The local mayor, Bashkim Ramosaj, an ally of Mr. Haradinaj, resisted giving the monastery no land back, and challenged a ruling by the Kosovo Constitutional Court in 2016 that the area claimed by Father Sava should be returned. The mayor, who did not want to be questioned, told local media that he would rather go to jail than surrender and surrender the ruling territory.
The land, 60 hectares of agricultural land and forest outside the monastery walls, belonged to the church until 1946, when it was seized by the socialist government of Yugoslavia.
In the 1990s, the remnants of a disintegrated Yugoslav state returned the country to the rise of the power of Slobodan Milosevic, an atheist communist functionary who had become a proponent of Serbian nationalism and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
While the ethnic Albanians hiding in the monastery during the war quietly support the monks, the abbot said, their political leaders often view the land dispute ‘as a continuation of their war against Serbia, as if we were Milosevic’s proxies, which we is not. ”
The court ruling confirming the monastery’s land claim, he added, “was not a Milosevic decision, but a decision by the highest court in Kosovo.”
The footsteps in the execution of the court ruling increasingly upset the United States, which sent warplanes to attack Milosevic’s troops in Kosovo in 1999 and severed its grip on the area.
The monastery’s case over his country, US Ambassador Philip S. Kosnett warned in a recent statement, “is not about ethnicity, politics or religion; it is about property rights and respect for the law.”