Serbian Patriarch Porfirije has once again used a religious platform to deliver politically charged and inflammatory rhetoric, this time during his Easter address, targeting Kosovo and its Albanian population.
In his speech, Porfirije referred to the so-called “suffering” of Serbs in Kosovo, blaming Albanian local authorities for allegedly expelling Serbs from their homes and persecuting those who remain. He framed Kosovo as “sacred Serbian territory”, invoking Serbian Orthodox martyrs, churches, and monasteries, without acknowledging Serbia’s history of war crimes in the region.
“An example of this is the ‘suffering’ of our people in Kosovo at the hands of Albanian ‘local authorities’ who are ‘expelling’ Serbs from their centuries-old homes and persecuting those who remain—aiming to build their own state on sacred Serbian land,” said Porfirije. He added that peace and mutual respect were preferable, despite earlier incendiary remarks.
However, his comments ignore key historical facts. During the Kosovo war, more than 800,000 Albanians were forcibly displaced by Serbian forces, and over 10,000 civilians were killed. To this day, the fate of around 1,600 missing persons remains unknown.
Kosovar officials and human rights advocates have condemned the Patriarch’s remarks, calling them a distortion of history and an attempt to whitewash Serbian war crimes committed under the regime of Slobodan Milošević, often referred to as the “Butcher of the Balkans.”
