Sava Janjic, the outspoken Serbian Orthodox priest whose decades-long public empathy for ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike suffering at the hands of "immoral and destructive" nationalists, is worried that any deal to redraw the border between Kosovo and Serbia would be costly for the entire Balkans.
Nicknamed “cybermonk” for his e-mails and correspondence with foreign journalists and other outsiders during the Kosovo War of the late '90s, the popular abbot of Visoki Decani, a Serbian Orthodox monastery in Kosovo, warned amid recent talk of a possible territory swap against an ethnically based solution to Belgrade and Pristina's differences.
“The lessons of history have been forgotten," Janjic told Vreme, "and that's why we must warn people while there's still time that the Europeanization of this region cannot be based on the principle of ethnic or territorial partitioning."
Much of the international "conventional wisdom" suggests that altering borders -- reportedly already under consideration by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovar President Hashim Thaçi -- could have explosive consequences in Kosovo and beyond.
But there are indications that Janjic's suspicion is not so widespread in Serbia -- apart from a few NGOs and some opposition leaders, there has been little public criticism of the rumored proposal, despite concerns that it would be an implicit or explicit recognition of Kosovar sovereignty. And ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo are mostly in favor of the swap, some reports suggest, perhaps in expectation that Serbian citizenship might follow.
Janjic has therefore drawn fire from some local media and nationalists on both sides. And the abbot has noticed.
“I have to admit that the threats and the unscrupulous media campaign [against me] directed by the authorities in Belgrade and sometimes also by some [Kosovar Albanian] Pristina-based media -- according to whom I am, in the first case, an American spy and, in the second, a Russian one -- are reminiscent of the threats that were made against Oliver Ivanovic,” Janjic told the Belgrade magazine Vreme recently.
That is a reference to an ethnic Serb politician from northern Kosovo who was widely praised for demonstrating cooperation and tolerance in divided times before he was gunned down in North Mitrovica in January. Ivanovic was born in a village near Janjic's Decani monastery.
Janjic has nearly 20,000 followers on Facebook and is active on Twitter, posting in both Serbian and English.
Despite the venerable status of the Visoki Decani monastery (it was built in the 14th century and has been a protected heritage site for decades), its abbot does not speak for the Serbian Orthodox Church.
But there are also ethnic-Serb communities in the areas in question that could find themselves unwilling residents of Kosovo if the proposed “border adjustment” became reality -- communities that might welcome Janjic's skepticism.
Path To Ethnic Cleansing?
But since his Vreme interview, Janjic's Twitter feed has become a target of insults and profanity over his stance on the border issue. He has been labeled a “traitor to Serbia’s national interests” and worse. One tweet attacked him for being an advocate of Kosovo’s membership in UNESCO. (The Decani monastery is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, along with several other medieval monuments in Kosovo, but Serbia opposes Kosovo’s membership in that and other international bodies.) Another post suggested -- rightly or wrongly -- that Janjic once held an umbrella for former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is unpopular among Serbs for her role in the Clinton administration’s decision to intervene in 1999.
In fact, Janjic has stood out then and in the ensuing two decades for his resistance to the notion of one-sided solutions or justice for one community over the other.
"The peoples of Kosovo and Metohia are living through the most difficult days in their history," Janjic wrote in the forward to the book Crucified Kosovo in 1999-2000. "The ethnic Albanians experienced their days of suffering, exile and death inflicted by the immoral and destructive policy of [Yugoslav and then Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic's regime. Now the Serbs are being exposed to suffering, exile and death from the immoral and destructive policy of the ethnic Albanian nationalists."
In an article for Open Democracy in 2002, Janjic insisted that "democracy cannot be built on ethnic discrimination," adding, "The priority for Kosovo should be the building of a stable, civil society which would respect human rights and freedoms regardless of one’s ethnic or religious background. Only thus will all its residents be able to overcome the anachronisms of the past."
More recently, Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, a convicted war criminal, has described Janjic as a "notorious traitor."
“I would never attack the church, but I would [attack] some of its individual dignitaries, if they wrong their own people and the interests of the state,” Seselj said, adding in a reference to other convicted or accused war criminals who have come before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: “I've been attacking Sava Janjic for a long time. This is a man who wanted [former Yugoslav and Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic, [former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan] Karadzic, and [Bosnian Serb General Ratko] Mladic to be handed over to The Hague."
If not for his monk’s robe, Seselj vowed, he would “give [Janjic] a good slap.”
It is Janjic’s role as abbot of one of Serbs' most venerated institutions -- the Decani monastery has been referred to as “the cradle of the Serbian nation” -- that lends weight to his views. Janjic also appears to enjoy the respect of ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Of the rumored territory swap, Janjic said: "I am especially worried about the part that talks about the border separating Serbs and Albanians, which implies that where one [ethnic group] lives, the other will be absent, and vice versa. This is a retrograde model that is very much in line with the policy of ethnic cleansing implemented during the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia -- and so it's unsurprising that the proposal, which has the backing, albeit for their own reasons, of both Vucic and Thaci, also has the support of one of the chief ideologues of ethnic cleansing, Vojislav Seselj."
The executive director of the North Mitrovica-based NGO Advocacy Center for Democratic Culture, Dusan Radakovic, cited complex dynamics on the ground in Kosovo among the reasons the outspoken Janjic is under fire.
But he also noted that the Serbian Orthodox Church had not yet issued any public reaction to rumors of any territorial swap between Serbia and Kosovo.
"We have yet to hear from other church dignitaries, and even the patriarch himself has not said anything very specific," Radakovic said, adding that "a solution that pleases everyone will not come easily."
"Both sides will have to swallow a bitter pill to make that happen."
