A weekend trip to the Albanian coast - nine hours, but worth it to find a beautiful, and genuinely unspoiled, beach at the end.
A chance piece of graffiti, however, set me thinking. By the main road in Fier, a town in Southern Albania, someone had written a slogan, roughly translated as 'Long Live Ethnic Albania!'
It occurred to me that 'Greater Albania' was the dog that didn't - and still doesn't - bark. The graffiti was striking because, living in Kosovo, I had never seen the slogan before. Whilst it is possible to meet people who long for a union with Albania, they are a tiny minority in Kosovo (and, I suspect, in Albania too). The graffiti was notable for its rarity.
What are not rare, however, are the Albanian flags which are still common throughout Kosovo (especially during wedding season, when they are waved from cars in the bridal procession). The Kosovo Albanian community still maintains a strong sense of being 'Albanian' - much as Kosovo's Serbs, Roma, Turks, Bosniaks seem themselves as Serbian, Roma, Turkish and Bosniak, in the 'ethnic' sense of the word. It is interesting, however, that for Kosovo Albanians especially, the strong sense of ethnic identity has not translated into a movement for political unification.
There are various reasons for this. The Albanian language spoken in Kosovo is different from that spoken in much of Albania (but all Albanian speakers would claim to speak a common language). Moreover, the experience of the Albanian communities in Albania and Kosovo has diverged greatly since the First World War, most obviously with the Kosovo Albanians' experience under Milosevic. The experience of autonomy in Socialist Yugoslavia (and its withdrawal under Milosevic) cast the political question in very Kosovo-centric terms, as well as creating a "Kosovar" identity (albeit a fluid one which overlaps with other layers). In similar terms, the Kosovo Serb experience under Yugoslavia, forming much of the administrative and military elite for the whole country, mitigated against the formation of a separate Kosovo Serb identity, and towards identification with Serbia (of which Kosovo was a province).
Of course, identity, by its nature, is fluid, and often defies exact definition (and for this reason, I hope to see lots of comments on the blog - and expect most of them to disagree vehemently with me!) But in any case, there has been very limited political activism (in my experience) for a 'Greater Albania'. Of all the provisions in the Comprehensive Settlement Proposal , the prohibition on union with other countries was the easiest to sell to the Kosovo Albanians.
Posted at 16:50 01 July 2008 by Ruairi O'Connell |
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