Serbia’s top academic says Pristina’s letter to UNESCO a provocation

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The head of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) Vladimir Kostic told N1 on Monday that the letter sent by the Kosovo authorities demanding that UNESCO remove three Serbian Orthodox Christian monasteries and a church from the list of endangered monuments is a provocation.

“I can’t take any other view of it except as a provocation. It reminds me of a play in which a man is told to apologize to the man who beat him up for beating him up,” the SANU President said.

He said that the Kosovo government is trying to say that everything is fine and well over there. “I see that as a provocation at this time. I don’t know those people but their actions, words, the fact that they are claiming our pearls as theirs even though they are mankind’s pearls. That is a problem that cannot be resolved politically. We have to be interested in that story. There is identity and our identity is not just the past,” Kostic said.

He said that a framework should be set up to discuss cultural heritage, adding that cultural heritage can’t be discussed without the church because it owns it and because it was the institution that rallied people. “What’s strange in this story is that its view is being ignored, it has to be asked,” Kostic said.