andrew herscher, andras riedlmayer - monument and crime, the destruction of historic architecture in...

8/17/2019 Andrew Herscher, Andras Riedlmayer - Monument and Crime, The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

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Kulla (Mansion) of Jashar Pasha,Peja/Peć. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.


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Monument and Crime:

The Destruction of

Historic Architecture

in Kosovo

ANDREW HERSCHER AND ANDRÁS RIEDLMAYER

While international accords prohibit the targeting of culturalartifacts during warfare, this legal protection implies thatwar is not waged over questions of culture and thus, that cul-tural artifacts can unproblematically be distinguished fromlegitimate military targets.1 The 1998-1999 conflict inKosovo, however, was sanctioned by recourse to little elsethan culture; competing versions of Kosovo’s cultural iden-tity were staged as the bases for competing claims for sover-eignty over the province, and cultural artifacts werepresented as precise evidence of those claims. The entan-glement of the cultural and the political that led to the wide-scale destruction of historic architecture in Kosovo, then,was less an avoidable anomaly of the conict than one of theconict’s constituent elements. As such, the war in Kosovois characteristic of a new form of conflict that is producednot out of geopolitical or ideological disputes, but out of thepolitics of particularist identities. In this new form of con-ict, “behavior that was proscribed according to the classicalrules of warfare and codified in the laws of war in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as atrocitiesagainst non-combatants, sieges, destruction of historicmonuments, etc., now constitutes an essential component.” 2

The recruitment of cultural heritage as evidence in sup-port of a political project is, if not inevitable, a prevalentdimension of discourse on that heritage. The situation inKosovo, however, can be distinguished by the degree towhich culture, and specifically, architecture, was—andremains—the symbolic centerpiece of Serb nationalistclaims to the province. Kosovo’s Serbian Orthodox build-ings—both surviving medieval monuments and the products

of twentieth-century church construction programs—have served as proxy for a Serb population to substantiateSerbian state sovereignty over Kosovo, the population of which has been predominantly Albanian since Serbiaclaimed Kosovo as a province in 1912. Reciprocally, archi-tectural heritage associated with Kosovo’s Albanian majorityhas been subjected to institutionalized disregard in themanagement of Kosovo’s cultural heritage and, during the1998-1999 conflict, catastrophic destruction. While thisdestruction constitutes a war crime in violation of the Hague

Grey Room 01, Fall 2000, p p. 108–122. © 2000 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 109


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and Geneva Conventions, it is also the counterpart to a sanc-tioned cultural heritage policy carried out for decades beforethe war.

When the Kingdom of Serbia wrested control of Kosovofrom the Ottoman Empire in 1912, it set out three justifica-tions for Serbian rule in the province: the “moral right of amore civilized people,” the ethnographic right of a peoplewho “originally” constituted Kosovo’s majority population,

and the Serbs’ historic right to the place which contained thePatriarchate buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church.3

While these buildings directly substantiated the third of these justications, they also were scripted as evidence forthe preceding two claims; the medieval architecture of theSerbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo testied both to the Serbs’level of civilization and to their past presence in the province.

Between the world wars, this patrimony of medievalarchitecture was supplemented by an extensive church- building campaign in Kosovo; this campaign led both to thereconstruction of ruined Serbian Orthodox churches and theconstruction of new ones. Signicantly, it is often difcult todistinguish between the two procedures, as what was termeda “reconstructed” (obnovljena) church was sometimeslocated on a site where a medieval chronicle or charterattested that a church once existed, even if no elements of the original building remained. This equivocation betweenreconstruction and construction reflected the manner inwhich Serbian Orthodox architecture in Kosovo was endowedwith a continuous existence on an ideological level as amarker of Serb presence in the province, whether or not thisarchitecture actually existed on a material level. To reinforcethe same historical continuity, churches built in this period,

in both Kosovo and Serbia, utilized a historicist architecturalvocabulary drawn from medieval Serbian Orthodox churches.4

Indeed, as prominent historic churches in Kosovo, such asthe Church of the Dormition of the Virgin at Grac̀anicaMonastery, were often used as direct models for contemporarychurches elsewhere in Serbia, the merging of the historicistwith the historic mirrored the intended merging of Kosovowith Serbia proper.

While the construction of religious buildings in Yugoslaviawas restricted from the establishment of Tito’s Communistgovernment in 1945 until the relaxation of church-state rela-

tions in the mid-1970s, the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo, founded in 1952, institu-tionalized the production of cultural heritage in Kosovo andprovided another field on which an ideology of culturewould play itself out.5 By the time of last year’s war, some210 Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and gravesiteswere listed as protected historic monuments in Kosovo,including over forty churches built between the 1930s andthe 1990s. In contrast, only fteen of the more than six hun-dred mosques in Kosovo were listed as historic monuments,

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even though well over half of these mosques date from theOttoman era (fourteenth through nineteenth centuries).6 Asthe criteria for considering mosques as “historic monu-ments” were far more restrictive than those for SerbianOrthodox buildings, Kosovo’s cultural heritage was materi-ally transformed: while listed buildings received all fundsdesignated for historic preservation, the renovation of unlistedmosques was undertaken without the Institute’s supervision

and frequently resulted in the damaging or destruction of original architectural elements.7

Beginning after the death of Tito in the 1980s, the resur-gence of Serb nationalism and the formation of new relations between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Belgrade gov-ernment led to the initiation of a new program of church building in Kosovo. New Serbian Orthodox churches con-structed in the 1990s were prominently positioned in thecenters of cities such as Prishtina and Djakovica, whiledozens of smaller churches were also constructed in provin-cial towns and villages, many with the patronage of promi-nent members and supporters of the Milos̀evi´ c regime. At thesame time, Albanian resistance to Serbian control of Kosovowas sometimes expressed through the vandalism of pre-cisely those artifacts by which that control was legitimated:historic and contemporary Serbian Orthodox churches andmonasteries.8 This vandalism was heavily publicized in thestate-controlled media as part of a campaign chargingKosovo’s Albanians with “genocide” against Kosovo’s Serbsand their cultural heritage. Monument protection was seizedupon by the Serbian government as one of the pretexts for itsdecision to impose direct rule on Kosovo, a province thathad in Tito’s era received considerable control over its own

internal affairs; if architecture legitimated Serbia’s claim toKosovo, then damage to that architecture became damageto that claim.

The revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, the decla-ration of a state of emergency in the province, the forcedremoval of ethnic Albanians from all public institutions, anda series of human rights abuses perpetuated by Serb securityforces in the province led to escalating tensions between theprovince’s ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb govern-ment.9 Increasing repression and the evident failure ofnon-violent resistance to bring about change led to the for-

mation of an armed insurgency, the Kosovo Liberation Army,and the outbreak of open conflict between the KLA andSerbian government forces in 1998. Serb forces initiated acounterinsurgency campaign in March 1998, directed againstthe KLA and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population. In thiscampaign, as large numbers of Kosovo’s Albanian popula-tion were forcibly deported from their homes, the historicarchitecture associated with that population was systemati-cally targeted for destruction. This targeting took place bothas groups of people were being expelled from their places of

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residence, apparently to diminish these people’s incentiveto return to their hometowns and villages, but also after expul-sions took place, apparently to remove visible evidence of Kosovo’s deported Albanian community.10

The primary buildings singled out by Serb forces fordestruction in 1998 and 1999 were mosques; at least 207 of the approximately 609 mosques in Kosovo sustained damageor were destroyed in that period.11 Other architectural

targets of Serb forces were Islamic religious schools andlibraries, more than 500 kullas (traditional stone mansions,often associated with prominent Albanian families), andhistoric bazaars. Three out of four well-preserved Ottoman-era urban cores in Kosovo cities were also severely damaged,in each case with great loss of historic architecture.

The damage sustained by these buildings was not collat-eral. Damaged and destroyed monuments were often situ-ated in undisturbed or lightly-damaged contexts, and thetypes of damage which monuments received (buildings burned from the interior, minarets of mosques toppled withexplosives, anti-Islamic and anti-Albanian vandalism) indi-cate that this damage was deliberate, rather than the resultof monuments being caught in the cross-re of military oper-ations. In a number of cases, eyewitnesses have also beenable to precisely describe attacks on historic monuments.While the United Nations High Commission on Refugeeshas estimated that 70,000 homes were destroyed in Kosovofrom March to June 1999, the destruction of historic archi-tecture has a unique significance in that it signifies theattempt to target not just the homes and properties of indi-vidual members of Kosovo’s Albanian population, but thatentire population as a culturally dened entity.

The United Nations Security Council resolution thatauthorized the United Nations administration in Kosovo fol-lowing the end of the war in June 1999 allows officialYugoslav and Serbian personnel in Kosovo for certain limitedpurposes: to mark and clear minefields, to provide liaisonwith the international security mission, and “to maintain apresence at Serb patrimonial sites.”12 Although internationalpeacekeeping forces took measures to guard the most famousmedieval Serbian Orthodox sites, less well-known churchesand monasteries in rural areas abandoned by the eeing Serbminority population became the targets of revenge attacks by

returning Albanians. In the weeks after the war, more thanseventy buildings were vandalized or destroyed; while mostwere built in the twentieth century, some dated from themedieval period and were listed monuments. 13

The Serbian government has used these attacks as the basis to petition the United Nations to allow the return of itstroops and police to Kosovo to guard historic monuments.While this petition was unsuccessful, the postwar attack onSerbian cultural heritage has been appropriated by Serbiancultural institutions as a means to deect attention from the

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assault on Albanian cultural heritage that preceded it. Theseinstitutions have reported only on the postwar damage sus-tained by Serbian Orthodox heritage and these reports have been regarded as neutral and objective assessments by inter-national cultural heritage institutions.14 As a result, there has been little awareness of or concern for the damaged culturalheritage of Kosovo’s Albanian majority. The only officialacknowledgment by the Serbian government that damage

was done to Albanian cultural heritage in Kosovo was madein the frame of an assessment of NATO war crimes, whichostensibly included the aerial bombardment of severalAlbanian historic monuments.15

The international community in Kosovo has also beenreluctant to acknowledge the damage that was done toAlbanian cultural heritage in Kosovo. The initial UNESCOreport on the state of cultural heritage in Kosovo after thewar was based primarily on information supplied by Serbiancultural heritage institutions.16 More generally, however, theinternational community has conceived of its mission inKosovo as simply a humanitarian triage to provide for the basic needs of Kosovo’s ravaged postwar population, a pop-ulation which is dealt with less as peoples with distinct andvaluable cultural heritages than as generic refugees. As somecommentators have pointed out, the NATO intervention inKosovo was based on an ideology of victimization: “whenNATO intervened to protect Kosovar victims, it ensured atthe same time that they would remain victims, inhabitantsof a devastated country with a passive population.”17 Thesame ideology also underlays the bracketing-off of culturalheritage from what is called the “reconstruction” of Kosovo.


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Village Mosque, Lismir/Dobri Dub. Constructed at the begin-ning of the twentieth century. Photo: Andrew Herscher.Informant statement: “On April 4, 1999, all residents of thevillage were expelled by Serb paramilitaries and the villagewas burned. We spent the rest of the war in refugee camps inAlbania. When we returned in August, we found the villagedestroyed and the mosque burned out. To keep childrenfrom getting hurt by falling rubble, we cleared away theruins. The minaret still stands, but we have no money torebuild the mosque.”


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Top: Before destruction. Mosque of Halil Efendi, Dobërçan/Dobr Æcane. Constructed in the seventeenth century, restoredin the nineteenth century. Photo: Raif Virmica.Informant statement: “The imam of the mosque, Nusret

Hajdari, was taken from his house next door to the mosqueand was killed in front of the mosque with his family watch-ing. Then the mosque was burned down. This was done bySerb paramilitaries on June 13, 1999, the day before the rstKFOR troops arrived in the village. The paramilitaries woremilitary-style camouage uniforms and red bandannas tiedaround their heads. The imam had been called into the Serbpolice station and threatened almost daily during the war.”

Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andrew Herscher.


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Top: Before destruction. Market Mosque and Old Market,Vushtrri/Vu Æcitrn. Constructed in the fteenth century, restoredin the nineteenth century. Photo: Raif Virmica.Informant statement: “Two days after the start of the NATO bombing, Serb paramilitaries burned down the MarketMosque and looted and burned 50 shops in the old bazaarnext to the mosque. The paramilitaries wore masks and were

led by a Serb nationalist politician, the local boss of Arkan’spolitical party. They bulldozed the entire site that Sunday(March 28, 1999). My house is the one across the street. They burned it down after they burned the mosque. My familyname is Mejzini (son of the muezzin). My father and his fatherwere muezzins; they called the people of this town to prayerfrom that mosque. Now it’s all gone. I am leaving Vushtrri andnot coming back. There’s nothing left for me here.”

Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andr s Riedlmayer.


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Top: Before destruction. Orthodox Monastery Church of thePresentation of the Holy Virgin, Dolac. Founded in the latefourteenth century, restored in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies.Photo: Slobodan Mileusnić, Svetinje Kosova i Metohije(Novi Sad: Pravoslavna re Æc, 1999).Informant statement: “This church is genuinely old. I knowthe place because I worked here years ago on a project torestore the frescoes. The site is even older —just look at thehuge stones at the base of the wall encircling the hilltop.That was an archaic fortress, dating back to Classical

Antiquity and even earlier to prehistoric times. This churchwas built with the traditional technique that both Serbs andAlbanians in this area use for their houses and theirchurches: stone walls, the roof made out of thick slabs of slate. Someone must have set off explosives inside to makethe church collapse like this under the weight of the roof.This was done by Albanians. They thought they were takingrevenge. But those who did it are ignorant people.”

Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andrew Herscher.


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Kulla (Mansion) of Jashar Pasha, Peja/Peć. Constructed in1803; restored in the twentieth century. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.Informant statement: “This kulla had been restored just before the war by the doctor whose family it belongs to. It

was a famous landmark, where the Albanian League of Pejarst met in 1899; you can see the ofcial historic marker nextto the door. It was burned in May 1999 by local Serbs, led bycivilians. It took them several days. Three or four times theytried to set a re inside but it didn’t burn, so they set up lad-ders and had a man climb up on the roof and throw bucketsof gasoline into the house and burn it from the top down.The man who set the re was an employee with the municipalroads department; he got the ladders from where he worked.”


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Old Market, Gjakova/Djakovica. Constructed in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.Informant statement: “On the rst night of the NATO air war,on the 8:00 p.m. newscast on Serbian state television, the

announcer said that Belgrade, Novi Sad, Prishtina, and thecenter of Djakovica had been bombed by NATO. I thoughtthis was strange since I had not seen or heard any explosionsnearby, even though I live in the middle of the old town.Four hours later, around midnight, Serb police and paramil-itaries began setting re to the old market district around theHadum Mosque and killing people in their houses.”


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Kulla (traditional stone mansion), Junik. Constructed in theeighteenth century. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.Informant statement: “This kulla has been my family’s homefor many generations. It was burned by Serb paramilitaries.

They poured gasoline all over the kulla before setting italight last April 14. They used that large jerry can you canstill see lying in the rubble. We were living inside until the war.This is a historic monument. It is very, very old. The roomfor male guests on the top floor was especially splendid—a rare example of Albanian architectural heritage. The wallsare very old, perhaps they were here even before the Turksarrived. We want to rebuild, but we need help to rebuild thestone walls and especially a new roof. A kulla without a roof will quickly fall apart.”


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Top: Before destruction. Old Market, Peja/Peć. Constructedin the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Photo: Institute forthe Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo.Informant statement: “All the shops and houses in the old

market district around the Bajrakli Mosque were looted and burned, and anything still left standing wrecked with bull-dozers by local Serb police and civilians. There were a lot of valuable goods taken, especially from the goldsmiths’ shops andfrom the shops of the argjendarët , Catholic Albanian silver-smiths who specialize in ligree work. Among the shops nextto the mosque that were burned were two dozen that belongedto the charitable foundations of the local Islamic community.”

Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.


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Notes

1. On international accords on the protection of cultural property in

warfare, see Ji Ærí Toman, The Protection of Cultural Property in the Event

of Armed Conict (Paris: UNESCO, 1996).

2. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8.

3. See Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York

University Press, 1998), xlvii.

4. On early twentieth-century Serbian historicist architecture, see

Bratislav Panteli´ c, “Nationalism and Architecture: The Creation of aNational Style in Serbian Architecture and Its Political Importance,”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 1 (March 1997):

16–41.

5. The early history of this institution—originally, the Institute for the

Protection and Study of Cultural Monuments in the Autonomous Province

of Kosova-Metohija—is given in Ratomir Karaku Æsevi´ c, “Rad Zavoda za

za Æstitu i prou Æcavanje spomenika kulture AKMO od svog osnivanja do

danas,” Glasnik Muzeja Kosova i Metohije, 1 (1956): 357–365.

6. On listed historic monuments in Kosovo, see Mileta Milić, ed.,

Cultural Heritage of Kosovo and Metohija (Belgrade: Institute for the

Protection of Cultural Monuments of the Republic of Serbia, 1999).

7. See Haki Kasumi, Bashkësitë fetare në Kosovë (Prishtina: Instituti i

Historisë së Kosovës, 1988), 114.

8. A partial list of vandalized Serbian Orthodox sites is given in William

Dorich, Kosovo (Alhambra, Cal.: Kosovo Charity Fund, 1992).

9. For an account of this period in Kosovo, see International Helsinki

Federation for Human Rights, International Helsinki Federation Responses

to Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo (Vienna:

International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1999).

10. Nearly half (47 percent) of Kosovar refugees reported seeing

places of worship destroyed before they left Kosovo; see Physicians for

Human Rights, War Crimes in Kosovo: A Population-Based Assessment

of Human Rights Violations Against Kosovar Albanians (Boston, MA:

Physicians for Human Rights, 1999), 86.

11. This and the following data on damage sustained by cultural heritagein Kosovo are from a survey carried out by the authors in the fall of 1999,

publication forthcoming.

12. See United Nations Resolution 1244, Annex 2, sec. 6

(www.un.org/docs/scres/1999/99sc1244.htm).

13. For a documentation of postwar attacks on Serbian Orthodox sites,

see Destroyed and Desecrated Christian Orthodox Shrines in Kosovo and

Metohija (www.decani.yunet.com).

14. For example, reports from the International Council on Monuments

and Sites (ICOMOS) in Yugoslavia and the Society of Conservators of

Serbia were consolidated in “War Damage in the Balkans,” US/ICOMOS

Newsletter (March-April 1999).

15. See NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia: Documentary Evidence 24

March-24 April 1999 (Belgrade: Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs,Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1999), 226-228. In two cases (Djakovica

bazaar and Prizren League Museum in Prizren) in which NATO is alleged

to have destroyed Albanian historic monuments in Kosovo, however, the

damage sustained by these monuments is incompatible with the damage

produced by aerial bombing.

16. See Colin Kaiser, Report on Mission to Kosovo, 4-14 July 1999

(Paris: UNESCO, 1999).

17. Slavoj ÆZi Æzek, “Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism,” in

London Review of Books 21, no. 21, 28 (October 1999): 14.
http://www.decani.yunet.com/http://www.un.org/docs/scres/1999/99sc1244.htm

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