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        THE RAPE OF SERBIA: A Defilement of our Faith

The Role of Arab Oil, the Vatican, and Political Ecumenism in
the Establishment of a Worldwide Assault on the Serbian People,
the Orthodox Faith, and the Truth.

"...A false witness will utter lies."

Taken from "Orthodox Tradition," Vol. X, No. 3, 1993

By The Most Reverend Dr. Chrysostomos, Bishop of Etna and the
St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, Synodal Exarch in America of the
True Orthodox Church of Greece under the Presidency of The Most
Reverend Cyprian, Metropolitan of Oropos and Fili (Greece)


On every television set and radio in America, we hear of
Serbian atrocities in the former Yugoslavia: Serbian soldiers
raping and defiling women; Serbian forces "cleansing" Bosnia
and Herzegovina of Moslem ethnics; women and children dying
because of Serbian aggression against the "innocents." CNN, the
nation's window on the world and the world's window on a
shameful chapter in American reporting, tells us daily that the
Serbs have become the twentieth century's newest Nazis,
exhorting us, during an interview with a Croatian woman
allegedly raped by Serbian soldiers, to remember that those who
do not heed the lessons of history and especially those offered
by the genocide of the Nazi holocaust--are destined to repeat
it. Incredibly, during the first hours after the gruesome March
bombing of the World Trade Center complex in New York by Moslem
fundamentalist extremists, CNN even reported that a Serbian
terrorist group was suspected of masterminding the bombing.
Indeed, the United Nations, in the spirit of the anti-Serbian
propaganda spewing forth from the American media, has called
for the establishment of an international war crimes tribunal
to try the Serbs for crimes against humanity.

            An Objective Picture

The actual fact is that the former Yugoslavia is in the throes
of a horrible conflict. Food is scarce and many people--Serbs,
Croats, Bosnians, Christians, and Moslems alike--are starving.
No doubt rape and plunder are widespread, though again
objective sources have admitted that all sides in the conflict
are equally guilty of these atrocities of war. No doubt the
Yugoslav Republic, with its capital in Serbia, is still more
greatly under the control of former communists than any other
of the former Yugoslavian states, placing its
policies--including the impediment of United Nations food
shipments to various locales--under suspicion. But again, to
put this issue in perspective, communism is not Serbian;
rather, it is the universal system of tyranny under which Tito,
a non-Serb, exterminated untold numbers of Serbs to establish
the former communist Yugoslavia. That ethnic hatred has
surfaced in the former Yugoslavia is also beyond denial. Yet,
few American reporters have bothered to tell us why there are
Slavic Moslems in the Balkans, these remnants of the same
Islamic zeal to convert the Christian infidels of Europe to the
Moslem faith that brought an end to the Byzantine (Roman)
Empire. Nor have they told us that Bosnia and Kosovo, about
which they so glibly babble, are ancient spiritual centers of
Orthodox Serbia. Just as the American media dismiss Greek
memories of four hundred years of slavery under the Moslem
Turkish yoke as "an ethnic prejudice," they also speak of the
Serbian desire to reclaim their lands--some of them settled by
Moslems as part of Tito's policy of forced relocation--as
"ethnic cleansing." Exploiting ignorance, the media have raped
an entire people.

        An Attack Against Our Faith.

The media, in ravishing the Serbs, have also defiled our
Orthodox Faith. The same CNN whose reporters have made the name
"Serb" a "four-letter word" also frequently reports--in a cheap
manipulation of lingering American suspicions about the former
Soviet Union--that the Serbian people enjoy the support of the
"Russians," owing to their common Slavic roots and their
"Orthodox religion." In other parts of the world, religions
form values which, in turn, determine the moral commitments of
their adherents. In Eastern Europe, however, the "Orthodox
religion" apparently fosters a different system. Setting all
values aside, we Orthodox support anyone who shares our
religious affiliation or who happens to be of the same ethnic
background. In the face of allegations of rape and genocide, we
place the commonality of religious confession above the moral
imperatives of our religious value system. Such is the image of
Orthodox Christianity--the second largest and the oldest of the
Christian confessions--created by the American media.

        The Frightening Plot.

What is the ultimate source of the plat to paint the Serbian
people and our Faith with the wide brush of religious and
ethnic intolerance? The answer is disturbing and frightening.
First we must understand something about American foreign
policy and the ARAB NATIONS. Only once, on the CBS weekly news
program "60 Minutes," have the American people been told that
the Saudi Arabian government has demanded that the U.S. and
Western Europe do something to aid its co-religionists in
Bosnia. Since the Saudis control the flow of oil to the West,
one cannot dismiss the importance of their demands, demands
which no doubt played some role in the U.S. decision to
participate in the humanitarian efforts to feed the starving in
Somalia--a largely Moslem country--, while ignoring the
starving masses in largely Christian Ethiopia. The White House
communications director, George Stephanopoulos (the son of a
New Calendarist Greek Orthodox Priest), in speaking of American
aid to the starving people in the former Yugoslav Republics,
has directly linked U.S. responsibilities in Somalia and
Bosnia, though without mentioning the Islamic link and, in all
fairness, stressing that American aid to the hungry in Bosnia
should exclude no ethnic group. Nonetheless, Arab oil and
American interests are vital pieces in the puzzle of the
Christian West's support of European Moslem enclaves at the
cost of the condemnation of Christian Serbia.

Second, lurking in the shadows of contemporary politics is THE
NEW VATICAN, a political force strengthened by its calculatedly
benign image and increasingly powerful role in world affairs.
The same Vatican which has made its goal the absorption of the
Orthodox Church into Roman Catholicism and which tried to
establish a Greek Catholic presence in the former Yugoslavia by
supporting the creation of a Slavic "Macedonia," and then
denied these efforts--this is the Vatican which has much to
gain by the international denigration of the Orthodox Serbs. It
is also the Vatican which has much to lose if the true history
of the conflict between the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox
Serbs in the former Yugoslavia is ever told. By encouraging
portrayals of the Serbs as a new breed of Nazi, the Vatican and
the Catholic press hope to turn the world's attention away from
the Nazi State established in Croatia during World War II, a
state supported by the Vatican and--with the exception of some
very heroic but ineffective Croatian Catholic Churchmen--served
by Latin clergymen and a special contingent of Franciscan
"missionaries."

Forty years to the day after five hundred Orthodox men, women,
and children from the village of Previlovci were slaughtered in
1941 by the Croatian Ustashi (Nazis) and thrown into the
Golubinka Pit, a subterranean cave near Medjugorie, the Virgin
Mary began to appear to several Croatian Catholic peasants in
what has become a Franciscan center of international
pilgrimage. In astonishingly ecumenical messages, equating all
religions and setting aside the centrality of Christ, the
Medjugorie "Virgin" has forgotten the Serbs who were
slaughtered on this spot because they would not relinquish
their Orthodox Faith. Moreover, Croatia and the world have
forgotten that the Catholic State of Croatia, to quote
Holocaust historian Simon Wiesenthal, had a "criminal
character" which appalled "...even the Germans." The Vatican
and the Croatian leaders, however, have not lost their memories.
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, Croatian President Franjo
Tudjman, lacking a good public relations office, has said:
"Thank God my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew." The Vatican
has been more skillful. It has washed its hands of the blood of
hundreds of thousands of Serbians slaughtered in World War II
for refusing to convert to Catholicism, and now declares itself
an ecumenical center. (Comment:  It has learnt much since the
Inquisition.) Its initial condemnation of the apparition in
Medjugorie has given way to acceptance, since the message of
religious relativism--even a Virgin Mary who fails to preach
Christ!--is a good hedge against admitting that the Latin
Church has a history of intolerance that will not go away.

Let us add, incidentally, that when, several years ago,
thousands of the bodies of those slaughtered by the Ustashi
were recovered from hidden graves all over Bosnia, Croatia,
Herzegovina and other areas in the former Yugoslavia, the
Orthodox built shrines to house the bones of these martyrs,
including the relics of slaughtered Orthodox monks who were,
after long years in the pits of the earth, given a funeral
conducted by the Patriarch himself. All of these shrines,
including one monastery, have since been bulldozed by the
Croatians.

Finally, let us openly acknowledge that POLITICAL ECUMENISM has
played a great role in the rape of the Serbian people and the
defilement of our Faith. In an atmosphere of religious
relativism, we forget that Islam is a violent religion. Bosnian
President Alija Izetbegovic has said that, "...the Islamic
movement must...destroy the non-Islamic power. ...Turkey, as an
Islamic country, used to rule the world." Without excusing the
atrocities that even Christians commit in times of war and
conflict, would any Christian out of principle adhere to the
political tenets of Islam? No. Thus, the Christian West has a
moral responsibility to support the Christian heritage of the
Serbian people. The Vatican has a moral responsibility to
account for its past. And neither ecumenism nor moral
relativism nor an American and Western European need for oil
can change this!