FLASH
Shkruar nga Prof.dr. Skënder Asani
If after World War II Albanians were punished for their courage to build a state, today they are facing the risk of being punished for their courage to defend it. This historical parallelism is not a rhetorical figure, but a strategic alarm. And historical alarms, when ignored, rarely remain just at the level of words.
The statehood of the Albanian people in Macedonia does not represent a late political demand, nor an ambition produced by the dynamics of the transitions of the post-90s, but a long historical process, rooted in concrete contribution, direct sacrifice and legitimacy gained in the most defining moments of the 20th century. It is the result of the active participation of Albanians in the anti-fascist confrontation, in the construction of the post-war order and in the continuous effort for institutional equality within a state that, historically, has accepted the Albanian presence, but has hesitated to accept its co-foundation. It is precisely in this structural contradiction that the source of repeated political tensions and cyclical crises of state legitimacy lies.
The anti-fascist contribution of Albanians in these areas created an indisputable moral and political basis for their recognition as a state-forming element in the post-war order. However, history proves that this potential was accepted only in declarative form and was rejected as soon as it was articulated as a demand for real institutional power. The fate of Nexhat Agolli and Qemal Agolli does not simply represent personal tragedies, but the paradigmatic moment when Albanian statehood was identified as a political danger. Nexhat Agolli, a minister in the first state bodies after World War II, was publicly shot in the center of Skopje for his courage to build Albanian state-forming institutions, while Qemal Agolli was interned in the infamous Goli Otok prison as a punitive and warning act. These acts did not only aim to eliminate individuals, but to discipline a political project: Albanians were allowed to contribute to the state, but not to co-found it.
This pattern of exclusion was reproduced in the following decades through less visible but equally effective mechanisms. Albanians were tolerated as a cultural community, accepted as a workforce and partially incorporated into administrative structures, but kept away from real decision-making centers. Albanian continuity survived as historical memory, as identity and as moral resistance, but was stripped of its institutional dimension. This structural discontinuity created a deep gap between real contribution and political recognition, a gap that the post-communist transition was supposed to close.
The post-1990 transition and, in particular, the Ohrid Agreement were interpreted as a corrective moment for this historical injustice. The agreement was not simply a compromise to stop the 2001 conflict, but a fundamental act that advanced the constitutional position of Albanians and institutionalized the principle of equality as a condition for state stability. For the first time, the state was forced to admit that without the real involvement of Albanians, there could be no long-term functionality. However, this advancement never turned into a sustainable internal consensus, but was treated as an imposed concession, tolerated as long as it did not challenge the traditional architecture of power.
At this point, a new phase of danger begins. Today, Albanian statehood is not being challenged through direct repression, but through a political discourse that aims to delegitimize and symbolically eliminate the political subject emerging from the Ohrid Agreement. The language that articulates the disappearance of this subject is not ordinary electoral rhetoric, but a sign of a deeper project: the reconceptualization of the state without its Albanian state-forming component. Here lies the alarming historical parallel: what Nexhat and Qemal Agolli experienced as physical punishment for their state-forming engagement, Albanian political representatives are today trying to experience through discursive erasure and institutionalization of exclusion.
This transformation from physical violence to discursive violence does not constitute democratic emancipation, but a sophistication of exclusionary mechanisms. If in the post-war period the Albanian statehood was punished with shootings and imprisonment, today it risks being undone through constitutional relativization, the normalization of the language of elimination, and the selective rewriting of political history. This process constitutes normative regression and a serious risk to social cohesion, as it undermines the very principle on which the political peace after 2001 was built.
From a political-strategic perspective, this year marks a critical juncture. Any attempt to delegitimize or eliminate the political product of the Ohrid Agreement implies the gradual dismantling of the architecture of stability. History proves that Albanian statehood is not extinguished by repression or rhetoric, but often resists, producing deeper crises for the state itself. Therefore, the return of the discourse of elimination is not a sign of state strength, but a symptom of structural insecurity and the lack of will to accept the multiethnic reality of the state.
In this context, Albanian statehood is not a sectoral demand, nor a narrow political interest, but a historical necessity and an inalienable condition of long-term stability. Any attempt to relativize or undo it constitutes a repetition of a proven historical error, with known consequences. Silence in the face of this process cannot be interpreted as political prudence or diplomatic neutrality; it is co-responsibility in the institutionalization of the interruption of state-forming equality.
If after World War II Albanians were punished for their courage to build a state, today they are facing the risk of being punished for their courage to defend it. This historical parallelism is not a rhetorical figure, but a strategic alarm. And historical alarms, when ignored, rarely remain just at the level of words.
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