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When Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Djuric accused Kosovo’s authorities of targeting “Christian Serbs on the holiest night of the Orthodox calendar,” he was not responding to a single set of policing incidents.
He was advancing a familiar and deliberate framing—one that recasts administrative disputes and governance failures as evidence of religious persecution.
That distinction matters. Allegations of religious repression are among the gravest claims a state official can make.
They require precision, evidence, and proportionality. What Djuric offered instead was narrative escalation: a shift from law and institutions to faith and identity, obscuring facts and hardening positions at a moment when normalization demands the opposite.
The incidents cited by Djuric unfolded on Orthodox Christmas Eve in North Mitrovica and Gracanica. In North Mitrovica, Kosovo Police temporarily intervened to prevent the placement of a banner bearing a traditional Orthodox Christmas greeting. The banner was later returned and installed.
In Gracanica, police briefly stopped citizens returning from a Badnji dan ritual and asked them to remove T-shirts with religious inscriptions.
The shirts were returned. No arrests were made. No violence occurred. No church service was interrupted.
These facts are not in dispute. What is disputed is their meaning.
What did not happen is equally important. There was no ban on Orthodox worship. No prohibition of religious symbols under Kosovo law. No interruption of liturgies or religious rites. A campaign of religious persecution does not reverse itself within hours, nor does it leave intact the legal framework protecting freedom of belief and expression.
Kosovo’s Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights guarantee freedom of religion and expression.
Police authority to intervene arises only where expression is linked to concrete risks: incitement, imminent threats to public order, or unlawful conduct. In these cases, the problem was not the absence of those protections but the way policing discretion was exercised.
Kosovo Police fell short in three areas. First, legal articulation: orders were reportedly enforced without clear reference to the legal basis at the point of action. Second, proportionality: measures later reversed within hours raise legitimate questions about initial necessity. Third, communication: inconsistent explanations created confusion and mistrust.
These are governance and capacity issues—not evidence of religious hostility. Conflating the two is analytically false and politically reckless.
Djuric’s statement relies less on what it says than on what it leaves out. It omits that lawful expression ultimately prevailed. It omits Kosovo’s constitutional protections. It omits the presence of KFOR, EULEX, OSCE, and UNMIK—institutions that monitor security, policing, courts, and elections in one of the most internationally supervised territories in Europe.
Instead, Kosovo is presented as an information vacuum, a space without witnesses, where only Belgrade can see clearly. This rhetorical move is not accidental. A narrative that erases independent verification elevates political assertion into presumed fact.
Djuric also pointed to an incident in Prizren, alleging that a “political activist disguised as a priest” attempted to disrupt or desecrate Orthodox celebrations. The reference is intended to reinforce a broader claim of religious hostility. The facts, however, point elsewhere.
The episode involved Nikolla Xhufka, a religious figure whose status is contested within Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchies.
That internal dispute is not the relevant legal issue. Under Kosovo law and European human rights standards, individuals and groups are free to define their religious identity and conduct religious rites regardless of canonical recognition. Non-recognition by established churches does not render religious activity illegal.
Crucially, the Prizren episode does not support claims of state repression of Orthodoxy. Public Orthodox rites—including open, symbolically charged ceremonies in shared civic spaces—proceeded without police interference.
No service was banned. No ritual was halted. Where authorities intervened elsewhere, it concerned questions of conduct and public order, not belief. Conflating the two collapses a legal boundary European democracies are required to uphold.
The attempt to portray Albin Kurti as pursuing an anti-Christian agenda also runs into a basic credibility problem: it does not withstand minimal scrutiny of either personal reality or institutional record.
Kurti has been married for more than a decade to Rita Augestad Knudsen, a Norwegian national from a country shaped by a long Christian tradition and a senior researcher at Norway’s leading foreign-policy institute.
This is not offered as a political argument, nor should it be overstated. It illustrates a broader point: claims of ideological hostility toward Christianity require a level of abstraction that ignores obvious personal and social facts.
More importantly, Kurti’s governments have operated within—and upheld—a constitutional framework that explicitly guarantees freedom of religion and protects all religious communities, including the Serbian Orthodox Church. Churches function openly. Religious rites proceed without prohibition.
Faith is not regulated by the state. Whatever criticisms may be directed at policing decisions or institutional execution, there is no evidence of a governing agenda directed against Christianity as such.
The persistence of the “anti-Christian” label therefore reflects narrative construction rather than policy analysis. It substitutes caricature for evidence and identity for conduct.
For international audiences, this distinction matters: credibility is cumulative, and sweeping allegations that disregard institutional safeguards weaken the seriousness of legitimate concerns raised elsewhere.
The most consequential aspect of Djuric’s framing is not its inaccuracy but its method. By collapsing faith, ethnicity, and political loyalty into a single identity—“Christian Serbs” under siege—Serbia transforms negotiable governance issues into moral absolutes. Administrative errors become acts of desecration. Correctable institutional failures are recast as civilizational attacks.
This is not about protecting Orthodoxy. Orthodox worship in Kosovo continues openly, publicly, and lawfully. It is about using religion as a shield against scrutiny and as leverage in a political dispute over sovereignty and authority.
The effect is to narrow the space for compromise. Once conflict is cast as religious, law becomes secondary and accountability suspect. Dialogue survives rhetorically, but resolution is deferred structurally.
Kosovo’s responsibility is clear. Police require better operational guidance, stronger language and context training in mixed-ethnic environments, and stricter standards of legal explanation at the point of enforcement.
Errors must be corrected early and openly.
Serbia’s responsibility is equally clear. Serious allegations demand evidence, not absolutes. Governance disputes should be addressed as legal and institutional questions, not elevated into religious indictments.
For international partners, it is also worth recalling that claims of religious persecution derive their force not from rhetoric, but from consistency. Freedom of religion is a reciprocal obligation under European legal and political norms, not a selective instrument to be deployed across borders.
When faith is invoked as a shield for political objectives, its protective function is weakened everywhere—including within the states that advance such claims.
Faith deserves protection. It does not deserve conscription into political warfare. Kosovo’s future will be shaped by law, institutions, and accountability—not by the instrumentalization of belief.
This article was first published on the Kosovo Dispatch website.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Türkiye Today.
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