FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
"Financial Times" has made a different article about the situation in the Balkans. Based on two different books, one about Serbia and one about Albania, the famous magazine shows how the past is holding both countries hostage. In Albania, the period of Ahmet Zog is mentioned, while in Serbia, the dream of Greater Serbia is told.
A year after the outbreak of World War I, Grigory Trubetskoy, head of the Near East department in the Foreign Ministry of imperial Russia, wrote: " Many Serbs sincerely believe that they are the first nation in the world and that they have the best army in Europe. They think the same about their literature ."
Note that Russia at this time was an ally of Serbia. The book, ' Serbia, the Modern History ' by Marko Attila Hoare, serves as a reminder that today's supposedly warm ties between President Vladimir Putin's Russia and President Aleksandar Vucic's Serbia do not tell the whole story.
Moscow cultivates Belgrade as part of its anti-Western foreign policy, but ultimately pursues its own interests. For its part, Serbia balances its relations with Russia with ties to Western democracies and China in an effort to maximize its freedom of maneuver.
Hoare's impressive book, which chronicles the Serbian wars of liberation against Ottoman rule in the early 19th century to the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, is based on his own research as well as a body of research by Serbian historians. It's the comprehensive history of Serbia that English speakers have wanted for decades—detailed in its narrative, panoramic in scope, and penetrating in analysis, much of it relevant to today's political conditions in the Balkans. Despite undeniable progress since the fall of communism, the region suffers from corruption, organized crime and democratic deficiencies, which combine with ethnic, territorial and historical disputes and great power rivalries to create the impression of difficult times ahead. .
The next book, Robert Austin's Royal Fraud , focuses on the life and times of Ahmet Zog, or King Zog, the colorful and unscrupulous political schemer who ruled Albania in the intervening years. Written with dry humor and a keen awareness of Albania's fragility in this age of marauding European dictatorships and troubled democracies, Austin's scarce volume opens a window on what he calls the nature of "small state survival." .
Like Marie-Janine Calic in The Great Cauldron (2019), Hoare and Austin perform a valuable service for readers by resisting the temptation to indulge in clichés about the Balkans as irretrievably backward and ruined with intractable conflicts. If the modern history of Serbia and Albania has been marred by wars, economic ills, and long periods of internal repression, much of it stems from the precarious independence that each state established amid an unstable neighborhood and the harassment of larger powers. foreign majors. Nowadays, EU membership may help, but no country seems ready to join the club any time soon.
For Serbia's leaders, a consistent objective in the 19th and 20th centuries was not only to establish independence on a firm basis, but to expand the national territory so that the various Serbian communities, scattered throughout the Balkans, could be incorporated into one country. Hoare, a professor of history at the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, explains that this goal brought some difficulties. In the first place, many Serbs lived side by side with other peoples, so conflicts with neighboring states became possible. Second, not all of the South Slavs identified by Serbia as Serbs – Macedonians and Muslim Bosniaks – considered themselves as such, or wanted to be ruled by Belgrade.
The same applies to Albanians, who are not Slavs, but who lived in areas coveted by Serbia - above all, Kosovo, seen in Belgrade as the historical cradle of Serbian identity. Herein lies the origin of today's troubles over Kosovo, acquired by Serbia in 1912 and now independent, though not recognized by Belgrade, as of 2008. Similarly, the incorporation of Croatia into the post-1918 recognized state as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — the Yugoslav state seen by many in Belgrade as a kind of Greater Serbia — led to permanent, often violent, tensions between Serbs and Croats.
No less important, is what Hoare says throughout his book: as Serbia expanded in size, "newly acquired territories increased the reach of authoritarian regimes." Democracy was too often sacrificed on the altar of the national idea. The pattern tended to repeat itself in the 1990s when communist Yugoslavia disintegrated and Serbian nationalist strongman Slobodan Milosevic pursued the same vision of gathering all Serbs into one state, violating democratic values in the process.
The centerpiece of Hoare's book is his riveting account of the 1903 plot that led to the assassination of King Alexander and his queen, Draga Mašin, a former royal lady-in-waiting. Hoare quotes the historian Dubravka Stojanovç: "The crime of 1903 is the founding crime." He foresaw the Yugoslav intercommunal violence of World War II and the 1990s, as well as the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjic, a rare post-communist example of a reformist liberal rising to the post of Serbian prime minister.
Austin, a University of Toronto scholar, notes that Zogu, who served as interior minister, prime minister and president before becoming king in 1928, did little to modernize Albania but was successful in "killing almost to all his opponents, mostly in broad daylight in foreign countries". He was not a bad orator like Hitler or Mussolini, but he was known for his "laziness and love of pomp".
When he decided he needed a queen, ideally an American, he placed an ad in the press: " The King of Albania, Ahmet Zogu I, is looking for a wife from the United States of America, who must also be rich. While a level of beauty is helpful, the required annual income for the Queen is US$1 million per year ."
For all his faults, Zogu was not as tyrannical as Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who ruled Albania from 1944 to 1985, but shut it off from the world and earned a reputation as Eastern Europe's most vicious communist dictator. Austin also credits Zogu and Albanians in general for refusing to join the Nazi-led mass persecution of Jews - unlike others in Eastern Europe in the 1940s.
Terrible suffering and misrule mark the modern history of Serbia and Albania, and the peoples of both countries surely deserve a better future. Hoare's and Austin's books are excellent accounts of how the traumas of the past have left deep marks on each country. / Adapted Pamphlet from Financial Times
Lini një Përgjigje