The local mayor, Bashkim Ramosaj, an ally of Mr. Haradinaj, resisted returning the land to the monastery, challenging a 2016 decision by the Kosovo Constitutional Court that the territory claimed by Father Sava must be returned. The mayor, who declined to be interviewed, told local media that he would rather go to jail than obey the decision and hand over the territory.
The land, 60 acres of farms and forests outside the monastery walls, belonged to the church until 1946, when it was taken over by the Socialist government of Yugoslavia.
In the 1990s, the remains of a ruined Yugoslav state returned the land after the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic, an atheist communist official who metamorphosed into a champion of Serbian nationalism and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
While the ethnic Albanians who took shelter in the monastery during the war support the monks, the abbot said, their political leaders often see the land dispute “as a continuation of their war against Serbia, as if we were prosecutors for Milosevic, who we are. no.”
The court’s decision that confirmed the monastery’s land claim, he added, “was not a decision by Milosevic, but a decision by the highest court in Kosovo.”
The slow pace of implementation of the court’s ruling has increasingly exasperated the United States, which sent warplanes to attack Milosevic’s troops in Kosovo in 1999 and broke their grip on the territory.
The case of the monastery over its lands, Philip S. Kosnett, the American ambassador, warned in a recent statement, “it is not about ethnicity, politics or religion; these are property rights and respect for the law. “