On July 18, 2021, Kosovo police informed a local priest in Štrpce that during a routine visit to the Serbian Orthodox Churches, they saw a damaged door on the church of St. Peter and Paul in the village of Brod.
The parish priest found a broken lock on the entrance gate, a forcibly opened door on the church and "Kosovo Liberal Army" graffiti in the church, the local Diocese reported.
During the day, police conducted an investigation in the presence of the team from Pristina, and an investigation was opened.
The Diocese of Raška and Prizren expresses concern over this as it is another in a series of vandal attacks on churches in the region.
The Diocese made appeals for respect for basic religious freedoms, as well as the spiritual and cultural heritage of Orthodox Serbs in the region.
The Serbian mythos finds itself in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, where despite their courage, Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović was martyred and his forces routed by the Ottoman invaders.
Although the Serbs achieved sovereignty over the region with the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, the region had already become an Albanian majority on Ottoman orders to weaken Serbian identity and dominance in the region.
Kosovo became an autonomous region of Serbia after the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War Two and retained its Albanian-majority.
The 1990’s proved this was always a weak point of Serbia.
With the U.S. sponsoring the violent destruction of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s, the status of Kosovo was left unresolved, culminating in the terrorist-led war against the Yugoslav state (in which Serbia was the successor of) in 1999.
The terrorist ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK), with the backing of NATO and the Albanian Republic, defeated Yugoslav forces.
The United Nations and NATO assumed control of the territory, which eventually declared independence in 2008.
Since then, Kosovo under Albanian rule has become a heroin ‘smugglers paradise,’ and a hub for human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms trafficking.
READ MORE: The Cham Issue: How Albania turned Nazi collaborators into victims.