A RESPONSE TO XHELADIN ZENELI'S BOOK "DIASPORA DHE VENDLINDJA"

Dear Friends, Last month Joe DioGuardi and I were invited by Xheladin Zeneli to be part of a panel discussing the publication of his book, Diaspora dhe Vendlindja. ZeneIi was the first Albanian elected to the Montenegrin Parliament after the collapse of communism in 1990, only to resign a year later because of Montenegro’s discriminatory policies against Albanians. In 2003, Zeneli participated in the first Congressional delegation to Albanian lands in Montenegro led by Tom Lantos under the auspices of the Albanian American Civic League. The release of his book gives us an opportunity to revisit the plight of Albanians in Montenegro and the history of the diaspora in responding to it.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speech by Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, Balkan Affairs Adviser November 5, 2011, the Bronx, New York It is a pleasure to be here tonight, and I want to thank Xheladin Zeneli for taking the time to write his book, Diaspora dhe Vendlindja and, as a result, to cause all of us to revisit the plight of Albanians in Montenegro and the role of the diaspora in responding to it. It is important that Xheladin has documented the anti-Albanian racism in Montenegro and the repression of Albanians, now less than 5 percent of the population—first by the Communist government and later by the newly established government masquerading as a democracy, which led him to take the moral step of resigning from the parliament in 1991. As many of you know, in late 2001, I decided that the Albanian American Civic League had to enter Montenegro. It had been impossible to make the trip earlier because Joe DioGuardi had been blacklisted by Slobodan Milosevic from entering Yugoslavia in June 1990, after his trip to Prishtina with Congressman Tom Lantos. That changed in June 2001, when Milosevic was indicted and extradited to The Hague, an extradition to which I had dedicated myself for more than two years. Even though Montenegro was still linked to Serbia—because the international community, led by the EU’s representative for foreign policy, Javier Solana, was demanding that Montenegro and Serbia stay together—I knew that, based on what we were hearing about the horrible conditions for Albanians from Civic League board members born in Montenegro, we had to go to there before it was too late. Joe and I entered into serious discussions with board members from Montenegro, including Gjergj Dedvukaj, Marash Nuculaj, Fero Gjonbalaj, Adem Dukaj, and Arslan Cekaj, about establishing a delegation with the late Congressman Tom Lantos. Initially we asked every Albanian group in the United States with connections to Montenegro to come together to participate in the development and funding of the delegation. This turned out to be a terrible mistake. As Primo Levi, the great analyst of the Holocaust who survived Auschwitz has observed in his The Drowned and the Saved, the harsher the oppression in any country and historical situation, the more widespread the willingness to collaborate and often out of a "myopic desire for any power whatsoever." And so it is within the Albanian diaspora from Montenegro." Within hours after our first meeting, most of the people that we knew personally received phone calls from one organization in particular trying to intimidate them into cutting off involvement with the Civic League. Then the false rumor was spread that the Civic League wanted to raise $50,000 for Congressman Lantos, when we were raising money to cover the trip that would ultimately include twelve people. It would take an entire year to undue the damage of this propaganda campaign. In addition to our board members, Xheladin Zenelli (at that time, the chair of the Ana e Malit organization) stayed the course with us, and he became part of the trip that we ultimately took in the summer of 2003. We planned a fact-finding mission that would take Congressman Lantos, the first member of the US Congress to visit Albanian lands in Montenegro (with his wife, Annette) to Ulqin, Ana e Malit, Kraja, Tuzi, and Plave-Gusije. We identified experts in each location to make presentations to Congressman Lantos on the problems that Albanians face in Montenegro, including land confiscation, lack of education in the Albanian language, lack of adequate healthcare, discrimination in employment, a history of forced assimilation and expulsion, and abuse in the criminal justice system. In the process, we exposed a system designed to either subjugate or drive Albanians out of the country, beginning with the changing of Albanian names to Slavic ones at birth. It was clear to the board of the Civic League then (and still today) that what was needed to stop the West from fostering and supporting the illusion of Montenegro as a democracy was a full-fledged lobbying and public relations campaign. I made a first stab at this by writing and subsequently publishing a report to the House International Relations Committee, with research assistance from Xheladin and Marash Nuculaj, entitled "Internationalizing the Plight of Albanians in Montenegro," and after our trip, I followed that with "Montenegro: An Apartheid State in the Heart of Europe." That article caused Janusz Bugajski of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Allen Kassof of the Project on Ethnic Conflict at Princeton University (both of whom we would later learn had received consulting fees from Montenegro) and members of the Montenegrin Embassy in Washington to pressure Congressman Lantos and his staff to stop dealing with the Civic League, claiming that he was "being misused by a highly vocal ultra-nationalist lobby." Fortunately Tom Lantos was not persuaded, especially after working for so many years with Joe from the time that Joe entered Congress in 1985, and later with me, beginning in 1995. He responded to the pressure by holding the first hearing, with Dana Rohrabacher, on the "Future of Albanians in Montenegro," in October 2003. At this hearing we were permitted to have Anton Lajcaj and Nail Draga from Montenegro testify. They had participated in the delegation, and they were interpreted by Faton Bislimi, who had served as our interpreter in Montenegro. Xheladin and I were the other witnesses. The Civic League continued to persist in its efforts, in spite of growing opposition from Montenegro and its Albanian collaborators and Western efforts to keep Montenegro together with Serbia out of a misguided fear that the continuing dissolution of the former Yugoslavia would open the door to Kosova’s independence. In 2005, the Civic League brought Dana Rohrabacher to Ulqin to discuss the confiscation of the most valuable Albanian property by the Montenegrin government and to Tuzi for a strategy meeting about how to oppose the Capital City bill, which was intended to place the Albanian-majority area of Tuzi within and under the complete control of Podgorica. Montenegro would become independent the following year due to a high percentage of Albanian votes, but instead of rewarding Albanians, the government would tighten the noose even further. On September 9, 2006, the government tortured, arrested, and jailed 14 Albanians, including three Albanian Americans, Kola Dedvukaj, Rrok Dedvukaj, and Sokol Ivanaj. The Civic League would spend the next three years trying to get them out of jail, and then another year working with one of the best lawyers in London, who in January 2010, at our request filed a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the Republic of Montenegro. That suit is still pending in court, and through it we hope to provide a window into the suffering that Albanians endure in Montenegro and to demonstrate why the Western claim that Montenegro is a democracy is more an illusion than reality. And so, where are we at the end of 2011? Land confiscation has been taking place in Plav, and Mayor Nikol Gegaj is flying a Bosnian flag in Tuzi. (Ulqin Mayor Nazif Chungu is apparently doing a good job, and let us hope that he continues to do so.) The diaspora remains fractured. The leadership in Kosova and other parts of the Balkans has never reached out to Albanians in Montenegro. There are now five Albanian parties in Montenegro, which is exactly the kind of divided political reality for Albanians that the Slavs want. And these parties have never engaged in a substantial dialogue with other Albanians and the international community about the conditions that Albanians face in Montenegro and the steps that should be taken to bring them equality. Instead, the primary objective of the Albanian political elite has been the protection and the maintenance of their meager political power at the expense of the Albanian people. Nevertheless, we still have leverage. Because Montenegro is not yet part of the European Union, the country is sensitive to the negative images that it has been receiving and deservedly so for its treatment of Albanians as second- and third-class citizens. Even though little has changed, Montenegro stands to be granted membership accession negotiations by the European Union in the middle of 2012. Only an international lobbying and public relations campaign will make a difference—the kind of campaign that the Civic League waged for the independence of Kosova, a campaign that we waged successfully in Washington with our friends in the U.S. House and Senate when most people thought that it could not be done. A campaign can still be waged on behalf of Albanians in Montenegro, but this will require a commitment from the Albanian American diaspora. A successful challenge to Slav dominance in Montenegro may seem impossible, but every truly great accomplishment at first seems to be very difficult, if not impossible. And, for this reason, I believe that it is important to remember Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of Indian’s nationalist movement against British rule, when he said that, "There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fail." One of the Albanian people’s greatest supporters, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, said this in his own way: "Today’s tyrants will eventually be cast into the dust bin of history. Albanian American Civic League PO Box 70 | Ossining, NY 10562 | USA www.aacl.com jjd@aacl.com Tel: (914) 762-5530 Fax: (914) 762-5102 Published in  AACL web site  :http://www.aacl.us/albaniansmontenegro.htm VOA / Zëri i Shqiptarëve: http://www.voal-online.ch/index.php?mod=article&cat=OPINONEEDITORIALE&article=19831