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As the president of the Albanian American Civic League, DioGuardi has worked with members on both sides of the political aisle in an effort to bring lasting peace and stability to the Southeast Europe. In 1986, he convinced Congressmen Tom Lantos and John Porter, cochairs of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, to put the issue of Albanians in Yugoslavia on their agenda. He then introduced the first Congressional Resolution in the House and the Senate in support of Albanian human rights in the Balkans. In 1990, he and Congressman Tom Lantos visited Kosova in order to challenge the brutal policies of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s regime there, after which they made the first official trip to Albania in fifty years, opening the doors to democracy in this former Communist dictatorship. Later that year, DioGuardi persuaded Bob Dole and six other U.S. senators to visit the two million Albanians in Kosova under Serbian occupation. In 1996, DioGuardi returned to Albania with the Civic League’s Balkan Affairs Adviser, Shirley Cloyes, and Congressman Benjamin Gilman, then chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, to meet with President Sali Berisha to discuss Albanian national security. He traveled to Albania again in 1998 to assess the humanitarian crisis emanating from the war in Kosova, at the request of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. In the summer of 1999, he and Shirley Cloyes, who he had married the year before, traveled to Kosova after the NATO bombing campaign ended to assess conditions and report back to Chairman Gilman. Since then, DioGuardi, Cloyes, and members of the Albanian American Civic League Board have made many additional fact-finding missions to Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Presheva. In early 2003, they were responsible for the introduction of a Congressional Resolution (H.Res. 28, now H.Res. 24) and a hearing calling on the U.S. government to recognize Kosova’s independence now, with the active support of House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and Ranking Member Tom Lantos. In August 2003, they led a delegation with Congressman Lantos to Montenegro, the first of its kind, to assess the status of Albanians there and helped to create the first Congressional hearing, held in October 2003, on the “future of Albanians in Montenegro.” In May 2005, DioGuardi, Cloyes, and the board of directors of the Albanian American Civic League and the Albanian American Foundation held a 15 th anniversary dinner, “A Salute to Albanian Tolerance, Resistance, and Hope: Remembering Besa and the Holocaust,” in conjunction with the 60 th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The dinner was devoted to the role that Albanians played in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust, after which the Civic League took Kosova’s Bishop Mark Sopi, Fr. Lush Gjergi, Fr. Shan Zefi, and Minister of the Environment Ardian Gjini to visit Cardinal Egan in New York, Cardinal McCarrick in Washington, and to Congress to testify before a House International Relations Committee hearing on the current and future status of Kosova. At the hearing, Sopi, Gjergji, Gjini, and Cloyes countered propaganda that Albanians are a Muslim majority who pose a potential fundamentalist, terrorist threat in the heart of Europe. In August, DioGuardi, Cloyes, and members of the Civic League board traveled to Albania, Montenegro, and Kosova with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, where they held high-level meetings and developed a strategy for the next phase of lobbying on behalf of Albanian concerns in Washington. On October 27, at the urging of the Civic League, Congressmen Rohrabacher and Lantos introduced H.Res. 522, honoring the 600 th anniversary of the birth of Gjergj Kastrioti Skenderbeg. Before coming to Congress, DioGuardi was a practicing CPA who served twenty-two years with the international accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co., twelve of them as a partner. In 1984, he became the first practicing certified public accountant ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to his human rights work while in Congress, DioGuardi took the lead in sounding the call for federal financial reform. After leaving Congress, he established a nonpartisan foundation, Truth in Government, and published a book entitled Unaccountable Congress: It Doesn’t Add Up. DioGuardi currently serves on the board of directors of several private and publicly-held U.S. corporations. DioGuardi was raised in the Bronx, New York, where he graduated from Fordham Prep in 1958 and Fordham University with honors in 1962. His late father, who immigrated to America in 1929, was an ethnic Albanian who was born in Greci, the oldest Albanian-speaking village in Italy and the only one (there are fifty-one) in which Skenderbeg set foot. His mother is a first-generation Italian American who was born in New York City. You can contact Joe DioGuardi by email at jjd@aacl.com
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Joseph DioGuardi was the first Member of Congress to bring the issue of Albanian rights in the Balkans to the attention of the U.S. government through a Congressional Resolution that he sponsored as a new Member in 1986. He was also responsible for the first Congressional hearing on Kosova in 1987. He has made more than thirty trips to the Balkans since leaving Congress in 1989 in his capacity as the founding, volunteer president of the Albanian American Civic League. The Civic League is the only registered grassroots lobby representing the concerns and interests in Washington, DC, of the Albanian people. 2005 marked its fifteenth year of continuous service in Washington and around the world for the Albanian national cause of seven million Albanians living side by side in the Balkans in Albania, Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro, the Presheve Valley, and Chameria.