Montenegro:
An Apartheid State in the Heart of Europe
Albanian American Civic League Delegation Conducts a Fact-Finding Mission
to Montenegro with
Congressman Tom Lantos
by Shirley Cloyes
DioGuardi
From July 31 to August 4, the Albanian
American Civic League, with the support of the Patriotic Association of Kraja
and Shoqata Ana e Malit, conducted a fact-finding mission to the Albanian
communities in Montenegro with Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife, Annette. The
delegation was the realization of a Civic League plan to begin the
internationalization of the plight of Albanians in Montenegro that was launched
more than a year ago in Washington. It did not come a moment too soon. As we
quickly discovered, the state-sponsored effort of the Montenegrin Slav majority
to either drive out or assimilate the Albanian population in Montenegro is not
the stuff of history, but a contemporary and shocking reality that threatens the
very existence of Albanians in Montenegro. Fueled by a virulent anti-Albanian
racism, this effort also threatens the political and economic future of
Montenegro as part of a united Europe.
After hearing testimony from Albanian
experts and activists in Ulqin, Ana e Malit, Kraja, and Tuzi, Annette Lantos,
who works with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, observed that, in its
racist treatment of Albanians, “Montenegro is a hundred years behind the rest
of Europe.” Based on what he heard and saw, Congressman Lantos described his
feeling as “one of outrage that in the twenty-first century civilized people
living in Europe could be discriminated against so profoundly simply because
they want to maintain their linguistic, cultural, and ethnic heritage.” He
stated that, along with his friends Joe DioGuardi and Shirley Cloyes, he was
“both emotionally and intellectually committed” to helping the Albanian
people in Montenegro, and he vowed to “deal with their problems at the highest
levels in Washington.”
The two main purposes of the trip were
to see firsthand the conditions in which Albanians in Montenegro live today and
to bring this information back to the U.S. Congress, so that the Civic League,
working with Congressman Lantos, can develop a solution that will give Albanians
full economic, political, and cultural equality with Montenegrin Slavs. Just as
he played a critical role in internationalizing the Albanian issue in Kosova,
Tom Lantos is now prepared to do the same for Albanians in Montenegro.
The members of the delegation included
Albanian American Civic League President, former Congressman Joe DioGuardi,
Balkan Affairs Adviser Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, and Board members Luan Bukolla,
Gjergj Dedvukaj, Adem Dukaj, Sadri Gjonbalaj, and Marash Nuculaj; Xhevat Kraja
(vice-president) and Adem Cukaj of the Patriotic Association of Kraja; and
Xheladin Zeneli (vice-president) of the Shoqata Ana e Malit. Faton Bislimi,
student coordinator for the Civic League from Kosova, acted as the
delegation’s official translator.
While Congressman Lantos flew to
Budapest to celebrate his 75th birthday in his country
of origin, some of the members of the delegation traveled to Prishtina to hold a
press conference on August 5 about our findings in Montenegro. Shortly
thereafter, we were fortunate to meet with Azem Hajdini, one of the few living
survivors of the 1945 massacre of 4,300 anti-fascist Albanian soldiers in Tivar,
Montenegro, by Serbian and Montenegrin military forces. Hajdini, who has
published a comprehensive account of the massacre, explained how for years no
one was allowed to speak about this tragedy under threat of death. He expressed
his concern that Albanians in Montenegro and throughout the Balkans will
continue to risk expulsion and extermination unless we demand change.
Forced Immigration, Confiscation
of Land, and Forced Assimilation
In addition to a hidden history of
genocide against the Albanians of Montenegro, which began with the first
annexation of Albanian land to Montenegro in 1878, there has been a continuous
pattern of forced immigration, confiscation of land, and forced assimilation.
The delegation encountered these realities from Ulqin to Tuzi and also in
Plave-Gusija, where part of the group concluded our fact-finding mission.
Historian Riza Rexha explained that
ever since the socalled Great Powers at the Conference of Berlin placed
Albanians under Montenegrin control, the effort to censor Albanian speech,
behavior, and cultural _expression and to Slavicize Albanians, beginning with
appending their last names with the Slavic suffix “-ic” at birth, has
proceeded apace. According to Rexha, “Albanians face the same issues that they
have faced for the past 123 years.” As a result, today half the population of
Albanians from Montenegro lives in the United States and Western Europe.
He also described a parallel strategy
that consists of moving Montenegrins into Albanian communities to change their
ethnic composition and political structures. Some of the most egregious examples
of confiscating Albanian land and moving Montenegrins into Albanian-populated
areas to change the demographics have occurred and are occurring in Tuzi. We
learned from Anton Lajcaj, an unemployed professor in Tuzi, that within the next
year, 1,200 Slavs will be placed in factories and given apartments on
confiscated land between Tuzi and Podgorica. At the same time, the government
has confiscated land owned by Slavs on the outskirts of Podgorica for the
purpose of building a prison. They have promised the aggrieved landowners that
they will be recompensed with 60,000 square meters of Albanian land. The
government is also in the midst of seizing miles of property along Lake Shkodra,
to which Albanians have held title for generations, ostensibly to establish a
national park. When Congressman Lantos asked what kind of compensation Albanians
receive from the government for their land, Anton Lajcaj responded that they
receive none whatsoever and any protest is met with imprisonment and
persecution.
Tuzi has also been physically divided
by the building of a military base and a garbage dump that is subjecting
Albanian children to disease. Lajcaj stated that “Montenegrin policies
violate all European human rights conventions and that, if they continue, the
entire Albanian population will either
flee or be assimilated.”
While Congressman and Mrs. Lantos and the
members of our delegation were powerfully impacted by the insight and courage of
the Albanians whom we met in Montenegro, we were vividly aware that the
state’s policies have already succeeded in assimilating many Albanians, who no
longer speak their mother tongue. Some Albanians have gone so far as to join
Montenegrin political parties, and others still have actively collaborated with
the government’s security forces and special police in monitoring and
repressing the Albanian population.
Education as an Instrument of
Assimilation and Forced Immigration
The delegation asked the president (Petrit
Gjokaj) and the vice-president (Nik Gjeloshaj) of the national Albanian Student
Association, as well as the branch leaders, to meet with us in Ulqin. Because
there is no higher education in the Albanian language, all attend university
outside Montenegro. The Association, which has 700 members, came into being only
recently to oppose assimilation and to help students to cope with an educational
system that is designed for them to fail. Petrit and Nik spoke of the intense
pressure on Albanian students to forget their identity and history and to shun
political activity. In response, the Association is calling for
Albanian-language education through high school and a curriculum that teaches
Albanian history and culture. Currently, Albanian language instruction exists
only through elementary school, but even this is not universal. Increasingly,
Serbo-Croatian is the language of instruction at all levels (students are forced
to translate Serbo-Croatian textbooks into Albanian), and the curriculum is
completely devoted to Serbian and Montenegrin culture and history. Petrit Gjokaj
also said that the Student Association was working with all student bodies in
Montenegro to further the political cause of Albanians.
Because Albanians make up only seven to
ten percent of Montenegro’s population, the students pointed out that by
European standards, they could not expect to Montenegro to build an
Albanian-language university. However, they said that they should be able to
enroll in universities in Kosova, Albania, and Macedonia without interference,
and they said that an Albanian-language teachers’ college should be
established in Montenegro to train future elementary and secondary school
teachers. They told the story of how the proposed teachers’ college is being
systematically undermined by both Montenegrin and Albanian politicians. The
government has offered to build a teachers’ college in Niksic, which is deep
inside Slav territory and therefore inaccessible to most Albanians. Albanian
political parties, meanwhile, instead of uniting to oppose the location in
Niksic, are fighting among themselves over the placement of the college on
Albanian land. The result is a deadlock that threatens the future of Albanian
education in Montenegro.
Students who have the economic means to
attend university abroad often find that they are
unable to return to Montenegro, because the state will not recognize their
degrees and therefore they cannot
get jobs. But some Albanian students never even make it to high school. For
example, we learned from historian Ismail Doda, as we stood next to the statue
of Skanderbeg funded by the Patriotic Association of Kraja, that students from
Kraja are forced to move to Ulqin or to take a long bus ride there to attend
high school. Many cannot afford to do either.
Nail Draga, president of the
Association of Artists and Intellectuals in Ulqin and a school principal who
recently has been removed from his job by the Montenegrin government, told the
Civic League delegation that, “Although Montenegro is multinational, and
therefore multicultural, Montenegrin culture dominates.” He said that, “To
this day the Montenegrin government has not financed a single Albanian cultural
or scientific project.”
Economic Underdevelopment and
Unemployment as an Instrument of Forced Immigration
Nowhere is it more apparent that
anti-Albanian racism negatively impacts both Albanians and Montenegrins than in
the area of the economy. Ulqin, a stunningly beautiful Illyrian city dating back
to the Bronze Age, is a major tourist destination on the Adriatic Sea. The city
is more than 80 percent Albanian, and a large number of the tourists who visit
Ulqin are Albanian. Although the central government in Podgorica takes most of
the profits from tourism in Ulqin, depriving the municipality of the funds that
it needs to operate properly, it refuses to develop Ulqin’s infrastructure
because it is an Albanian-majority area. The result is that Podgorica deprives
all of Montenegro of urgently needed capital through a well-developed tourist
industry.
The delegation learned that sixty
percent of Ulqin is made up of the younger generation of Albanians because there
are jobs in tourism and in the municipal government. However, in Ana e Malit,
Kraja, Tuzi, and Plave-Gusija, the older generation predominates because of the
lack of jobs and infrastructure. In Kraja, historian Ali Gjecbritaj informed our
group that in 1991, 4,000 people lived there, but that today only 2,000 live in
Kraja because there are no jobs, no running water (in spite of the town’s
proximity to Lake Shkodra), and no access to the Internet. Muhamet Gjokaj, a
lawyer in Tuzi, explained that ever since Tuzi, the Albanian-majority center of
the Malesia region, was stripped of its autonomy in 1957 as a municipality and
was subsumed under Podgorica, its economy and infrastructure have deteriorated
to the point that more than half of the Albanian population has immigrated
elsewhere.
In one of the most poignant moments of our travel through Montenegro, Gjokaj revealed the extent of the poverty, including no running water, minimal electricity, and no phone lines, in Albanian villages in the region. This is the case in Dinosha, the largest Albanian village in the area, which is only three miles from the capital of Podgorica and in which 1,500 people live. When Congressman Lantos asked how many Montenegrin villages were similarly afflicted, the answer was “none.”
Ominously, Gjokaj stated that, “The
call for a Tuzi commune, along with any move for improvement by Albanians, is
deemed to be the work of a ‘separatist movement,’ and that the Montenegrin
government is now passing laws to prevent Albanian municipal control
permanently. Our delegation learned that the European Union has done nothing to
stop this unfolding tragedy.
Lack of Adequate Healthcare as an
Instrument of Assimilation and Forced Immigration
As explained above, Albanian names are
changed at birth to appear Slavic. This is accomplished because none of the
maternity wards in Montenegro are run or staffed by Albanian doctors and nurses.
Dr. Sime Dobreci informed our
delegation that there has been no financial investment in the healthcare system
in any Albanian areas in Montenegro for the past twenty years. The majority of
Albanians in Montenegro have no access to healthcare and, where they do, their
interaction with the healthcare system is conducted in Serbo-Croatian. The
hospital in Ulqin is a bleak, ill-equipped facility, and this is where tourists,
not just residents, are treated for disease and injury.
The delegation visited the clinic in
Ana e Malit, one of Montenegro’s few Albanian clinics. Only two doctors serve
10,000 inhabitants, and both commute from Ulqin, returning home at 7:00 p.m.
each evening. From Dr. Zulfie Duraku, we learned that the government finances
the education of Montenegrin Slav medical students but no Albanian students.
(She financed her own education at the age of 38.) Dr. Duraku observed that the
clinic in Ana e Malit is “exactly the way that it was when she was born,”
and that it receives almost no funds from the government.
The Criminal Justice System and
the Military as Instruments of Political Repression
Lawyer Gezim Kalavrezi gave our
delegation a detailed account of the criminal justice system in Montenegro,
where “the principle of equal rights under the law is not practiced and where
what is written in the Constitution is not implemented,” he said. For example,
the law that states that minorities have a right to use their language in spoken
and written form is never implemented. All court procedures are conducted in
Serbo-Croatian and then translated. According to Kalavrezi, the translation is
often poor to the point that citizens’ rights are abrogated. None of the
judges in the Supreme Court or in the prosecutor’s office are Albanian.
During his presentation to our
delegation, Professor Anton Lajcaj disclosed that he was one of 300 Albanians,
from 18 to 35 years of age (many, like Lajcaj, with a wife and children), who
had just received call-up notices to report to a military base deep inside
Serbia on September 3. This conscription
of Albanians in Montenegro is being advertised
as a “multiethnic” endeavor by the state, now that Albanians and Slavs
“are no longer in conflict.”
And yet, historically, Albanians have been subject to gross racism and
brutality in the armies of the former Yugoslavia under Serbian and Montenegrin
command.
Conclusion
The situation for Albanians in
Montenegro is dire. As Nail Draga stated during our visit, “the
Montenegrin government ‘recognizes’ its problems when international
delegations visit, but in practice they never do anything.” The prevailing
mentality in the government is deeply racist and still in the throes of
Communism. Draga believes that the problem of human and civil rights for
Albanians in Montenegro can be solved only through diplomatic intervention by
the United States and the European Union. The members of the Civic League
delegation are dedicated to working with Congressman Lantos to internationalize
the plight of Albanians in Montenegro. We will not support the independence of
Montenegro unless the Albanian population receives full economic, political, and
cultural rights. And we will vigorously oppose the admission of Serbia and
Montenegro into the European Union and NATO until both are willing to recognize
and protect the ethnic legitimacy of Albanians, to renounce a hundred years of
ethnic cleansing and genocide, and to embrace democracy and the rule of law.
Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi is Balkan Affairs Adviser to the Albanian American Civic League.