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Serb Monastery Protects All Peoples
by The Associated Press
DECANI, Yugoslavia, June 17 (AP) -- When withdrawing Serb forces pillaged this southwest Kosovo town, the abbot of the Serbian Orthodox monastery sheltered scores of ethnic Albanian villagers within the 14th-century building's stone walls.
On Thursday, it was still sheltering frightened people. But this time they were Serb monks and townspeople, fearful of violence at the hands of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.
Local Albanians remembered the monastery's courage and kindness and vowed to protect those inside. "If they are going to kill them, they must kill us first," an ethnic Albanian villager, Shaban Bruqi, said of the monks. "They saved us."
From Saturday to Monday, when Serb soldiers went on a final rampage of burning, looting and raping in western Kosovo, the monastery's abbot made its green grounds an oasis of peace for Serb and ethnic Albanian residents alike.
It was a rare act in Kosovo. Faith and nation are almost one and the same in Serbia, for both predominantly Serbian Orthodox Serbs and predominantly Muslim ethnic Albanians.
"They were honest people of all faiths and nations," the Abbot Theodosia said Thursday as black-robed monks around him hacked at weeds and pushed wheelbarrows. "It was the Christian thing to do. It was the human thing to do."
The town outside the monastery held about 6,000 ethnic Albanians and 700 Serbs before the war. Fighting that started months before the NATO bombing campaign chased out all but 350 of the ethnic Albanians and reduced their mosque to ruins.
On June 11, with the peace accord signed, armed Serbs broke into the homes of the remaining ethnic Albanian villagers, robbing them, beating both women and men, and threatening women at gunpoint with rape.
"I told the soldier, 'Here, you can have my five dinars [a few cents], just don't kill me and my father,"' 8-year-old Duresa Malaj said, sitting on her father's lap in one of the buildings still standing in Decani. "He took my money."
The abbot had helped the ethnic Albanians throughout the fighting, giving them food, going to their homes and stopping them on the streets to check on their wellbeing.
Saturday, after the rampage of the previous night, he sent for the threatened families, dispatching cars to fetch 150 ethnic Albanians and bring them to shelter inside the monastery's walls.
In the town, monks took up positions outside the gated courtyards of those ethnic Albanian families who stayed in their homes. When Serb attackers came looking for ethnic Albanians, the monks told them there were none, the villagers said.
Families cowered inside the monastery and their homes for three days, while a Serb woman from the town guided Serb fighters looking for homes to burn.
Serb fighters appeared at the arched gate of the monastery one day only to tell the monks blocking their way that they were there to pray for forgiveness for what they had done.
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