict as an extension of
existential polemics. Orthodox prayer is politics in Kosovo.

Albanian extremists have only heightened Serb fears by blowing up
numerous churches since 1999, when NATO intervened to put a stop to
Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic terror against the Kosovar
Albanians. That said, there is now a groundswell in Albanian civil
society that offers hope of a way forward. Many nations have their
spiritual roots left behind in other territories: the Iranians in Najaf
and Karbala; the Turks all over Central Asia; the Greeks in Istanbul. If
the Albanians can make promises to protect Serb shrines, and the Serbs
can bring themselves to believe those promises, there should be no reason
why Bishop Artemije and his flock cannot arrive at a modern way of living
with reality.
And then perhaps the year 1389 might cede, at last, to the present.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal

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Is this what Amerika calls "regime change"? Amerika goes in and makes
things WORSE...

Prayer and Politics
Serb fears grow as Albanians dynamite churches.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

GRACANICA, Kosovo--The ceremony
was elaborate. First came espresso
cups, filled with sweet, viscous coffee.
Then......................