A slogan has emerged among legitimate voices: “Albania of Albanians, not of traitors,” offered as patriotism.
That Christopher S. HYLAND
Every nation reaches, at certain intervals, a threshold where it must choose between two definitions of itself – one open and one closed, one secure and one fearful – and Albania, a small country that I have supported for most of my life, is at such a threshold this week.
The case is the seaside in Zvërnec, where a protest against the behavior of a private security firm and against unanswered questions about a fragile lagoon and the ownership of southern land has become something bigger: a contest over what kind of country Albania aims to be. Among the legitimate voices, a slogan has emerged: “Albania of Albanians, not of traitors” – offered as patriotism. Having worked for three decades on Albanian and Kosovar issues and for the cause of interfaith understanding throughout the region, I would respectfully say that this phrase does not belong to any Albanian tradition worth preserving. Its origin is, in fact, foreign and well-known. It is a single template that the European far right has reused for a century, changing only the name in the void: “Deutschland den Deutschen” in 1930s Germany; “La France aux Français” in the rhetoric of the National Front; “Italia agli italiani”; and, just across the southern border of Albania, “Greece for the Greeks,” the credo of Golden Dawn.
Each of them presents itself as a devotion to the homeland; each is, on examination, a claim about who can be excluded from it.
The second line of the phrase – “not of traitors” – comes from closer home, from the wartime motto of the Balli Kombëtar; and a nation has a right to be wary when its slogans are inherited from the most destructive chapter of the 20th century. These are, after all, among the pathologies that flourish whenever identity is reduced to ideology. Albania, of all nations, has reason to know where closed definition leads, because it has already endured it. From 1944 to 1990, “Albania for Albanians” was not a slogan but a system – closed borders, enforced self-sufficiency, the belief that a people is safer alone – and it ultimately produced only impoverishment and displacement. When the system collapsed, roughly a third of the population emigrated in a single decade, so that today more Albanians live beyond the country’s borders than within them.
This diaspora – in Athens and Thessaloniki, in Rome, Milan, Munich, Geneva, London, and throughout the United States – is not a misfortune to be regretted, but one of the most stable foundations of the national economy, and it persists precisely because other societies received Albanians as welcome minorities.
A citizen who sings of exception in Tirana might consider, with sincerity, what the same principle would mean for his cousin in Athens. The first to suffer under “a nation for its own” are rarely foreigners within a country; they are the people of that country living elsewhere. There is a better legacy, and it is the opposite of blood. It is Besa—the Albanian word of honor, the obligation that obligates a host to protect anyone who has entered his home—and its most striking demonstration is a matter of fact, not legend. When World War II consigned Europe’s Jews to the camps, Albania became the rare occupied nation that ended the war with more Jews within its borders than when it began.
In Kruja, a seventeen-year-old named Refik Veseli convinced his parents, Veseli and Fatima, to hide the family of photographer Moshe Mandil; his name stands today among the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, and he was one of many. This is the spirit of a land where, for centuries, Muslims and Christians have lived as neighbors and treated hospitality not as a weakness of faith, but as its fullest expression – a conviction rooted in the spiritual dignity of every person.
(It should be made clear, and then set aside, that the anti-Semitic images recently circulating online about the Zvërnec project – the southern coast cartoonishly wrapped in an Israeli flag because one of its American investors is Jewish – are a minor insult to this very history and deserve no more attention than their name suggests.)
This heritage, not ethnic arithmetic, is what is worth defending. In fact, accuracy is mandatory, because accuracy is the first casualty whenever a slogan takes command. On May 30, masked private guards dragged and beat a demonstrator into the fenced-off site near the Narta lagoon, and Albanians were right to be horrified. However, what followed deserves greater attention. Within a single day, the State Police corrected its initial statement; the regional police director in Vlora was removed; a guard was arrested; and the developer publicly apologized and terminated its contract with the security company. In the days since, the licenses of two private security firms have been revoked, criminal proceedings have been opened, and the special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office has begun examining how the protected status of the Vjosa-Narta landscape has been altered.
The Albanian state and Prime Minister Rama deserve to be praised rather than condemned for such a swift and public correction – because this is precisely the constitutional reflex, the submission of force to the law, that membership in the European Union requires, and which Albania is constantly showing that it has achieved.
Seen without distortion, investment in itself is not a disaster, but an opportunity, and it responds to Albania’s truest need. The country’s deepest wound has never been foreign capital; it has been emigration, the constant loss of its youth.
A nation keeps its sons and daughters not by closing its borders, but by building, at home, the jobs and futures for which they now cross the sea. A significant tourist investment in the Riviera – financed by American partners and Gulf Arab capital, with prominent Qatari investors among the backers – promises construction, employment, infrastructure and a rightful place for Albania in the legitimate global economy. Honest questions remain and they must be answered openly: the ecology of a delicate coastline, transparency about how land title was transferred, and the rights and property of the Greek minority families of the south. These are issues that must be resolved according to law, by a secure and constitutional state – and not cases of conspiracy, nor pretexts for the imported grammar of exclusion.
What is emerging in this corner of the Balkans, for those willing to see it, is something more hopeful than a quarrel over a coastline.
It is the prospect of an Albania that completes its transition to the European Union; that takes its place, with Kosovo and its neighbors, in a Balkan Commonwealth founded on constitutional democracy, religious pluralism, and reconciliation; and that offers the world a Muslim-majority society at peace with its Jewish friends and Christian neighbors alike – a trend that complements, even expands, the spirit of the Abraham Accords.
Such an Albania needs no borrowed slogan, for it already possesses a better one of its own. Let the courts hold the guilty accountable; let the prosecutors pursue every environmental and legal case wherever it leads with integrity; let the developer meet the highest standard of transparency and care; and let the legal system itself rise, with judicious determination and an unhurried loyalty to due process, to the full seriousness of the case before it. None of this requires a scapegoat, and none of this requires fear. The Albania I have had the honor of supporting is the Albania of Faith and moral clarity – the country that sheltered the stranger when most of Europe turned him in, and whose fate lies not behind closed borders but on Europe’s open doorstep.
He kept his word before. He can keep it now too.
(Christopher S. Hyland is a veteran diplomatic advisor specializing in Balkan affairs. He served as Deputy National Political Director for Bill Clinton. He is a “Knight of Skanderbeg” in Albania, and a member of the “Order of Dr. Ibrahim Rugova” in Kosovo)