The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Macedonian Encyclopaedia Offends Albanians
Skopje | 21 September 2009 | Sinisa-Jakov Marusic
Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts
In announcing the lawsuit, DUI legislator Xhevat Ademi told reporters that the academy's latest edition of the Encyclopaedia of Macedonia contains “insinuations and lies” regarding the origin of the Albanian people in Macedonia.
The party and several ethnic Albanian members of the academy object to the encyclopaedia's presentation of Albanians as “settlers” in Macedonia, and to references to them as “Shiptari”, a term considered derogatory and offensive to ethnic Albanians in the country.
DUI also objects to the fact that their leader, who was the former head of the 2001 Albanian insurgency, is described as a “suspected war criminal”.
Macedonian authorities launched a probe against the insurgents’ leadership after the conflict ended. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, took over the case but did not bring any indictments. Ahmeti was never mentioned by name as a suspect in the government investigation.
“DUI will do everything it takes in order to amend the mistakes, lies and [distortions] of the truth in this publication, printed with taxpayers' money” an official statement from DUI reads.
MANU’s Blaze Ristovski, who is the main supervisor of the edition, argues that the political party is exaggerating, adding that qualified experts wrote all the articles in the encyclopaedia.
“Unfortunately, some of our Albanian colleagues, under pressure from political parties, withdrew from this capital project. Some other authorities from the Albanian ethnic community wrote the different units,” he told reporters.
But some of his ethnic Albanian colleagues were quick to distance themselves from the claims in the encyclopaedia.
“It is obvious that the project is influenced by daily politics,” academy member Shukri Rahimi told newspaper Dnevnik. He claimed that he was initially offered the position of editor for the section dedicated to Albanian history, but “knowing who I would have to cooperate with, I declined”.
A second MANU member, Alajdin Abazi, also distanced himself from the project, in comments to Alsat M TV, arguing that all of his Albanian colleagues did the same right at the beginning.
About one quarter of Macedonian population is ethnic Albanian, who consider themselves as much indigenes as the ethnic Macedonian majority.
After the 2001 armed conflict, a peace treaty was formulated that envisaged the extension of greater rights to the Albanian community. The leadership of the Albanian insurgency subsequently transformed themselves into DUI.
2009-09-21 12:35:31