By passing an anti-discrimination law that discriminates, Macedonia’s ruling conservatives have abused the whole issue.
Kadare Cancels Greek Visit After Racist Chants
Tirana | 16 April 2010 |
“Being aware of the recent events in Athens expressing racism against Albanians I am canceling my visit to your country,” Kadare is cited as writing by local broadcaster Top-Channel TV. “You know very well my admiration for Greek literature and culture, but I believe that in this climate that lacks civility, my visit would be premature,” Kadare adds.
Video footage taken on March 25 at a military parade in Athens appeared on the internet, and showed soldiers of the Greek army shouting racist slogans against Greece’s neighbours: Albanians and Macedonians.
“They are Skopians, they are Albanians, we will make new clothes out of their skins,” and “You do not become a Greek, you are born one,” and “We’re going to spill your blood, Albanian pig” were some of the chants that could be heard from the footage.
The Greek ambassadors to Skopje and Tirana apologised for the incident.
Greek media reported that the officers who were shouting the racist slogans were part of the Greek coast guard special forces unit. The head of the unit has been suspended and the army has launched an investigation to determine exactly who was involved in the incident.
Greece has a large Albanian community living and working within its borders. Although bilateral political relations are good, the issue of Greece's reluctance to recognise the expulsion of the Albanian Cham minority from Greece at the end of World War Two is still an open issue.
Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the southern town of Gjirokastra, near the Greek border. He first studied at the University of Tirana in Albania, and later at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
During half a century of Stalinist rule in Albania his works attacked totalitarianism and the doctrines of socialist realism with subtle allegories.
A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, his novels and essays have been translated into more than 40 languages and he has been awarded with the Booker International Prize for literature and the Prince of Asturias Prize, among others.
2010-04-16 16:59:09