The warrior-saints stare out from the frescoes of Gracanica monastery, one of the most precious holy sights in the Serbian Orthodox church, just a few miles from Pristina. After worshippers kiss the walls, cross themselves, enter through the arched doorway and light a candle, some write in an open book.
“Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. Its monasteries are the soul,” reads one. “Dear God Jesus Christ and Saint Sava, help Serbian people stay on the holy Serbian land of Kosmet [Kosovo]. Amen,” reads another.
The English-language pamphlet for tourists says the 14th-century building has withstood “all vicissitudes in an area swept by much political and military conflict”. Opposite is a small restaurant called “1389”, the date of the battle of Kosovo Polje, when the Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman Turks.
Last Sunday, 1389 was full of angry men who believed they had been betrayed by their government in Belgrade, and by the world, into another historic defeat. Their families were packed into trucks and battered cars, crammed together in the mud outside the monastery wall, mattresses falling off roof-racks, children crying, women arguing, no one knowing where to go. Weeping, some entered the monastery for a final visit. The church’s official position is that Serbs should stay in Kosovo to protect the holy sites, but these Serbs are taking no chances on what would happen to them at the hands of returning Albanian refugees, or what they call “the terrorists”, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
A few yards up the road, we found the Albanian sector of Gracanica deserted and destroyed. As we took pictures of the burnt-out shells of what had been homes, two women emerged from the intact houses across the road. We chatted.
“Where are your Albanian neighbours?”
“Oh, they went away during the war.”
“What happened to their houses?”
“We don’t know. It happened during the night.”
“Someone must have seen.”
“Well, the Albanians burned their own houses before they left.”
It is a standard response, and the main reason the Serbian peasants streaming out of Kosovo do not get much sympathy. I have not found one who will acknowledge the cruelty and brutality of Serb paramilitaries – and, sometimes, of Serb civilians. It is all someone else’s fault – Nato, the Albanian “terrorists”, the Serbian government.
Nato is doing little to stop the exodus of Serb civilians. The convoys of withdrawing military trucks with naked pin-ups plastered to the bonnets and anti-aircraft guns garlanded by flowers are mixed up with old cars and tractors with trailers. “Now our army and police are leaving, there is no one to protect us,” said one man I met, as he sat under a tree with his friends waiting for the rest of the convoy to catch up. In some places, Albanians who have just come down from the forests have stoned the convoys as they pass through Kosovo’s bleak and ruined landscape.
In Gracanica on 6 June, the Green Howards from the north of England were trying to gain the trust of the Serbian population. Two Warrior armoured personnel carriers were parked by a roundabout, and the soldiers talked and played with local youths. A small woman with dyed orange hair leant against a wall and watched.
“We are very surprised,” she said. “We were told the British had raped many Serbian women in Macedonia. But they have been quite correct so far.”
Two young Yugoslav soldiers came up to the British troops standing by one Warrior, shook hands and playfully swapped caps.
“I hope the Nato troops will be objective,” said a Serbian officer looking on. “Not all Serbs are as bad as you think, and not all Albanians are good. Every country has the right to defend itself against separatists. The Kosovo Liberation Army are terrorists, but in the west they are seen as some kind of freedom fighters.”
KLA units took advantage of the first few days of Nato occupation to emerge from their hideouts in the hills and establish themselves as the controlling force in villages scattered around Kosovo. This is what the Serbs fear most. They believe there is no place for them in a Kosovo run by the KLA. The KLA is deeply embedded in the Kosovar Albanian population. Many Albanian families have a son or a cousin in the KLA, which is likely to be the force that administers “justice” on behalf of Albanian refugees who return to find their property looted and their houses burned. So far, Nato has not disarmed the KLA, and the German commander in the sector around Prizren has said that he had no orders to do so.
Serbs often complain that the world was appalled by the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnians Muslims and Croats during the wars there, but no one cared when hundreds of thousands of Serbs were forced out of the Krajina in Croatia in 1995. Some acknowledge that Slobodan Milosevic sacrificed the Krajina Serbs of Croatia to end the war, after propelling them into conflict four years earlier.
For the Serbs, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as tragedy again. Milosevic pushed Kosovo into war, supposedly to protect it as part of a sovereign Serbia. Now his government refuses to acknowledge that it has lost Kosovo. Serbian state television has not shown pictures of Serbs fleeing Kosovo. The departing Kosovo Serbs leave behind an Albanian population that hates them, and an occupying force with little sympathy. They are heading for a place where they are not wanted; an unacknowledged reminder of a policy that has brought disaster down on the Serbs again.
Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for “Channel 4 News”
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