In Easter message, Serbian Patriarch Porfirije calls for unity

BELGRADE - The Serbs are a Christian nation of the Golgotha and the Resurrection and Kosovo-Metohija is where our cradle and our home and our living and our deceased are, Serbian Patriarch Porfirije said on Friday in his Easter message, pointing out absolute untruths and an unprecedented historical revisionism aimed at declaring, by simple inversion, the Serbs - the victims of multiple genocides and ethnic cleansing - as those who have committed genocide.

In the message, the patriarch called for unity among the people.

"We are accomplishing our unity as a people under the omophorion of Saint Sava, in the Church of Christ, the Living God, whose Crucifixion and Resurrection the Orthodox Serbs are going through and iconising in their passage through history," he noted.

"We are not diminishing the scale of the Srebrenica crime but, as Orthodox Serbs, we also do not remain silent in the face of crimes against our people in the vicinity of Srebrenica, in which entire families were rooted out and which were going on continuously between 1992 and 1995," the patriarch said, noting that proposers of resolutions were turning a blind eye to crimes against Serbs.

"In their view, there is an exclusive right to being a victim and to the resulting pain. In our view, all innocent victims are innocent victims, be they Muslim, Croat or Serb victims, which contemporary revisionists and enemies of the historical truth 'wisely' remain silent about, leaving a stumbling block for the future to all of us who live in this territory by imposing an exclusive right to pain and victimhood," he said.

Noting that the Serbs had also taken the cross of Christ in WWI, becoming the world's most suffering nation by population size, Patriarch Porfirije said that "our cross-bearing passage also continued in WWII, when camps were set up in the infamous, disgraceful Independent State of Croatia even for our children, who were dying of starvation, cold, diseases and abuse."

It was only in occupied Serbia that, in a single day, swathes of schoolchildren were killed after classes by Nazi German machine gun bullets, he noted.

"We suffered in every hamlet, every village and every city. The truthfulness of that suffering did not need to be confirmed by imposed amoral resolutions," the patriarch added.

"Regrettably, the world we live in has forgotten the genocide against Serbs in the 20th century and the centuries that preceded it", he noted.

"Kosovo-Metohija is both our cradle and our home," ha also said.

"Kosovo-Metohija, Old Serbia, is where our living and our deceased are. There are no dead. We are a Church of the living. We are a Christian nation of the Golgotha and the Resurrection," the patriarch said in the message, noting that Kosovo-Metohija was where "our past, present and future intertwine."

"Let's pray and always be with our suffering brothers and sisters in Kosovo-Metohija, who are a living expression of hope, love, longevity and endurance," he said, adding that Kosovo-Metohija Serbs were targeted by violence just for being Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Serbs and for "being themselves on their own soil."

"They live in so-called peace - in 'peace' in which there is no freedom, in 'peace' where there is just fear and injustice," Patriarch Porfirije noted.