What is the worst thing to be connected with in Serbian public life? According to our tabloids, there’s nothing quite so bad as human rights activists.
But when you’re looking for help, when you need support for your ideas or political projects, who do you want to have on your side?
In Serbia, everybody knows: you have to have support from the hooligan groups, those who can advocate for your cause during football matches.
But Sava the Monk, the archimandrite of Decani monastery in Kosovo – one of the jewels of Serbian Orthodox heritage, according to the interpretation of Serbian tabloids and President Aleksandar Vucic – has succeeded in doing something unique: he has received support from both sides, from Serbian NGO activists who get described by the tabloids as “foreign agents” and from hooligan groups, known as “guardians of national pride”.
How it is possible to combine such contradictory things, such opposing attitudes and values?
According to Vucic, hatred of him and his family initiated it, and his superb idea of partitioning Kosovo has united those who cannot be united.
Over the last couple of weeks, Father Sava – someone known as a decent man who fought for Serbian heritage during and after the war in Kosovo, a man who succeeded in surviving behind ‘enemy lines’ – has become an enemy of the state because he said publicly that the Church and representatives of the Serb community from the south of Kosovo are all against the partition of Kosovo.
Sava, the ‘cyber monk’ from Decani, has over the years become one of the credible voices from Kosovo, his Twitter and Facebook accounts recognised as an independent voice in every crisis that has hit Kosovo in the last decade.
But in the last couple of weeks his tweets can be understood not an independent and credible voice but a tool for promotion of policies that are different from those of the government.
That is why when he wrote at the beginning of August that something was happening in Kosovo, some kind of new ‘Storm’, the notorious military action in 1995 which ‘liberated’ Croatia of more than 200,000 Serbs, he became a target for the Belgrade tabloids.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
