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Vengeful KLA turns on nuns and Gypsies
FROM TOM WALKER AT DEVIC MONASTERY, LAUSA
ROGUE units of the Kosovo Liberation Army are rapidly destroying the guerrilla organisation's credibility amid a worsening spiral of anarchy in Kosovo. In the latest incidents, KLA fighters have attacked and possibly raped nuns in an isolated monastery, and begun a vicious series of revenge killings of Gypsies in the southern Prizren area.
A British Army officer who visited the 14th-century Devic monastery in the central Drenica region described the three-day ordeal of the nine nuns there as "sickening".
Kfor officers last week toured Kosovo monasteries with the Orthodox Patriarch of Serbia, Pavle, and the force has since stepped up its security operations around dozens of the Church's most important sites in the province.
In addition to threats to Kosovo's Orthodox heritage and to the Serb population, Kfor is having to consider the safety of the Gypsy population. The Albanians have blamed much of the looting and collaboration of the past three months on Gypsies, thousands of whom have fled to Serbia. At the weekend several Gypsy men were killed by the KLA near Suva Reka, just north of Prizren, and Kfor's current policy of patrolling the main roads is of little comfort to those at risk.
Yesterday seven soldiers from a French tank battalion stood guard in the grounds of the Devic monastery, as the nuns tried to rebuild simple lives devastated by KLA brutality. At a time of year when they normally would have been tending fields and making honey, they found themselves locked in the monastery by a local unit of the KLA. The guerrillas beat and robbed the nuns and vandalised the monastery, whose crypt contains the bones of St Joanikios.
"I know they fired guns right next to the sisters' heads and I believe very possibly the youngest sister was raped," the British officer said. "She looked completely spaced out when we got there and she may well need psychological help."
Adding to the KLA's embarrassment, Kfor officials confirmed yesterday that Italian troops in Pec had stopped a lorry laden with arms destined for the guerrillas. Although not widely visited, Devic and its nuns have always been at the heart of Serb propaganda about the Albanian Muslim hordes endangering the Orthodox Jerusalem, and there have been many press reports in the past of nuns being raped and tortured.
Sister Anastasia looked tired yesterday, and she was reluctant to talk. For much of last year she was sparky and combative, and almost proud of the run-ins she had with the local KLA, in which she had been shot at more than once. Yesterday she was stooped and withdrawn, and spoke only half-heartedly of staying on.
"I don't know what this is apart from a war crime," she said, showing us where the KLA had smashed open the tomb of St Joanikios and thrown the bones of another saint over the floor. "After three days they forced us at gunpoint to clear everything up," she added. "There are terrible things happening to this nation, things that we suffered 50 years ago and I thought would never happen again."
The KLA fighters had also scrawled their local acronym, UCK, across one of Devic's icons, a portrait of St Paraskeva, and stolen DM50,000 (about £17,200) from the sisters' living quarters, along with all their vehicles, food, wine and honey.
Devic was sacked and burnt by local Albanians loyal to the Germans and Italians in the Second World War, but in the recent conflict local KLA commanders had always vowed they would not attack Orthodox sites.
However, on Friday a KLA unit burnt another small monastery, St Trinity in Musutiste. German soldiers also found a KLA torture chamber in the former Serb police headquarters in Prizren, where a 70-year-old Serb had died while strapped to a radiator.
The guerrillas - supposedly disarmed - now seem intent on killing Gypsies, whom they hold in lower esteem than they do the Serbs.
Meanwhile, many KLA fighters were not averse to a spot of looting themselves over the weekend, while turning a blind eye to the ransacking and burning of many Serb houses.
sunday-times.co.uk
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