c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Religious leaders in Yugoslavia, weary of 10 weeks of NATO bombings and wary of politicians’ promises, are providing somber appraisals of the apparent peace deal that could end the more than 10-week war against the country.”As Christians, we must forgive everything but as a people we can never forget what happened,”said Deacon Luka Novakovic from the Patriarchate, or headquarters, of the country’s dominant Serbian Orthodox Church.

Novakovic said the 6.5 million-member church was”very happy”at the prospect of peace that came with Thursday’s (June3) approval by the Yugoslav parliament of a plan brought here by Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin and the European Union’s Martti Ahtisaari. But he was pessimistic about the future of Yugoslavia with its badly mauled infrastructure. “The bombing should stop immediately because one day of bombing is equal to something like one year of rebuilding, not just physical structures but also love and trust between peoples,”said Novakovic in a Friday morning interview interrupted once by the sound of NATO jet breaking the sound barrier.

With electricity and water largely restored for the second straight day in Belgrade, life was improving somewhat although air raid sirens sounded several times. It was with relief late Friday afternoon that the loud rumbling in the Belgrade sky was followed by a cooling thundershower rather than another loss of electric power.

Like Yugoslavia’s other faiths, the Serbian Orthodox Church has consistently called for an end to NATO’s attacks and for finding a peaceful solution of the conflict over Kosovo.

But the church, suppressed and persecuted in communist times, has also studiously avoided making political statements and resisted pressure to take a Serbian nationalist stance. All the same, the Serbian Orthodox Church’s 1,300 monasteries, churches and chapels in Kosovo is continuously invoked here as reasons why Kosovo can never be granted independence from Serbia.

In the peace deal passed Thursday morning by a nearly 2-1 margin by the Yugoslav parliament, one of the only roles of the less than 1,000 Serbian security forces allowed to operate in Kosovo will be”maintaining a presence at places of Serb heritage.” While Novakovic said the church will be grateful for any government support, there is little it can do to accommodate Serb military and police.”We are not going to take monks out of monasteries and replace them with soldiers. It is not going to happen,”Novakovic said.”We don’t have those kinds of facilities to offer the Army.” Before NATO’s bombing started on March 24, about 10 percent of Kosovo’s 2 million residents were ethnic Serbs, most of them nominally Orthodox Christians. Of the ethnic Albanians, the vast majority are Muslims, with 3 percent counting themselves Roman Catholics.

In Belgrade, a senior Catholic priest, the Rev. Lorand Kilbertus, said he had been informed recently by a visiting nun that the Catholic Albanians of Kosovo were largely unscathed in the ethnic-based violence that helped cause the flight of nearly 1 million Kosovars from the area. “She said the Albanian Catholics were not expelled, simply because they were not Muslims,”said Kilbertus, noting that little surprised him anymore after witnessing eight years of ethnic conflict in the Balkans.”All these warriors do not understand much.” In his multiethnic parish in the heart of Belgrade, St. Peter’s, Kilbertus said people are guarded in their reactions to the peace plan. “We are not believing it until we see it,”he said, summing up the opinion of many of the city’s 10,000 Catholics.”I think people are fed up with politics. There is tremendous apathy.” Numbering an estimated 200,000, Muslims are by far Belgrade’s most significant religious minority. According to Imam Mustafa Yusuf, it is important the leaders of Yugoslavia’s religious faiths act together if peace is to be found.”We are trying to be seen together with the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox as much as possible,”Yusuf said.”The people are like water. You can channel them by forming stones together.” At varying volumes, religious communities in Yugoslavia’s overwhelmingly secular society have uniformly condemned as evil and unwarranted the NATO attacks that claimed an estimated 1,200 civilian and 5,000 military lives.

Yugoslavia’s rabbi, Yitshak Asiel, in the past has been sharply critical of both the war and those Western Jewish organizations’ which support the bombing. But he refused to comment on the peace plan, saying the Western media has lost its credibility because of what he called its consistently skewed coverage in favor of NATO.

The disillusionment of Asiel, a Belgrade native who studied in Israel and is married to an American woman, can be found throughout Yugoslavia’s religious leadership, many of whom are fluent in English and lived and were educated in NATO countries.

Novakovic, who studied at England’s Oxford University for two years, said his church’s profound disappointment with the actions of Western governments will not spoil its strong ties with Western churches, which largely condemned NATO. “All the time, they were in contact with us, expressing their regret. Delegations, too, were coming here all the time, showing us support,”he said.”Those relationships will not change.” For minority faiths, particularly Catholics and Yugoslavia’s tiny Protestant communities, there is, however, a stigma to be overcome. “This is a very big burden for us that the countries that are bombing us are largely Protestant,”said Jasmina Tosic, the co-director of a Baptist- and Pentecostal-run humanitarian aid program called Bread of Life.

Referring to the eight years of economic blockades and ethnic strife which Serbs had endured even before the NATO attacks started, Tosic said,”The country was exhausted and now it is destroyed.” Western aid will be key to rebuilding Yugoslavia, she said.”What we have done so far is nothing compared to what needs to happen in the future.” DEA END RNS