Analysis of the Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies “OCTOPUS”
In 2020, construction began on the so-called Holy Trinity Church in Nakëll, Peja, a small church surrounded by several old cemeteries and with an exit to the village’s main street.
The land on which the church is located is not surrounded by impenetrable defenses and can be entered by anyone who wishes to do so.
The building is not easily recognizable as a religious building (there is no Orthodox cross) and until recently it was used as a shelter for drug addicts, transients and the homeless.
Given the escalation of the situation due to the hybrid war, Serbia has undertaken to paint some graffiti on this religious building and to hold the Albanians responsible for these actions.
The OCTOPUS Institute has carefully analyzed the inscriptions on the interior walls of the church and also analyzed in detail the surrounding situation and the security situation between Kosovo and Serbia.
After these analyses, we come to the following conclusions:
According to photo No. 2, when analyzing the word “Allahu Akbar” we find significant spelling errors, which prove that the person who wrote this graffiti has little knowledge of the Albanian language, that is, for the main manuscript he has Serbian language in Cyrillic letters and also, has no knowledge of the Islamic religion.
Muslims do not write the word “AKbar” with capital letters, and even the last letter is still capitalized, which is similar to the psychological learning to write letters in the form of Cyrillic letters. Due to the non-comparison with Allah, Muslims do not capitalize Akbar either, and these two words contradict each other.
The sentence at the top of the same picture has even more problems, as it actually says: “Islani është feju(y) e votme e Vertet”. (“Islam is the true faith”). So it doesn’t say “Islami” but “Islani”, then the author who didn’t know the Albanian language didn’t know how to write the word “religion” and wrote “feju(y)”, so author didn’t know the right word, Author didn’t know how to write the letter “a” at the end. Since the author did not know the Albanian language, author also did not know how to write the word “vetme” and wrote “votme”. In the end, the author also wrote the word “truth” as “vertet”, starting with a capital letter and the same one who put the letter “ë” in the word “is” did not know how to put the same letter in the word “vertet”.
In photo number 3 we can see even more arguments that the people who wrote the graffiti were not Albanians, that they did not know the Albanian language and that his main handwriting is also the Serbian language with Cyrillic letters.
So author started at the beginning of the sentence with the letter “C”, which in Serbian Cyrillic is understood as the letter “S”, then made a renotation and tried to harmonize it with the Albanian letter “S”, but was not successful. Similarly, the letter “j” is written without a dot above the letter, just as the letter “i” is written without a dot above the word “church”. Similarly, the word “we love” begins with a capital “D”, with a “j” without a period, and the word “xhami” is written as “gjami”, and only this last word is known to all Muslims, regardless of their level of education or not, how to spell correctly. So this shows that in photo 3 there is also a second person who writes graffiti on the walls and also has the Serbian language with Cyrillic letters as his main language. The photo also tried to become a symbol of the author’s failure.
In the photo we can also see a working shovel that was placed or restored after the graffiti was written. As you can see, the shovel was not used by the craftsmen working there, as the craftsmen did not leave their tools dirty due to damage.
In photo number 4, we notice a new manuscript in which we can talk about the third person who was involved in writing the graffiti and who also has no knowledge of the Albanian language. They actually wanted to write “Remove this church from here, there are only Muslims here”, but in reality failed and revealed itself and the purpose of the graffiti in the strongest terms.
The person did not know how to write a single word in the correct form, but authors handwriting also betrays them by showing that author can write in Cyrillic letters and very little in Latin letters and even less in the Albanian language. As for the word “church”, author didn’t even know how to spell it correctly in Albanian, but even the letter “s” looked more like Cyrillic letters.
Similarly, the manuscript betrayed the word “ka” by deviating to the second letter in the form of Cyrillic letters.
In photo number 5, we have mistakes in the word “ALLAHU”, because the letter “LL” does not exist in the Serbian language, so the author did not know how to write it correctly, and deviated from the spelling of “II” with two capital letters “I” in the Albanian language or two lowercase letters “l”, which, however, are in contrast to the other capital letters. As for the word “Ekbar”, we also have many testimonies, where in photo number 1 we saw that the same word was written with the letter “A”, in photo number 5 with “E”, which does not resemble the letters in Albanian language, but with these Cyrillic letters and at the end the word ends with a thick, meaningless black line.
On photo number 5 we also notice that there are keys on the door, that the door can only be opened by responsible persons and that the door was not opened by force but in a normal way.
If it had been written by Albanians, the door would have been opened more forcibly, or the graffiti would have been written outside the walls of the church, as the Albanians have no one to be afraid of when they write such graffiti. But it was written by the Serbs who had the permission and the cels to go and paint the graffiti, along with the instructions on what to do and how to behave, and they could not write the graffiti on the outside walls because otherwise they would be discovered first by the passers-by.
In all the photos we notice that there were at least five people who do not know the Albanian language and do not have it as their main language and also do not know the Albanian script, and we confirm that the authors are from the Serbian community (not necessarily from Kosovo) and four of these people wrote the graffiti and one was the guard.
The purpose of graffiti
This graffiti emerges after the strong Serbian involvement in the hybrid war against Kosovo in the security and political field.
The factors that produced this graffiti for propaganda against Kosovo in the international arena and among the Serbian population are:
Denial of entry of Serbian Patriarch Pofirije to Kosovo.
Campaign against Kosovo for membership in the Council of Europe.
The issue of banning the illegal use of the dinar in Kosovo.
The question of granting the Serbs association, namely autonomy.
Finding weapons in the north of Kosovo.
Serbia has made these issues part of the hybrid war against Kosovo and uses them constantly, now also using the expansion of interethnic tensions and “attacks on Serbs” in other regions of the Republic of Kosovo.
The current President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, at the time when he was Minister of Propaganda in the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, had the task of collecting various cases in which he is also known as Serbian Gebels. Today, he continues this ability even when he himself is running Serbia’s institutions as an autocrat.
It is argued that the graffiti issue is all the more an issue for the Serbian government because in Serbia all but two media outlets are controlled and it would thus succeed in using graffiti to create propaganda to evoke victimization among internationals and chauvinism among the Serbian people. For this reason, it is no coincidence, that the Serbian people elected the Minister of Information, Dejan Ristic, who even before his appointment as Minister had already been responsible for creating a feeling of victimization, genocide and chauvinistic nationalization among Serbs among students, teachers and the Serbian people.
As the world knows, Serbian politicians in the past have made such acts even ruder in collaboration with the Serbian secret service, accusing the Albanians of justifying their actions after the fact.
Worth mentioning is the “Panda” case in Peja, in which several young people of Serbian nationality were killed in a café in 1998. Several Albanians were charged and sentenced by the special police for this case. The paramilitary group “Red Berets” immediately took revenge on other innocent Albanians with murder, torture, violence, imprisonment, looting and various abuses.
In 2013, Aleksandër Vucic himself publicly admitted that this ugly crime was committed by the Serbian security institutions themselves, members of the special police and Serbian criminals who were on duty at the time, but as an action it was planned by the Serbian “UDBA”.
While after the terrorist attack in Banjska in September 2023, it was proven that Vucic’s regime was using Serbian churches in Kosovo to store weapons.
Therefore, from the collection of data, analysis of facts and circumstances, it is clear that these events were not carried out by the Albanians, but by the Serbian government with the aim of escalating the situation in the region and to victimize and justify Serbia’s subsequent actions before the international community is not valid./Octopus/
