KNS - A Letter from the Director
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Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 13:45:51 +0200 (EET)
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Subject: KNS - A Letter from the Director
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Keston Institute <[email protected]>
KNS - A Letter from the Director
KESTON INSTITUTE, OXFORD, UK
______________________________________
A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR February 2002
______________________________________
Dear Friends of Keston,
In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks, many
(including myself) expressed fears that the west would demonise the
Islamic world as a whole. For the most part these fears have not come
to pass. If anything western journalists and government leaders have
gone too far in the opposite direction, downplaying facts that might
undermine the newly fashionable portrayal of Islam as a religion of
peace and tolerance.
Other religions and cultures have not been so fortunate. Sometimes an
ethnic or religious group is unlucky enough to be cast as a permanent
villain. The evils which it has committed are known to all, but the
evils which it has suffered somehow remain invisible. All of its
members, including those who were passive onlookers or even active
dissidents, are punished for the deeds of their most sinful brethren.
Such seems to be the fate of Serbian Orthodox Christians.
Keston Institute is committed to freedom of conscience for all bona
fide religious believers, even the untrendy. That is why Keston News
Service correspondents Geraldine Fagan and Branko Bjelajac recently
visited Kosovo, the haunted province where Orthodox Serbs and Muslim
Albanians have lived and fought for centuries.
Three years ago NATO subjected the Serbs to Europe's most massive
aerial bombings since World War II, in order to end their vicious
persecution of the Kosovo Albanians. Formally Kosovo remains a
province of Serbia, but real power is now divided between United
Nations administrators, a NATO peacekeeping force, and the formerly
persecuted Albanians. The Serbs have now found themselves at the
receiving end of 'ethnic cleansing' at the hands of the Albanians;
Kosovo's Serb population has shrunk to a tiny fraction of its pre-war
size. As a practical matter the Serbs are virtually powerless except
in a few small enclaves.
Since the war ended in mid-1999, Albanian terrorists have physically
destroyed or vandalised more than a hundred Serbian Orthodox church
buildings - often by dynamiting them. Not one of these terrorists has
been tried or even arrested. Among the Serbs targeted have been
Orthodox monks who gave sanctuary to Albanian civilians before and
during the war, when Albanians were suffering persecution rather than
inflicting it.
Ask yourself what the western reaction would be if a hundred Baptist
churches or Roman Catholic convents, or a hundred synagogues, had been
savaged in just one small province of one country within a mere
two-year period. The uproar in the news media, even the secular media,
would of course be enormous - like the 1990s furore over charges of a
racist conspiracy to burn black churches in America. On the terror
campaign against the Serbs' churches, by contrast, the mainstream
English-speaking media have for the most part remained silent.
United Nations officials in Kosovo do not even seem to be fully aware
of the anti-Orthodox terrorism. One UN official told Keston that he
was unaware of any destruction of religious sites since the NATO
forces' arrival in 1999: 'It was all in the immediate aftermath of the
war', he said. In fact, an Orthodox chapel in a cemetery 20 miles
south of Kosovo's capital Pristina was destroyed by three dynamite
explosions in early November of 2001. A few days earlier, Serbs
visiting the Orthodox cemetery in Pristina itself found that most of
graves there had been destroyed or desecrated. (See Keston News
Service, 12 November 2001.)
Any competent scholar will tell you that religious conflict has been a
crucial ingredient of Balkan history for the last millennium. Keston
found, however, that the Pristina office of the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe had only one publication in its
possession on the subject of religious life in Kosovo. (See Keston
News Service, 26 November 2001.) I wonder if it would be possible to
find any OSCE office anywhere in Europe with only one publication on
its bookshelves about, say, freedom of the press? Needless to say,
the OSCE has published no official report of its own on the subject.
Fr Sava Janjic of the Decani Monastery told Keston that even though
the Serbian Orthodox Church is 'the only institution left representing
the Serb people in Kosovo,' religion had been 'totally disregarded' by
the international authorities.
Fr Sava had high praise for the Italian component of the NATO
peacekeeping force, which he said was guarding his monastery with ten
tanks and going out of its way to provide other forms of assistance.
(See Keston News Service, 27 November 2001.) On the other hand, he and
other sources interviewed by Keston portrayed the United Nations
administration in a considerably less attractive light. A May 2001 UN
report on the protection or restoration of sites important for
Kosovo's cultural heritage clearly tilted against Orthodox churches
and monasteries, even though such buildings constitute the majority of
the province's cultural monuments older than the 16th century. A
Hungarian adviser to the OSCE told Keston that he had contacted
officials of UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation) in the spring of 2000 about the protection of religious
sites, but that 'they were very, very uninterested'.
The UN authorities also seem tone-deaf to the religious needs of
Kosovo's Muslim majority. Few of the hundreds of mosques destroyed by
the Serbs before the NATO bombing have been restored or replaced. Even
these construction projects are being distorted by donors from states
such as Saudi Arabia, dominated by the Wahhabi branch of Islam which
prefers architectural austerity. Albanian mosques, by contrast, favour
the more elaborate, ornate style influenced by the Turkish tradition.
Saudi-funded builders have actually tried to tear down Albanian
religious structures going back to the 16th century. (See Keston News
Service, 26 November 2001.) It is as if Westminster Abbey were to be
remodelled in the style of a Baptist chapel.
After the 1999 bombing campaign, a bitter diplomat from Armenia told
me that in any conflict between eastern Christians and Muslims the
west always sides with the Muslims. That is manifestly false: one need
only ask the Muslim Chechens. Nevertheless, a significant part of the
western secular elite seems to have a kind of allergy to recognising
eastern Christians as victims rather than oppressors - no matter what
the facts of the particular situation. The west needs to be truer to
the best of its secular ideals, such as empirical observation and
judicious analysis. Having won the Kosovo Albanians' civil war for
them, we now have a moral obligation to face the ugly truth about what
is happening there today - and to act on it.
________________________
Like Russia, China is using the new anti-terrorism coalition as an
opportunity to improve relations with the west. Not long ago Beijing
conspicuously downplayed what probably would have been an occasion for
dramatic protests just a year earlier: the discovery that an aeroplane
manufactured in the US for the personal use of China's premier was
riddled with tiny eavesdropping devices. Thus it is all the more
striking that the Chinese authorities have struck another blow against
religious minorities shortly before the forthcoming visit by President
Bush. A court in the southern province of Fujian convicted two
mainland Chinese and a man from Hong Kong of 'illegal business
operations' - smuggling Bibles to an outlawed Christian group.
China's policies on religion continue to make Russia's look mild by
comparison.
________________________
In my work for oppressed religious believers I am sometimes tempted by
cynicism. Too often it seems that religious leaders in the west care
only about the religious freedom of their own confessions, that they
are all too ready to embrace the oppressors as long as their own
co-religionists are spared. Too rarely do I hear Roman Catholics
actively speaking up for Protestants or vice versa. Of the many
organisations agitating for
religious freedom across the English-speaking world, too few regularly
demonstrate a principled, consistent commitment to freedom of
conscience for all - as distinct from mere self-interested lobbying
for their own denominations. What helps save me from cynicism is the
loyalty of you supporters of Keston - eastern and western Christians,
traditionalists and modernists, and even non-Christians and
non-believers - who apply the Golden Rule 'do unto others as you would
have them to do unto you' to human rights. Please keep in mind that
the organisations that share your vision are precious few, and
scantily funded. With our new Keston correspondents for Central Asia
and China, we will be needing your financial support more than ever to
extend that vision. Please keep us in your prayers and on behalf of
all the believers whose rights we defend, please accept our thanks.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Uzzell
Copyright (c) 2002 Keston Institute. All rights reserved.
________________________
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well as details of our other publications: the bimonthly magazine
Frontier and the quarterly academic journal Religion, State & Society.
________________________
REPRINTING/QUOTING
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________________________
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