OSCE chief visits Decani after protected zone roadworks

Ambassador Gerard McGurk, head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Mission in Kosovo, spent July 31 at the Visoki Decani monastery, where he met separately with Abbot Sava Janjic and with the mayor of Decani, Bashkim Ramosaj. The visit came days after the Raska-Prizren Diocese reported that heavy machinery had entered the monastery’s Special Protective Zone again.

In a statement issued after the visit, the OSCE Mission said both meetings pointed to “the importance of preserving cultural and religious heritage within existing legal frameworks, advancing constructive dialogue and maintaining effective channels of communication”. With Ramosaj, the ambassador discussed closer cooperation at the local level and support for heritage initiatives. With Janjic, the subject was the latest developments around the protected zone itself.

What the diocese reported

The Raska-Prizren Diocese said on July 29 that work had started roughly two kilometers west of the monastery, inside the zone protected by law. According to that account, heavy trucks were delivering large quantities of crushed stone while construction machinery spread and leveled the material along an existing track, the one tied to the Decani-Plav transit corridor.

The diocese says it received no advance notice, was shown no design documentation, and that the Church’s consent was never sought. Its assessment is that the scale of the job goes well beyond what counts as routine, limited road maintenance.

The legal instrument the diocese invokes is Law No. 03/L-039 on special protective zones. It bans transit roads through rural protective zones such as the one around Decani, and it makes road construction or reconstruction conditional on prior consultation with the Serbian Orthodox Church and its approval.

The municipality calls it two days of patching

Ramosaj rejected that reading. In his account there was no road construction at all, only two days of maintenance that has since been completed. He listed the work as:

• patching potholes along the existing track
• clearing grass and undergrowth from the verges
• sweeping away dust and loose debris

The mayor also said the municipality had done similar jobs on that stretch before, by arrangement with the abbot. The phrase he used for the substance of the work was “patching potholes”, a description that sits a long way from the one coming out of the monastery.

Why does the same scene keep repeating since 2018?

Because the deal meant to close it was never fully applied. A November 2020 agreement, endorsed by Kosovo officials and by European Union and OSCE representatives, provided for an international bypass built outside the Special Protective Zone, with only strictly limited upkeep of the local road inside it. As the diocese reads that document, it gives nobody a mandate for unilateral work.

The diocese says the agreement has gone unhonored for six years. Comparable attempts on the same track were made in 2018 and in 2020, and both were halted after international representatives intervened. We reported earlier on machinery entering the monastery zone for the third time, and the OSCE mission chief’s visit is the first move on that file to arrive from an international address.

Visoki Decani is on the UNESCO World Heritage List and is the only religious site in Kosovo under permanent KFOR protection. That status is why any excavator entering the belt around the monastery turns into a diplomatic file within hours rather than staying a municipal one.

The visit left the dispute exactly where it stood. The municipality maintains the job is finished, the diocese is still asking for documentation and consent it never received, and the OSCE statement named no concrete next step and no deadline. On present form, the next check on that track will come only when the machinery returns.