SERBIAN ORTHODOX CLERGY TELL THEIR PEOPLE THE TRUTH

WASHINGTON -- We always wondered how it would all end, but now we are perhaps seeing how the awful drama of Serbia in the l990s will finally be resolved.

The key is to be found in the astonishing and welcome words of the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the aging Patriarch Pavle. Speaking on June 28 at the famous and sacred l4th-century monastery of Gracanica in Kosovo, he said that if Serbia could survive only through crime, then it should not survive at all.

"If the only way to create a greater Serbia is by crime," he said, "then I do not accept that, and let that Serbia disappear. And also if a lesser Serbia can only survive by crime, let it also disappear. And if all the Serbs had to die and only I remained and I could live only by crime, then I would not accept that. It would be better to die."

Bishop Artemije, the most senior representative of the church in Kosovo, and a man who has been blisteringly critical of the West, spoke even more compellingly as he called the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, now responsible for more than 300,000 deaths in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and his own beloved Serbia, "the root of all evil." Then, repeating their call of three weeks ago, the Serbian church fathers pleaded again with Milosevic to resign. They also proclaimed that these messages would be preached from every church in Serbia this coming Sunday.

It all sounds good, and it is good, because the terrible conflicts that Serbia unleashed across southeastern Europe the past eight years, and the frightful demons that it has loosed within itself, can be truly settled in only a moral way. Serbia today is not merely one cynical man trying to manipulate the world; Serbia today is a people, like the Nazis in l945, who can find practical salvation only through moral means.

Yet, until now, as the Serbian people continue to deny what they have done, and what they have at the very least actively countenanced, and as they blame the world for their eternal "victimization," those means have simply not been present. Indeed, it has seemed, given the lethal combination of Milosevic's total control of the media and his mesmerization of his people with dreams of lost glories of the Great Serbian People, that a breakthrough might never come.

Even so, the story is not so simple, for along with their truth-telling to the Serbian people, these clergymen are telling some truth to themselves. Indeed, the very key to what is now developing lies, as in so much of the historical drama of Serbia, in the very place where the church leaders conducted their Orthodox mass last week. It was said on the legendary Field of Blackbirds, where the Serbs fought to the death in l389 against Muslim occupiers. Indeed, the day marked the 6l0th anniversary of the defeat, which the Serbs have over the centuries transmogrified in their minds into a great victory.

As historian Branimir Anzulovic describes in his perceptive book, "Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide," it was the ecclesiastically independent Serbian Orthodox Church that came to express "the ethos of the Serbian people to such a degree that nationality and religion fused into a distinctive 'Serbian faith.'" In short, the church was, for most of Serbia's history, the vehicle for passing down the religious-nationalistic passions that Milosevic in the l980s and '90s drew upon, exaggerated, and ultimately so grotesquely perverted.

The church had been relieved of many of its properties under Yugoslavia's communist reign, and so, in the beginning, church leaders strongly supported Milosevic in his nationalism. (He promised to return confiscated church properties; being Milosevic, he never did.)

Thus, the church is in some ways speaking to itself and to its own past. It is that process, both secular and sacred, both practical and profoundly moral, that has finally awakened the church as the major force for truth and for change.

Indeed, the same bishop, Amfilohije Radovic, who in the early '90s cheered Milosevic's wars of "self-determination" in Croatia and in Bosnia, last week proclaimed: "Milosevic is mad." The saga of Kosovo had become not the truth of a long-suffering Serbian people, but a "false myth of Kosovo." But then the bishop gave a warning that should be taken very seriously indeed. Milosevic, he said, "has a suicidal spirit, and terrible things happen if a suicidal spirit infects a whole people."

For along with this moral struggle stirring within Serbia, Milosevic still has l00,000 men under arms. He is ever more captured by the worst elements, the radical Serb nationalist paramilitaries and psychopathic criminals who fight with them. They will be destroyed if he falls. He himself cannot leave the country without facing trial as a war criminal, so he too is increasingly cornered.

Charismatic dictators like Milosevic, in their last breaths, find themselves driven to act out and repeat their myths and their pasts. Not only is the Kosovo myth of the Field of Blackbirds essentially suicidal, but both of Milosevic's parents were suicides.

Could Serbia, in place of the Orthodox Church's welcome moves toward redemption, still end in some kind of Armageddon unleashed by this man?

The choices are stark and, after last week, coming ever closer.