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   On Palm Sunday morning in Kraljevo I was glad at least to visit an Orthodox Church. I then spent a fascinating hour or so in its National Museum, where a lady with excellent English showed me around. Besides expertly curated older artefacts of the type one might expect, there was considerable focus on the 20^th century. One of the things I hadn’t realised was that during the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, tens of thousands of Serb refugees were forced from their homes in western areas and massed in exactly the same places as they had during World War II; it was essentially a rerun of that dreadful conflict. Another section included reproductions of some of the exquisite frescoes lost when 155 of Kosovo’s churches and monasteries, many of them UNESCO World Heritage sites, were gutted or destroyed by Nato’s Albanian Muslim allies following the withdrawal of Serb forces in June 1999. Memorable too were remnants of a Nato shell which once contained depleted uranium, known to have carcinogenic and other horrifying long-term health implications for civilians, including foetal deformities. Had Allan Little visited Kraljevo’s National Museum and been shown around by this lady in early 2000, I’m sure he would have had second or even third thoughts about calling his documentary ‘Moral [sic] Combat: Nato at War’.[1]  

   At a café in Vrbo along the road from there two friendly 20-somethings paid for my herbal infusion (and joked about the tea which had magic properties when Asterix went to Britain), and I was given a delicious free pastry at a café in Novo Selo. After midnight and fairly exhausted I was generously welcomed by the Russophile manager of a very inexpensive hotel, occupying the top floors of a tower block in Trstenik. Next day I gratefully accepted a plateful of free French fries in a café restaurant at Stopanje on the way to Krucevac.  

   In Serbia, reckoning my money was potentially quite useful to the local populace, I generally stayed in hotels, which did not by and large put my finances under excessive strain. At the Hotel Rubin in Krucevac I was able to watch CNN in my room, featuring a typically shrill and half-baked report about a "crisis" in the Catholic Church (as diagnosed by trendy media types in the newsrooms of at least three western capitals). On the following day a Serbian gentleman in Gaglovo who invited me to sit down for a cup of coffee in his garden turned out to be more sceptical than I was about the unjust victimisation of his country. Later I visited a diminutive chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist, praying for his help in order that I might observe the Easter Triduum in a worthy manner. That night I slept well in a disused public building on the way to Zitkovac, then on the next afternoon I was brought another very welcome coffee by a couple at Donyi Trnava. From there I made my way onto and along a busier road which leads to Niš, stopping for a comfortable night at the Hotel "Kosovka".

   On Maundy Thursday morning I arrived in the ancient city of Niš, birthplace in around 272AD of Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor.[2] I visited the city’s concentration camp, now a museum, where around 1000 victims of Hitler’s death cult perished. Upstairs it was bewildering to be presented with the inhumanity of barbed wire laid on the floor of solitary confinement cells, to prevent sleep. As an antidote to that experience, the beautifully painted interior of the Orthodox Cathedral testified to a vibrant, living Christian tradition. Then on the eastern outskirts of Niš I came to another sombre spectacle, called the Skull Tower. In the early 19th century the skulls of several hundred Serb soldiers, killed in battle, were turned into this disquieting monument by the Ottomans. It now serves as a reminder to Serbs…

“…of the value of [their] independence … showing them the true price their fathers had to pay for it.”[3]

   From there I made my way into more mountainous terrain again, spending the night under a bridge on the edge of a place called Ostrovica. Next morning I was very glad to be able to join a Good Friday service at the Monastery of Sveti Petka, where the singing was beautiful and the priest was actually tearful as he exhorted worshippers to observe the customary fast. My confession here is that I had started my fast at 6 o’clock on the previous evening, so later on, having been "abducted" by friendly and high-spirited young Serbs and taken by car a few miles off-route to a village called Ponor, I felt it would be rude not to join them for a few beers. The driver then very kindly put me up in his family home, so I was glad in the morning to be able to give his mother a small bag of chocolate Easter eggs which my mother had sent to Medjugorje with the kilt. As it was Holy Saturday[4] I decided to wear this again, though I got the impression my host, showing me his quintessentially Serbian World War II-era šajkača cap, took it for a skirt. Anxious therefore to spare me unnecessary embarrassment, he wanted to take me by car all the way to the Bulgarian border; but I persuaded him to let me out in Pirot, the next town – still a saving of eleven or twelve kilometres.  

   In the early evening I reached Dimitrovgrad, very near to the Bulgarian frontier. An Orthodox church I found was closed, but it seemed a nice gesture when, after explaining to a lady in the forecourt that I was a pilgrim and mentioning too that I was Catholic, she nonetheless spontaneously brought me a cup of water – please God, may she not lose her reward![5]  

   On Palm Sunday, on the road from Kraljevo, I found a Serbian flag, which I kept. I was left with the impression that, precisely because Serbs are the nicest people in the Balkans, they were the ones on whom it was easiest to pin the blame.

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[1] “Nato has proved that more or less it can do what it wants, where it wants, indeed when it wants.” Sky News correspondent Tim Marshall reporting from Belgrade during Nato’s bombardment of Yugoslavia, April 1999

“At this time the media in the USA was applying pressure for military intervention in Kosovo. The USA evidently also wanted to establish a precedence for NATO’s military engagement outside of a UN mandate.” (my emphasis) Heinz Loquai, retired. Br.Gen. of German armed forces and assistant to the German representation to the OSCE in Vienna, in the "Blättern für deutsche und internationale Politik", September 1999.

The following is excerpted from a 23 May 1999 Chicago Tribune article by Walter J. Rockler, a Washington lawyer who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.

War Crimes Law Applies To U.s. Too

“We have engaged in a flagrant military aggression, ceaselessly attacking a small country primarily to demonstrate that we run the world. The rationale that we are simply enforcing international morality, even if it were true, would not excuse the military aggression and widespread killing that it entails. It also does not lessen the culpability of the authors of this aggression.

As a primary source of international law, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the 1945-1946 case of the major Nazi war criminals is plain and clear. Our leaders often invoke and praise that judgment, but obviously have not read it. The International Court declared:

‘To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’

At Nuremberg, the United States and Britain pressed the prosecution of Nazi leaders for planning and initiating aggressive war. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the American prosecution staff, asserted "that launching a war of aggression is a crime and that no political or economic situation can justify it." He also declared that "if certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

The United Nations Charter views aggression similarly. Articles 2(4) and (7) prohibit interventions in the domestic jurisdiction of any country and threats of force or the use of force by one state against another. The General Assembly of the UN in Resolution 2131, "Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention," reinforced the view that a forceful military intervention in any country is aggression and a crime without justification.

Putting a "NATO" label on aggressive policy and conduct does not give that conduct any sanctity. This is simply a perversion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed as a defensive alliance under the UN Charter. The North Atlantic Treaty pledged its signatories to refrain from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations, and it explicitly recognized "the primary responsibility of the Security Council (of the United Nations) for the maintenance of international peace and security." Obviously, in bypassing UN approval for the current bombing, the U.S. and NATO have violated this basic obligation.” 

[2] On May 7th 1999, in one of the clearest specific instances of a war crime in Nato’s humanitarian murder spree, Niš Constantine the Great (civilian) Airport was the intended target of cluster bombs which were blown off-course and landed in residential areas. 16 ordinary citizens including an expectant mother with her unborn baby lost their lives and dozens more were wounded.

[3] French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine, writing in the 1830s when Niš was still part of the Ottoman Empire.

[4] In “A Freedom Within: The Prison Notes of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski”, the Primate of post-war Poland observed that on the first Holy Saturday, with Our Lord having descended to the dead and St Peter laid low by guilt and sorrow over his three-fold denial, Our Lady was de facto Head of the Church. The Polish nation in the person of Mieszko I is also traditionally believed to have been baptised on Holy Saturday, 14 April 966AD, and Cardinal Wyszynski’s episcopacy was largely defined by his heroic efforts to mobilise Polish Catholics to celebrate the Millennium of Polish Christianity in 1966.

[5] “And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Mt 10:42)