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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Kosovo, anxiety over the activities of Bin Ladin supporters has led
American diplomats to entrench themselves behind high, thick walls
observing exceptional security measures at their embassies and other
diplomatic facilities.
At the end of March, a group of Saudi "aid workers" was rousted by
UN police from a building in Prishtina, accused of surveilling foreign
vehicles, presumably in preparation for a terrorist attack. A representa–
tive of the Saudis, one Al Hadi, complained that the telephone in the
building where they resided had been tapped.
The upshot of this situation was visible in the first week of April,
when Prishtina saw a spectacle unheard of in Sarajevo. A massive fun–
damentalist "cultural program" was held in the local sports stadium to
celebrate the beginning of the Muslim new year. Thousands of Albanian
Muslims, young and old, walked away from the event happily clutching
works in Albanian that professed Wahhabi fanaticism.
In
May, the famil–
iar Saudi Joint Relief Committee laid the foundation of a multimillion
dollar cultural, sports, and religious center in the Kosovo capital.
Is there a solution to this problem? Surely there is, but it is ignored
by the foreign authorities in Kosovo. Albanians in the region include a
considerable Catholic minority, with a distinguished cultural legacy, as
well as thousands of followers of heterodox Islamic sects such as the
Bektashis, who drink alcohol and follow a kind of Islamic Unitarianism.
In
the city of Gjakova/Djakovica, for example, Bektashis and
Catholics far outnumber Sunni Muslims. Both the former groups merit
assistance in such matters as education, care of orphans, and the recon–
struction of destroyed religious architecture. But the foreigners pay no
attention to such details. They contemptuously dismiss the Catholics as
too few, and know nothing of the Bektashis. Somewhere down the
road, however, the consequences of such cultural obliviousness could
be disastrous.
