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Prince Lazar were part of the run-up to the commemoration in 1989<br />

of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. The commemoration<br />

took place simultaneously with a commemoration at Lazarica<br />

Church in Dalmatian Kosovo, an occasion used to rehabilitate the<br />

Chetnik movement.<br />

The spc had become involved in interpreting the events in<br />

Kosovo both inside Serbia and beyond its borders as early as 1982,<br />

when an appeal to “protect the spiritual and biological being of the<br />

Serb people in Kosovo and Metohija” was signed by twenty-one<br />

priests. 120 At the end of 1983, Atanasije Jeftić published “From Kosovo<br />

to Jadovno,” which dealt with the suffering of the Serbian people<br />

in Yugoslavia. In 1990, the spc Assembly requested the exploration<br />

of pits into which Serbs had been thrown during World War II in<br />

order to recover the remains and bury them properly. Funeral services<br />

commemorating victims of the genocide were held in Bosnia<br />

and Croatia throughout 1990 and 1991. These events were widely covered<br />

by all media establishments. The object of the campaign was to<br />

agitate the Serbs in Croatia by serving them a stereotype of Croats<br />

as a genocidal nation. The spc stressed that a new, up-to-date Nacertanije<br />

was needed to define the frontiers of the new Serbian state<br />

within its ethnic borders, so that no one could make concessions and<br />

thus betray national interests. 121<br />

The Serbs in Croatia were assigned a special role to play in the<br />

anti-bureaucratic revolution. In a July 1990 supplement to the magazine<br />

Duga bearing the title “Serbs in Croatia,” academician and historian<br />

Vasilije Krestić wrote:<br />

The unchanging values to which the Serb people in Croatia, Slavonia,<br />

and Dalmatia have adhered during their life together with the<br />

Croats could be summarized in the fact that they care above all at all<br />

120 Pravoslavlje, 1982 .<br />

121 Miroslav Radovanović, M .A ., Glas crkve, 19-VII, 1991 .<br />

101<br />

ChApter 1

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