An Orthodox Christian cemetery has been desecrated in a village in Kosovo, the Serbian government Office for Kosovo said in a press release on Thursday.

It said that tombstones and monuments in the graveyard in Zakovo outside the town of Istok had been vandalized and toppled, graves dug up and the remains in them removed. A vast majority of Serbs are Orthodox Christians while Albanians are mainly Moslem with some Christians (mainly Catholic).  

The press release said that desecration of Serb graveyards have been very frequent and added that there are virtually no Orthodox Christian cemeteries south of the Ibar river in Kosovo which have not been vandalized over the past 20 years. “Evidently, the hatred of chauvinists is so great that they are bothered even by dead Serbs. Despite the fact that we have been saying for years that a wide-ranging political and social campaign should be launched to root out chauvinism in Kosovo, that has not been done,” the press release said.  

“While Belgrade and Pristina are discussing the normalization of the situation on the ground, attacks like the one in Zakovo are painful testimony that the situation in Kosovo is far from normal,” it said.