Albanian Catholic Minority Says It Faces Serbian Bias
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 15, 1998; Page A28
KLINA, Yugoslavia, March 14-Every Sunday, as many
as 5,300 members of Father Frane
Sopi's congregation gather on a hillside on the
outskirts of this town to attend one of three
Catholic Masses. They all stand next to a shallow
pit dug in 1994 for the foundation of a
new church that Serbian authorities have refused
to let Sopi and his parishioners build.
As if in a tale by Kafka,
the construction of Sopi's church was approved in 1993 by
authorities in Pristina, 25 miles to the northeast
and the capital of Kosovo, a province of
Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. Sopi
later received the blessing of the Klina
municipal court and the Yugoslav Supreme Court
in Belgrade. But when the priest tried to
get the construction started, Serbian police
arrived with bulldozers and stopped him.
"They are afraid to
say they are not allowing [the church], but at the same time they are
telling people here not to let us," Sopi said
today while showing two reporters the multiple
appeals he has written to local authorities,
to Serbian religious and human rights officials,
and even to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
None has been answered, he said.
Foreign attention has
been focused for the past two weeks on recent Serbian killings of
ethnic Albanian Muslims in the Drenica region
due west of Pristina, as part of a Serbian
campaign to wipe out some rebels who allegedly
used violence to press for an
independent Albanian republic. But the Yugoslav
government's decision to obstruct the
building of the Catholic church in Klina indicates
that Muslims are not the only victims of
religious discrimination here.
Kosovo has an estimated
70,000 ethnic Albanian Catholics, a tiny fraction of the 1.9
million ethnic Albanians, who are predominantly
Muslim. Most of the 200,000 ethnic
Serbians in Kosovo belong to the Orthodox Church.
But some Catholics here complain
that Serbian authorities make no distinction
between adherents of their faith and the
followers of Islam. "The main reason is hating,"
Sopi said of the government's attitude
toward his church. "They don't want us to be
happy."
As in many areas of
Kosovo, the residents of Klina are on edge in the aftermath of the
Yugoslav government's crackdown against Albanians.
Serbian police in the downtown
area have beaten a half-dozen Catholics in the
past few weeks, without explanation,
according to a resident who said he witnessed
some of the beatings. In the nearby city of
Prizren, many Catholics were reluctant to leave
their homes last week, particularly after
they heard that someone was beaten at a bus station,
one resident said.
Ethnic tensions are
such in Kosovo now that a group of Serbian Orthodox nuns at a
monastery in Drenica also complained of periodic
harassment, but by Albanians.
At a checkpoint on the
main road leading into Klina, a police officer grew angry today
when he learned that American reporters were
present. "I should kill you right now," he told
the reporters while gripping his rifle. He then
repeated several times that "Kosovo is part of
Serbia." The remarks were evidently provoked
by the fact that Washington has been
highly critical of the police for using excessive
force and attacking the Albanian village of
Donji Prekaz so massively that 22 women and children
were slain.
Sopi said he has been
a resident of the Klina area for the past 20 years, and that he
works closely with two other priests and three
nuns to conduct the Masses and teach
religious classes to 800 students. Behind his
home is a small, unheated single-room
structure with whitewashed walls, with simple
wooden benches for children to attend class.
But it is not big enough to accommodate more
than a fraction of the parish on the coldest
winter days.
He last won a court
judgment in favor of the construction in 1996, when the municipality
promised to give him a construction permit in
30 days. But he said "I have spent two years
waiting . . . and nothing." The patriarchs of
the Serbian Orthodox Church in nearby Prizren
and in Belgrade have not responded to his appeals.
The local police say it is not their
problem. "The only explanation always given .
. . is that the permit will be given in ten
days."
"The Catholics in Kosovo
are systematically discriminated against," he said, noting that
in the past 10 years, five new Orthodox churches
have been constructed in the area. Even
a new mosque was built during that period, he
said.
On a walk outside in
his back yard, he pointed to the remnants of an old stone chapel
that was destroyed by members of the Yugoslav
Communist party in 1974. There were
"communists then, extremists now, and we can't
breathe at all," Sopi said.
_ Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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