The Bosnians are in trouble again. Their nationalists are running the risk of turning their country into Europe’s only failed state. This after thirteen years of intense international effort and investment. It seems to me they fight some awful horrendous ethnic war every 50 years or so in the South Balkans. We are due for another in about 2045. Some commentators reckon it might be sooner than that. I lived in Bosnia for two years as part of the military force that brought some measure of peace and security . When we used to recruit interpreters, or other staff to help us, we would give them a form. One of the items on the form was ‘Ethnic Group’ and they were expected to place in there ‘Bosnian Muslim, Serb or Croat’. None of these forms had the correct reply which was ‘Caucasian European’. They were of course all of them the same ‘ethnic group’. I presume that we have moved on now in missions like that and have a slightly more
correct question such as ‘nationality’, although even that has its problems. It is one thing changing the vocabulary on application forms, quite another rewiring people’s minds.
When I am asked about Albania, I am always pleased to put some misconceptions right. One of these preconceptions is that the country is just like all the other Balkan countries. Of course it is not. For example, very few Westerners, as I have pointed out before in these pages, have any idea of Albania’s unique distinction during the Second World War of saving not only all her own Jews, but every one who came looking for sanctuary.
Which is why I cannot really work out the snooty attitude, spoken or unspoken by many other Balkaners towards Albania. People who take that view are mostly Slavs, although the Kosovans are guilty as well, to some extent. The Greeks of course believe, hilariously, that they are not really Balkan at all, presumably on the basis that they managed to oil themselves into the EU and are no longer, with the accession of Bulgaria, the most corrupt country in it. All this attitude on the part of your neighbours may have something to do with the late development of Albania’s nationhood. Some of you may agree with me though that frankly in the Balkans the less developed the sense of nationalism, generally the more people stay alive. Those who were in Albania during the Kosovo War will remember that when the Serbian Army was attacking unarmed civilians, the Albanian Army was protecting the Serb minority areas in its own country. It cannot have been easy to have been a Serbian living in Albania at that time, but at the very least you were not going to be thrown out of your home and murdered.
Nationalism is a huge topic. Millions of words are spoken and written about it. Rather fewer are uttered about tolerance, except in the kind of meaningless verbiage churned out by international organisations. Albania and Albanians make very little of their tolerance. There is no conceit about it, and I have never heard anyone boast about it. Perhaps it is about time that Albanian diplomats as well as journalists begin to make a little bit more of their country’s illustrious history, and occasionally mention that it is the only country in the region without mass graves.
