Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

us to expose the sacred relics in the largest Belgrade church before the
eyes of our faithful people. Now the people see their holy tzar, who was a
defender of our Orthodox Serbian faith and our national identity. 5
The regime described the liturgy as a “nationalistic provocation and the
Church’s protest march against our government policies of national equality
in Kosovo and Macedonia.” 6 At the fourteenth session of the League of
Communists of Serbs, held in Belgrade a week later, the author Dobrica
Ćosić warned Serb communists that if they fail to curb Albanian nationalism
and if Serb leaders missed the chance to side with the Serbian people, the
Church and other, in Ćosić’s words, “primitive nationalists” would take advantage
of the situation to become defenders of national interests of the
Serbian people. 7 Ćosić was criticized as a nationalist, remained isolated, and
soon resigned from the Party.
In November 1968, after massive Albanian riots, the Serbian Orthodox
Church stepped up its pressure on the regime through petitions, complaints,
and appeals for protection of the Serbian sacred heritage in Kosovo and
Metohija, allegedly assaulted by ethnic Albanians. The Rasˇka-Prizren diocese
also complained to the Holy Synod and commissions for religious affairs in
Belgrade that the province authorities had been ineffective: some petitions
had been ignored and no perpetrator of alleged Albanian assaults on church
property and clergy had been brought to justice. 8 On 19 May 1969, the Holy
Assembly of Bishops send a letter-appeal, written in a kind tone, to President
Tito. The letter specified nearly a dozen Albanian attacks on the faithful, on
clergy, and on Church property. 9 Within a week Tito replied and promised
to investigate the problem through the republic and provincial authorities. 10
A few months later, Pravoslavlje expressed disappointment and concluded
that the government was unwilling to “halt the savagery.” 11 After 1968,
Pravoslavlje occasionally published reports and listed violent assaults, including
rape, murder, theft, arson, intimidation, threats, discriminatory policies,
desecration of cemeteries and holy places, and other aggressive activities
allegedly committed by nationalist Albanians against the Serbs, the
Serbian Church, and Serbian property in Kosovo. 12 However, only a few of
these allegations had been sustained by legal prosecution. In response to
this, the Church argued that the Albanian-dominated Kosovo state apparatus
was biased. 13 Yet, according to research carried out by the Serbian
scholar Vesna Pesˇić, rapes of Serbian women by Albanians (which the
Church underscored in its reports), were rare in the history of the region. 14
Nevertheless, Kosovo Serb migration accelerated to the northern homogeneously
Serbian parts of the largest Yugoslav republic. Between 1971 and
1981, more than 30,000 Serbs and Montenegrins left the troubled and most
backward Yugoslav province, heading to the big cities and the fertile, wealthy
northern province of Vojvodina. 15 The decline of the Orthodox population
in the province over a three-decade period showed an alarming tendency:
the other serbia 45