-Caveat Lector-
Via Sydney Morning Herald
>From LA Times
> Saturday, August 7, 1999
>
>
>
> ALBANIA
>
> Ancient legal code fuels surge in vendetta killings
>
>
>
> By MARJORIE MILLER in Golaj, Albania
>
> For 11 weeks, Zeke Rrushi could feel the tremors of NATO bombs
> and Serbian shells exploding on the border with Kosovo a
> kilometre or two away. He listened to intermittent sniper fire
> and to the staccato of automatic rifles so close to his
> farmhouse.
>
> But to Mr Rrushi's mind, the only real danger to his family came
> from the barrel of his neighbour's shotgun.
>
> The Rrushis have been fighting their own war for seven years,
> locked in a blood feud with their neighbours that has taken at
> least four lives and threatens to take many more.
>
> Except for a few weeks during planting season and the harvest
> each year - when their enemies grant them a truce - Mr Rrushi,
> 60, and 24 other adult males in his family have not set foot
> outside their compound of farmhouses since 1992 for fear of being
> killed.
>
> Mr Rrushi lives deep in the mountains of northern Albania, where
> little has changed in centuries. Land, family honour and revenge
> are the currency of these parts; the arm of government and rule
> of law do not reach here.
>
> Instead, the farmers of northern Albania live by a 500-year-old
> code called the kanun of Lek Dukagjini, which lays out formal
> "laws" for marriage, birth, death and inheritance and also
> determines when it is permissible to kill an enemy in a blood
> feud.
>
> It was a system for administering justice among the warring
> tribes of a remote mountain region of northern Albania and
> southern Yugoslavia that even the occupying Ottoman Turks found
> difficult to control.
>
> Handed down orally from generation to generation, a version of
> the kanun was put into writing in the 1920s.
>
> The communist government that ruled Albania from 1944 to 1991
> tried to wipe out vendetta killings and the kanun. Blood-feud
> crimes dropped dramatically.
>
> But the number of feuds has climbed steadily in Albania since the
> fall of communism and, particularly, since the collapse of the
> central government in 1997.
>
> An independent blood-feud reconciliation agency says there are
> more than 2,700 ongoing feuds in Albania, some of them old
> quarrels revived after lying dormant for half a century.
>
> Although some academics say this estimate is inflated by
> Mafia-style killings and run-of-the-mill crimes, there is no
> doubt that Albanians are resorting to the kanun to fill the
> vacuum of modern law and government.
>
> Blood feuds have been known to start over as little as a game of
> cards. However, like many post-communist disputes, the one
> between the Rrushis and the Bardhoshi family, neighbours who live
> less than a kilometre away, is over land - about 2.5 hectares. To
> hear the Rrushis tell it, the Bardhoshis are Johnny-come-latelies
> to the region, having arrived about 160 years ago to settle on a
> plot of land the Rrushis say they once owned.
>
> "We have been here for centuries. We gave them a small piece of
> land at that time, and then they abused our hospitality," Mr
> Rrushi said.
>
> After the collapse of communism, when collective ownership of the
> land was abolished, the Rrushis say the Bardhoshis "occupied" a
> plot of land that belonged to them. The Rrushis countered by
> seizing a plot belonging to the Bardhoshis.
>
> "They started slapping and hitting. Then we got our weapons,"
> said Isuf Rrushi, 70, another family elder.
>
> The Rrushis attacked in June 1992. They say three Bardhoshis died
> in the gun battle; the Bardhoshis insist that they lost four
> family members.
>
> According to the kanun, "blood is paid for with blood", and the
> Rrushi killers had to retreat into the confines of their home or
> face execution, because the Bardhoshis were entitled to avenge
> the deaths.
>
> For years, the Bardhoshis waited and watched. They agreed to a
> few short truces under the kanun so the Rrushis could reap enough
> food to eat. They were patient. Then, in 1997, they got their
> chance: they killed the son of 71-year-old Ali Rrushi as he stood
> by his front door.
>
> - Los Angeles Times
>From Irish Times
> Saturday, August 7, 1999
>
> KLA blamed for 'reverse
> ethnic cleansing'
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------- WORLD VIEW / By Seamus Martin
>
> The word "understandable" is frequently used in Western Europe
> and the United States to describe the desire for revenge by
> ethnic Albanians against ethnic Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) in
> Kosovo.
>
> On June 21st in Prizren, the sector of Kosovo in which German
> troops are deployed, a series of events took place which defied
> understanding.
>
> On that morning, Trifun Stamenkovic and Maria Filipovic set out
> on separate journeys to do their shopping in the town centre.
> Trifun left his home at 10 a.m. and returned an hour later. He
> told his story to representatives of the US-based Human Rights
> Watch organisation.
>
> "I couldn't find my wife. When I came inside [my house] I saw the
> broken windows and everything broken. I was in the doorway and I
> went back outside and saw a German patrol, two jeeps. I told them
> my wife was missing, that she wasn't in the house. When I entered
> the house with them I saw only my wife's knees. Her knees were
> bloody. I didn't see the rest of her body; the Germans took me
> outside. They saw her dead; they didn't let me in to see her."
>
> Trifun Stamenkovic is 85. His murdered wife Marica was 77. The
> German soldiers did not allow him to see her body because she had
> suffered appalling wounds.
>
> Half and hour later, Maria Filipovic returned to her home in the
> same street to find her husband Panta (63) dying of stab wounds.
> Her neighbours, members of the small Albanian Catholic community,
> told her the killings had been committed by members of the Kosovo
> Liberation Army (KLA). Both victims had their throats cut. German
> soldiers told Human Rights Watch that Marica Stamenkovic's throat
> had been severed almost to the point of decapitation.
>
> In the shorthand of the undeclared war the grey shades of reality
> were thrown into sharp blackand-white relief. The "good guys"
> were the KLA on the ground and the NATO forces 15,000 feet above
> them. The "bad guys" were known, in a term which pushed
> simplistic definitions to the verge of racism, as "the Serbs".
>
> Perhaps this demonising of an entire nationality may have helped
> some to view the events of that dreadful morning in Prizren, and
> the murder, two days later, of 14 farm workers, who had been
> promised but not given Kfor protection, as "understandable". If
> so, then we had better think again about applying such dangerous
> labels in future.
>
> Serbs such as the Arkan gang, and undoubtedly a number of Kosovo
> Serbs as well, took part in some of the most brutal crimes seen
> since the end of the second World War. A small number of Roma
> were accomplices.
>
> Mercenaries from "civilised" west European countries, including
> Denmark and Finland, are now beginning to admit their involvement
> in some of the more appalling instances of mass murder.
>
> Things have now changed. We are faced, in the short period since
> the NATO-led forces of Kfor have taken control of Kosovo, with
> ethnic cleansing in reverse. Reliable estimates show that more
> than 160,000 Serbs and Roma have left their Kosovo homes.
>
> The Human Rights Watch report published in New York this week
> lays the blame firmly on the KLA, despite denials from that
> organisation's leadership.
>
> In a society dominated by the traditions of families and clans,
> the KLA, known to Albanians as the UCK (Ushtria Clirimtaree
> Kosoves) has bizarre and disparate pedigrees.
>
> One "political" grouping is dominated by ultra right-wing clans
> whose elders served in the volunteer Skander beg division of the
> Nazi SS. This group fought Tito's communist partisans and, to its
> everlasting shame, made its con trib ution to the Holocaust by
> rounding up members of Kosovo's then tiny, and now non-existent,
> Jewish community.
>
> On the extreme left, most of the KLA's exiled leaders have
> emerged from the Stalinist tradition formulated in Albania proper
> by that country's paranoid dictator, Enver Hoxha. Following
> internal Yugoslav autonomy in 1974, Mr Hoxha had his agents
> infiltrate Pristina's University. The philosophy of revolution in
> Stalin's tradition was fomented from across the border in Tirana
> and found willing adherents among sections of Kosovo's Albanian
> population.
>
> Both strands, though opposed in political theory, have certain
> aims in common. Almost all want Kosovo to be separated from
> Yugoslavia and become part of a "Greater Albania". Some want to
> annex parts of western Macedonia and eastern Montenegro where
> there are ethnic Albanian minorities.
>
> A large group, Human Rights Watch believes, is motivated by the
> will to purge Kosovo of Gypsies and Serbs and create an
> ethnically "pure" Albanian region. All appear prepared to put
> their ideological differences aside until their territorial
> ambitions have been fulfilled.
>
> The NATO forces at Kfor's core now find themselves in a situation
> in which many of those who once appeared to be their armed allies
> have become involved in an evil spree of racist murder,
> harassment, arson, destruction, looting and terror. Human rights
> watch has detected a slowness on the part of Kfor officers to
> come to terms with this. Many have shrugged the situation off as
> "inevitable". One told a representative of Human Rights Watch
> that his unit did not even try to keep track of abductions
> because they were so frequent.
>
> Even less excusably, an attempt by another Human Rights Watch
> researcher to report an incident of harassment in the village of
> Ljubizda on June 30th to the German Kfor contingent "required
> multiple visits to local posts and then to contingent
> headquarters in Prizren, where a CMIC (civilianmilitary
> implementation cell) officer appeared uninterested in the details
> of the case".
>
> . Human Rights Watch, in its report published this week, issues
> the following exhortation: "Finally, it is incumbent on the
> special representative of the United Nations secretary General
> and head of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo), Bernard
> Kouchner, KFOR Commander Sir Mike Jackson and the representatives
> of the United States and other leading NATO governments not only
> to condemn attacks on Serbs and Roma in Kosovo, but to make the
> treatment of minorities an urgent priority of the international
> community in Kosovo.
>
> In addition to more effective security arrangements, this means a
> willingness to condemn whoever is responsible for abuses and to
> press the leadership of the KLA and other Kosovo Albanian leaders
> to take action to prevent them." There can be no place for the
> word "understandable" in this context.
A<>E<>R
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