Petrit Selimi, Deputy Chief of Kosovo diplomacy
Why Pristina is so sure that Kosovo will “pass” the mechanism of voting in the Executive Council and the General Assembly of UNESCO this autumn?
We have worked very closely in cooperation with all international partners and we constantly evaluated when the optimal moment for the nomination is. Already in January we decided to apply, so that our request could be discussed at the November session of the UNESCO General Conference. As Deputy PM Thaci indicated last week, we spoke with more than 130 delegations and we scheduled meetings for this month with another 20.
The Serbian side asked Pristina how it will take care about the Serbian religious and cultural monuments in Kosovo. As stated, these are the same people who were destroying them for the last 16 years, even under the UN protectorate. The Kosovo government has not officially distanced itself and condemned their destruction. When it comes to the Serbian Orthodox Church about 150 Orthodox churches and monasteries were destroyed, many of which are medieval.
As first, it is a lie that the Kosovo government has never condemned the demolition of some churches. In fact, the Kosovo government has allocated millions of euros to get them rebuilt, after the March 2004 riots. Today, the Kosovo police protect 95 per cent of the possession of the Serbian Orthodox Church. As second, Serbian army and police fully destroyed more than 300 mosques, including the Bazar mosque from 1761, Halil Efendi Mosque from 1526, Bektashi tekke in Djakovica from 1790 ….
Why the Council of Europe claims that they gave the money for the repair of the Serbian holy shrines destroyed in the March pogrom, which was just transferred through the accounts of the Government of Kosovo. Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) agreed with it in 2005, and signed the Memorandum on the reconstruction of Serbian churches and monasteries destroyed in the pogrom 2004 year.
I do not believe such a claim. We have daily contact with the CoE. It is known that the Kosovo government has already paid around five million euros for the renovation of Orthodox temples. It should be noted that Kosovo did not apply for UNESCO candidacy in order to provoke SPC, or to declare its heritage as Albanian. We applied so that we could enable Kosovo’s development in education, science and culture. The legacy is a small part of UNESCO. We understand that the legacy is important issue and that medieval facilities in Kosovo that are currently on the UNESCO World Heritage will always be the property of the SPC. The Ahtisaari plan and Kosovo’s constitution provide a very important constitutional protection of the SPC. Bishop Teodosije, Father Sava and many other church representatives in Kosovo support reconciliation and we have to give each other the hand of friendship and respect.
Why the topic of those destroyed 300 mosques in Kosovo has never been opened in the Belgrade-Pristina talks – from Vienna and Ahtisaari and to the Brussels dialogue? Only the Serbian heritage was discussed.
The focus in Vienna and the Ahtisaari process was the process of establishing a framework of conditional independence, while in Brussels still it is not opened the issue of heritage – neither the Orthodox nor Catholic, nor Muslim. The destruction of Islamic heritage has been the subject of many final judgments of the ICTY.
