“Peace has to be promoted from the top down, but it grows and it is nurtured from the bottom up,” he said.
Their efforts came on the brink of possible NATO airstrikes this week, designed to force the Yugoslav military to back down from its offensive in Kosovo.
At the conclusion of last week’s meeting, the participants issued a statement declaring that the bloodshed in Kosovo is not based on religious differences.
“We, the emissaries of our faithful, wish to state unequivocally that the war that is now raging in the our homeland, where our people are being killed and maimed, and where our homes and places of worship, and our schools and monuments are barbarously being destroyed, is not a war of religions,” the statement said.
“We state categorically that we are against the killing and destruction, and that we stand for dialogue and negotiation to bring about the peace that God demands of us.”
The religious representatives pledged to take the message back to their followers in Kosovo and to establish an interreligious group to maintain religious dialogue.
Ethnic Albanians, most of them Muslim, make up about 90 percent of the population of Kosovo.
At the same time, the region is also the site of some of the Serbian Orthodox Church’s most important historic and religious sites, including a number of centuries-old monasteries.
Attempts by Kosovo Albanians to secure independence have been met by a strong response from Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has used nationalist sentiment among the nation’s Serbian population to fuel the fighting there.