Where is the Balkans going?

2024-04-12 19:06:21Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA LEART KOLA
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Sometime in 2008 or 2009, when I was still working for the Movement, together with a group of Albanian organizations in the Balkans, we founded the Network of Albanian Organizations (RROSH). Apart from MJAFT, the most popular organizations were Vetëvendosja and Zgjohu, which were respectively led by Albin Kurti, today's Prime Minister of Kosovo, and Zgjohu by Artan Grubi, today's Deputy. Prime Minister of the Republic of North Macedonia. This initiative was joined endlessly by Albanian organizations from Presheva and Montenegro. For the time and economic opportunities that these organizations had, it was a serious initiative, which lived for a not short time and did many activities in the political awareness of Albanians wherever they lived in the Balkans.

I want to tell an interesting story that also shows a little context. At that time, Albin Kurti was declared 'non grata' by the Macedonian government, they considered him dangerous. There was a time when crossing into Macedonia for Albanians was an epic mistreatment (today it seems unbelievable, but in those years you could spend hours in Bllacë or Qafë-Thane under physical and document control). When the network's meetings had to be held in Skopje, which happened not infrequently, Albini had to cross semi-illegally into Macedonia. Once I accompanied him by car to the border. He crossed the mountain on foot and Artan Grubi was waiting for him on the other side. I remembered this event because two years ago, when I was going to travel from Skopje to Tetovo, exactly at the overpass where the roads split, the police blocked the traffic for at least an hour because Albini Kurti was expected to pass, this time with an escort in the role of the Prime Minister of Kosovo. I felt a certain pride and his success was in a way the success of all activists engaged in those difficult times. Times were really hard and Albini was really in danger, unlike the last time he staged a ridiculous assassination attempt.

Although difficult years, there was a kind of hope that things could get better, and in fact, as I will try to argue in this article, they eventually got better. Often times and starring some of the aforementioned characters. But are we today at the beginning of the end of this hope that was kept alive for all these years?

Only 3 years ago we had Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic in Montenegro, with a government that seemed to be moving rapidly towards the European Union.

In Albania, after many turbulences of non-participation in the local elections by the opposition, after only two years it was possible to organize a model electoral process that, even though the SP still won, it seemed as if the country would finally have a serious opposition.

In Kosovo, the Vetëvendosje Movement achieved an immeasurable political success, a former NGO that received over 50% of the popular vote was a violation of all the rules of electoral mathematics in that country.

In North Macedonia, the Albanians emerged much stronger from a process designed to weaken them. DUI not only took the most important part of the ministerial positions, but through a long debate with SDSM, they managed to include in the negotiations and the installation of an Albanian prime minister in the last 100 days, bringing an ethnic relaxation not experienced before in those territories. , which was made concrete with an infrastructural investment of 2 billion euros, mainly in the area inhabited by Albanians. A concrete success developing what used to be the Gaza Strip in the Balkans. Things were going well…

parenthesis

"It became clear that things would not go well for us when Albin Kurti, not yet entering his office as the Prime Minister of Kosovo, decided through a quixotic gesture to compete for the office of the Prime Minister of Albania, through a list of Megalomaniac candidates who in fact received less than any other subject, breaking a negative record in modern Albanian political history... And yet the taste of division remained in both states and unfortunately continues even today. The good days ended without a good start, as a result of the Albanian ego and political practice, which is already centuries old, that it is enough if the other one doesn't have it, if I don't have it either.

So where are we today?

In Montenegro, the good times when an Albanian became prime minister seem to have been forgotten. Today it is a country on the verge of ethnic conflict. The victory of the Serbian parties, the 100% involvement of the official Serbian politics in Montenegro, makes the country with a small population fear the future. There is no more talk of rapid integration, but only of a rapid explosion of ethnic conflict, where the Albanians as a minority seem to be the first to be harmed in an increase in conflict and autocracy. Only a miracle would give him political stability in the near future. The fuse is lit, it is only waiting for the flame to meet the powder barrel.

In Albania, the declaration 'non grata' of Sali Berisha destroys the constructiveness of the first days of the opposition, turning it into a ridiculous battalion that fights for the interests of one man, making the parliamentary debate non-existent, shrinking the numbers of the opposition to a historic level and the physical radicalization of an ever-smaller group of deputies, and as a consequence the denial of a governing alternative for the country. Basically, this has damaged the Socialist Party in power, both in the daily administrative management and in the collective imagination of the creation of the political strategy. Displacing that debate that should happen in politics, in the black chronicle, where the opposition has been replaced by the Special Prosecution and the people are passive wizard consumers of the disasters that fall on the next employee, thus producing a very harmful long-term apathy, where one side never wins and the other side wins without knowing why!

Kosovo, after getting over the 'hangover' of the election of the new leadership, discovers on awakening that it is in a critical economic situation, non-existent administrative performance, where no one works for fear of making a mistake and as a result unrealized projects reach figures of hundreds of millions of euros, deepening the social gap that they promise to correct. They replaced the lack of courage to change the economy with the guts to start a not-so-cold diplomatic war with the West.

The open conflict with the United States and the European Union, where the former does not spare criticism and the latter has managed to impose economic sanctions, as if Kosovo were not a product of the work of the West, but the Islamic Republic of Iran, has brought impotence evident in the international representation of the state of Kosovo, which, even without it, is found today because of our inability to predict the events in the position of the accused in the Hague tribunal, where it is mistakenly thought that some commanders are being tried, when in fact they themselves are being tried the legitimacy of the existence of the state of Kosovo. This judgment has the complete indifference of the government of Kosovo and its prime minister, in whose short-sightedness this trial is seen as a form to eliminate immediate political opponents. What a disaster! And what good fortune for Aleksandar Vu?i?, who is enjoying this international attention in whose eyes he seems like a constructive politician. Even when he is placed in the corner of the ring, as in the case of Banjska, Albini takes care to save him by inventing a crisis out of the box, like the last case of Dinar for example. More than amateurism, Kosovo politics looks like sado-masochism. And as if all these problems were not enough, VV decided to run in the elections of North Macedonia... What a genius, certainly with a Don Quixote similar to the candidates he had in Albania, thus antagonizing not only the allied party in the Socialist International, SDSM , but also bringing water to the mill of VMRO. And above all by dividing the Albanians who seem to sink into irrelevance after the May 8 elections.

Even an opportunity that the progressive forces had to have a constitutional guarantee through the election of a progressive president, such as the SDSM candidate Stevo Pendarovski, one of the most pro-Albanian presidents in the history of this country, assured the Albanians themselves that this would not was happening, bringing out with the inspiration of Albin Kurti the Mayor of the Municipality of Gostivar as a candidate from the Albanian opposition. As a result, they forced DUI to nominate its own candidate, reducing Pendarovski's chances of being elected president and thus helping a right-wing candidate who will be in unison with the future anti-Albanian government.

History is merciless in its judgment, and time will show that those who consider themselves great patriots today may turn out to be the most prominent traitors tomorrow. Those who today pretend to be fighting tooth and nail with the enemy, turn out tomorrow to have been his greatest allies. We cannot know this today, time will judge and will judge us all, but we do know something, because it is a fact, that today we are worse than yesterday, and tomorrow, in all likelihood, we will be worse than today. Because we do not know how to rise above the personal level of the ego for the common good. We are ready to burn the entire mattress for a flea, while the enemies of the idea of ??equality and coexistence between the nations in the Balkans warm their hands on it.

What seemed like a golden era of changes in the Balkans for Albanians, unfortunately, turns out to be the last breath of a body that could not become a political body, but always remained a biological body.

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