Turkish Forum

Category: Albania

  • “Turkey lobbies for Kosovo recognition”

    “Turkey lobbies for Kosovo recognition”

    Source: Tanjug

    19871654474e96d66ca6627814682251 hugeISTANBUL — Albanian President Bamir Topi has said Turkey is lobbying hard with other countries to get them to recognize Kosovo’s unilaterally declared independence.

    “I had a chance to bring up the issue of the recognition of Kosovo’s independence with Turkish President Abdullah Gul, who informed me he discussed the issue with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,” Topi said Wednesday after a visit to Turkey.

    He told Istanbul-based daily Hurriyet that Brazil was among the 95 countries that still have not recognized Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence in 2008.

    Along with Afghanistan and the U.S., Turkey was among the first to recognize Kosovo and has been trying to win support for its independence among Islamic countries. There have been unsuccessful attempts to pass a special resolution in the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

    “The outlook is optimistic and we expect more countries will recognize the state of Kosovo,” Topi said in the interview.

    When asked if there have been formal or informal talks about a possible union between Albania and Kosovo, the Albanian president said these were two countries which wanted to become members of the European Union.

    “In a symbolic sense, the union of the two countries will happen in Brussels, just as it is happening with other countries,” he explained.

    via B92 – News – “Turkey lobbies for Kosovo recognition”.

  • Turkey lobbying hard for Kosovo, says Tirana

    Turkey lobbying hard for Kosovo, says Tirana

    ERISA DAUTAJ ŞENERDEM

    ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

    Albaninan President Bamir Topi speaks at a meeting in Istanbul. DAILY NEWS photo, Emrah GÜREL
    Albaninan President Bamir Topi speaks at a meeting in Istanbul. DAILY NEWS photo, Emrah GÜREL

    Turkey is strongly lobbying for increasing the number of countries that recognize Kosovo, according to Albaninan President Bamir Topi.

    “I had the opportunity to raise [the issue of recognition of Kosovo] with Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who also informed me that he had a discussion with the President of Brazil Dilma Roussef on the issue of Kosovo’s recognition,” Topi said in an interview with the Hürriyet Daily News after participating in a Turkey-Albania Business Council meeting at Turkey’s Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEİK) in Istanbul.

    Brazil is not among the 85 states that have recognized Kosovo since it declared independence in 2007. The Gulf state of Kuwait announced yesterday that it has recognized Kosovo as an independent country and has decided to establish diplomatic ties at the ambassadorial level, according to an AFP report.

    Turkey’s authorities have a solid resolve to support new recognitions of Kosovo, and are lobbying other countries continue recognizing the new state, Topi said. “The perspective is optimistic and we expect more countries to recognize Kosovo in the future.”

    The position of the Albanian state regarding Kosovo is the same. The situation in Kosovo is irrevocable regarding its independence and functioning as a sovereign state, the Albanian president said. “This has been demonstrated even by the planet’s strongest states, including the United States, a majority of European Union member states and Turkey.”

    Regarding efforts by the EU to bring Kosovo and Serbia back to the negotiating table after tension in northern Kosovo, Topi said: “I am confident that the EU will not fail in the orientation of these discussions.”

    Kosovo’s government ruled out talks with Serbia over the flashpoint on Oct. 10, as the EU facilitator for the Belgrade-Prishtina dialogue, Robert Cooper, began a two-day visit in a bid to revive talks between the two sides, according to an AFP report. “Kosovo has a clear platform (for the talks) with red lines. The independence, territorial integrity and internal structure and system of Kosovo,” Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said in a statement.

    “Talks also have their own complications. They do not always progress as required. But this is a process and within a process. We encourage fluidity and continuity of negotiations,” Albania’s President Topi said. The talks, as already stated by Kosovo’s institutions, will be realized for all issues of reciprocal interests of technical character, but starting from positions of sovereignty, which means Kosovo and Serbia can negotiate as two independent sovereign countries, he added.

    The dialogue was interrupted in late September following a new wave of violence in northern Kosovo where the Serb population, which remains loyal to Belgrade, is concentrated. The situation there remains tense.

    Asked whether there are formal or informal talks between Albania and Kosovo on a possible unification of the two countries, Topi said: “Albania and Kosovo are two states that have a single aspiration, to be members of the EU, and in a symbolic sense, unification of the two states will occur in Brussels, as it will happen for other countries.”

    Topi also called for Turkish companies to invest more in Albania, especially in the tourism sector, during his speech at the business council. “Economic relations do not yet respond to the excellent relations between the two countries at the political level. We have taken notes of all suggestions [by Turkish business representatives] and will work to attract more Turkish investments to Albania, particularly in the fields of tourism, energy and mining,” he said.

    via Turkey lobbying hard for Kosovo, says Tirana – Hurriyet Daily News.

  • While you were watching Egypt, Balkans are like a bomb ready to explode

    While you were watching Egypt, Balkans are like a bomb ready to explode

    SHARP-EYED observers have noted that some of the protestors that brought down Egypt’s president used the clenched-fist logo of  Otpor, the well-organised, foreign-financed civic resistance movement that helped topple Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Parts of the Serbian press, notes Florian Bieber, an academic who works on Balkan affairs, have claimed that former Otpor activists helped train some of the opposition groups.

    balkans

    With the world’s attention on the Arab world, the political instability gripping much of the western Balkans has largely been ignored. Yet so serious is the unrest here—including mass demonstrations in Belgrade, Tirana and Skopje—that one diplomat told me his country’s foreign ministry had asked him if he thought that Egypt-style revolution might sweep northwards into the Balkans. (His answer was an emphatic “no”.) Here is a round-up of recent developments:

    Kosovo held an election on December 12th, but still has no government. Following allegations of “industrial-scale” fraud, re-runs had to be held. Until an apparent breakthrough yesterday, the country’s politicians had been unable to secure the basic outlines of a deal which would permit the formation of a government. Now, however, a faction within the Democratic Party of Kosovo of Hashim Thaci, the acting prime minister, has been forced to drop its insistence that its man, Jakup Krasniqi, the acting president, be given the job formally.

    Behgjet Pacolli, a tycoon, now looks set to become president. In exchange his party, the New Kosovo Alliance, will enter into coalition with Mr Thaci. Mr Pacolli is married to a Russian, which, given Moscow’s refusal to recognise Kosovo’s independence, leaves some Kosovars appalled.

    Two years after independence, Mr Thaci has never been so weak politically. He has been weakened by a row with Fatmir Limaj, the outgoing minister of transport, who enjoys much support in the party. Internationally, his standing has been shredded by a recent Council of Europe report making all sorts of lurid allegations against him. EULEX, the EU’s police mission in Kosovo, is now investigating. Partly as a consequence Kosovo’s European integration process has failed to get off the ground. Five of the EU’s 27 members do not recognise Kosovo.

    The situation in Macedonia is little better. Nikola Gruevski, the prime minister, has set off for Washington seeking support for his attempts to speed EU and NATO integration, but he may get his ear chewed off when he arrives. Solving the almost 20-year-old name dispute with Greece appears less of a priority in Skopje than ever. Construction of a giant  plinth that will support a statue of Alexander the Great is proceeding briskly, guaranteeing fresh outrage in Greece.

    The Social Democratic opposition has pulled out of parliament, and Macedonia is gripped by the saga of A1 Television, whose bank accounts have been frozen for a second time by the courts. Mr Gruevski’s opponents say that the government is trying to muzzle the last bastion of free speech in the country. Nonsense, claim government supporters. The courts are simply clamping down on tax evasion. In fact, the two arguments do not contradict each other. The smart money is on an early election in June.

    Meanwhile a small group of Albanians and Macedonians fought a pitched battle in Skopje castle on February 13th, where the government has begun building what it says is a museum, in the shape of a church. The problem is that the castle is in an Albanian, and hence Muslim, part of town. When the Albanians protested, saying that the structure was being built over an ancient Illyrian site,  Pasko Kuzman, the chief archaeologist, said construction would stop. But builders went in at night to continue their work, which led the Albanians to try and dismantle the structure. And so on, and so on.

    Over in Albania the prime minister, Sali Berisha, has accused the opposition of staging a coup, following a demonstration on January 21st that went horribly wrong when Republican Guards allegedly fired on opposition supporters, killing four. The demonstration sprang from charges by the opposition, led by Edi Rama, the Socialist mayor of Tirana, that Mr Berisha was returned to power in June 2009 by fraudulent elections. Unlike Macedonia, Albania is a member of NATO, but its EU integration path has effectively stalled.*

    The Serbian government has been holed and is taking on water—but has not sunk yet. Mladjan Dinkic, head of the G17 Plus party and Serbia’s deputy prime minister, had been openly criticising his governmental colleagues from President Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party. On February 14th Mirko Cvetkovic, the prime minister, moved to sack him. Mr Dinkic resigned today but stopped short of pulling his party out of the government.

    How long the Serbian government can limp on like this is anyone’s guess. Tomislav Nikolic, leader of the opposition Serbian Progressive Party, has said that unless new elections are called before April 5th he will lead more protests in Belgrade. Watch this space.

    Last but not least, Bosnia and Hercegovina. Elections there were held on October 3rd, but there is still no government at state level. No surprise there. Progress on anything, let alone EU integration, has been stalled in Bosnia since 2006 in the wake of the failure of the so-called “April Package” of constitutional reforms. Al Jazeera recently announced plans for a Balkans channel, based in Sarajevo and broadcasting in what it delicately calls “the regional language”. Given the station’s role as the cheerleader of revolt in Tunisia and Egypt, one can understand diplomats’ concerns.

    Global Agenda

  • Turkey sends aid to flood-hit Albania

    Turkey sends aid to flood-hit Albania

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul held a telephone conversation with his Albanian counterpart Bamir Topi.

    Sunday, 05 December 2010 10:57

    Turkey has taken action to give a helping hand to the Balkans following the recent flood disaster in the region.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul held a telephone conversation with his Albanian counterpart Bamir Topi.

    (Army forces evacuate a person from the flooded area of Shkoder, some 100 km (62 miles) north of the capital Tirana.)
    (Army forces evacuate a person from the flooded area of Shkoder, some 100 km (62 miles) north of the capital Tirana.)

    President Topi said that they needed help to evacuate people from the flood-hit areas. He added that they also required Turkey’s assistance in the areas of logistics and transportation.

    President Gul said that Turkey was ready to do its utmost to help Albanian people.

    Turkish Armed Forces sent three evacuation helicopters and Turkish relief agency, the Red Crescent, sent a truckload of blankets and tents to Albania.

    The Red Crescent will also send tents, blankets, foodstuff and medicine to Montenegro on December 7.

    Hundreds of people are being evacuated from northwestern Albania as their homes are threatened by widespread flooding. The government declared a state of emergency earlier this week in northwestern districts following days of torrential rain.

    Agencies

  • Turkey and Russia: Cleaning up the Mess in the Middle East

    Turkey and Russia: Cleaning up the Mess in the Middle East

    There has been no magic hand guiding Turkey and Russia as they form the axis of a new political formation. Turkey, once the ‘sick man of Europe’, is now ‘the only healthy man of Europe’, notes Eric Walberg.

    The neocon plan to transform the Middle East and Central Asia into a pliant client of the US empire and its only-democracy-in-the-Middle-East is now facing a very different playing field. Not only are the wars against the Palestinians, Afghans and Iraqis floundering, but they have set in motion unforeseen moves by all the regional players.

    The empire faces a resurgent Turkey, heir to the Ottomans, who governed a largely peaceful Middle East for half a millennium. As part of a dynamic diplomatic outreach under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey re-established the Caliphate visa-free tradition with Albania, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya and Syria last year. In February Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Ertugrul Gunay offered to do likewise with Egypt. There is “a great new plan of creating a Middle East Union as a regional equivalent of the European Union” with Turkey, fresh from a resounding constitutional referendum win by the AKP, writes Israel Shamir.

    Turkey also established a strategic partnership with Russia during the past two years, with a visa-free regime and ambitious trade and investment plans (denominated in rubles and lira), including the construction of new pipelines and nuclear energy facilities.

    Just as Turkey is heir to the Ottomans, Russia is heir to the Byzantines, who ruled a largely peaceful Middle East for close to a millennium before the Turks. Together, Russia and Turkey have far more justification as Middle Eastern “hegemons” than the British-American 20th century usurpers, and they are doing something about it.

    In a delicious irony, invasions by the US and Israel in the Middle East and Eurasia have not cowed the countries affected, but emboldened them to work together, creating the basis for a new alignment of forces, including Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iran.

    Syria, Turkey and Iran are united not only by tradition, faith, resistance to US-Israeli plans, but by their common need to fight Kurdish separatists, who have been supported by both the US and Israel. Their economic cooperation is growing by leaps and bounds. Adding Russia to the mix constitutes a like-minded, strong regional force encompassing the full socio-political spectrum, from Sunni and Shia Muslim, Christian, even Jewish, to secular traditions.

    This is the natural regional geopolitical logic, not the artificial one imposed over the past 150 years by the British and now US empires. Just as the Crusaders came to wreak havoc a millennium ago, forcing locals to unite to expel the invaders, so today’s Crusaders have set in motion the forces of their own demise.

    Turkey’s bold move with Brazil to defuse the West’s stand-off with Iran caught the world’s imagination in May. Its defiance of Israel after the Israeli attack on the Peace Flotilla trying to break the siege of Gaza in June made it the darling of the Arab world.

    Russia has its own, less spectacular contributions to these, the most burning issues in the Middle East today. There are problems for Russia. Its crippled economy and weakened military give it pause in anything that might provoke the world superpower. Its elites are divided on how far to pursuit accommodation with the US. The tragedies of Afghanistan and Chechnya and fears arising from the impasse in most of the “stans” continue to plague Russia’s relations with the Muslim Middle East.

    Since the departure of Soviet forces from Egypt in 1972, Russia has not officially had a strong presence in the Middle East. Since the mid- 1980s, it saw a million-odd Russians emigrate to Israel, who like immigrants anywhere, are anxious to prove their devotion and are on the whole unwilling to give up land in any two-state solution for Palestine. As Anatol Sharansky quipped to Bill Clinton after he emigrated, “I come from one of the biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in half. No, thank you.” Russia now has its very own well-funded Israel Lobby; many Russians are dual Israeli citizens, enjoying a visa-free regime with Israel.

    Then there is Russia’s equivocal stance on the stand-off between the West and Iran. Russia cooperates with Iran on nuclear energy, but has concerns about Iran’s nuclear intentions, supporting Security Council sanctions and cancelling the S-300 missile deal it signed with Iran in 2005. It is also increasing its support for US efforts in Afghanistan. Many commentators conclude that these are signs that the Russian leadership under President Dmitri Medvedev is caving in to Washington, backtracking on the more anti-imperial policy of Putin. “They showed that they are not reliable,” criticised Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi.

    Russia is fence-sitting on this tricky dilemma. It is also siding, so far, with the US and the EU in refusing to include Turkey and Brazil in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme. “The Non-Aligned countries in general, and Iran in particular, have interpreted the Russian vote as the will on the part of a great power to prevent emerging powers from attaining the energy independence they need for their economic development. And it will be difficult to make them forget this Russian faux pas,” argues Thierry Meyssan at voltairenet.org.

    Whatever the truth is there, the cooperation with Iran and now Turkey, Syria and Egypt on developing peaceful nuclear power, and the recent agreement to sell Syria advanced P-800 cruise missiles show Russia is hardly the plaything of the US and Israel in Middle East issues. Israel is furious over the missile sale to Syria, and last week threatened to sell “strategic, tie-breaking weapons” to “areas of strategic importance” to Russia in revenge. On both Iran and Syria, Russia’s moves suggest it is trying to calm volatile situations that could explode.

    There are other reasons to see Russia as a possible Middle East powerbroker. The millions of Russian Jews who moved to Israel are not necessarily a Lieberman-like Achilles Heel for Russia. A third of them are scornfully dismissed as not sufficiently kosher and could be a serious problem for a state that is founded solely on racial purity. Many have returned to Russia or managed to move on to greener pastures. Already, such prominent rightwing politicians as Moshe Arens, political patron of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are considering a one-state solution. Perhaps these Russian immigrants will produce a Frederik de Klerk to re-enact the dismantling of South African apartheid.

    Russia holds another intriguing key to peace in the Middle East. Zionism from the start was a secular socialist movement, with religious conservative Jews strongly opposed, a situation that continues even today, despite the defection of many under blandishments from the likes of Ben Gurion and Netanyahu. Like the Palestinians, True Torah Jews don’t recognise the “Jewish state”.

    But wait! There is a legitimate Jewish state, a secular one set up in 1928 in Birobidjan Russia, in accordance with Soviet secular nationalities policies. There is nothing stopping the entire population of Israeli Jews, orthodox and secular alike, from decamping to this Jewish homeland, blessed with abundant raw materials, Golda Meir’s “a land without a people for a people without a land”. It has taken on a new lease on life since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev made an unprecedented visit this summer, the first ever of a Russian (or Soviet) leader and pointed out the strong Russian state support it has as a Jewish homeland where Yiddish, the secular language of European Jews (not sacred Hebrew), is the state language.

    There has been no magic hand guiding Turkey and Russia as they form the axis of a new political formation. Rather it is the resilience of Islam in the face of Western onslaught, plus — surprisingly — a page from the history of Soviet secular national self-determination. Turkey, once the “sick man of Europe”, is now “the only healthy man of Europe”, Turkish President Abdullah Gul was told at the UN Millennium Goals Summit last week, positioning it along with the Russian, and friends Iranian and Syrian to clean up the mess created by the British empire and its “democratic” offspring, the US and Israel.

    While US and Israeli strategists continue to pore over mad schemes to invade Iran, Russian and Turkish leaders plan to increase trade and development in the Middle East, including nuclear power. From a Middle Eastern point of view, Russia’s eagerness to build power stations in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Egypt shows a desire to help accelerate the economic development that Westerners have long denied the Middle East — other than Israel — for so long. This includes Lebanon where Stroitransgaz and Gazprom will transit Syrian gas until Beirut can overcome Israeli-imposed obstacles to the exploitation of its large reserves offshore.

    Russia in its own way, like its ally Turkey, has placed itself as a go-between in the most urgent problems facing the Middle East — Palestine and Iran. “Peace in the Middle East holds the key to a peaceful and stable future in the world,” Gul told the UN Millennium Goals Summit — in English. The world now watches to see if their efforts will bear fruit.

    Eric Walberg writes for Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at .

    , 30.09.2010

  • Who Killed the Sultan?

    Who Killed the Sultan?

    by Robert Murray Davis
    7 December 2009

    Translations of little-known Albanian oral epics add another dimension to the endless conversation over the Battle of Kosovo.
    The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic. Introduction by Anna Di Lellio; translations by Robert Elsie. I. B. Tauris, 2009.

    Rudyard Kipling may have been right when he wrote that “There are nine and 60 ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right,” but as Anna Di Lellio shows in the masterly introduction to these translations of eight Albanian variants of the story of Sultan Murat and a Balkan Christian hero, there can be at least as many ways of understanding, interpreting, and using or misusing them.

    Di Lellio, a sociologist, journalist, and university professor with extensive experience in Kosovo, thinks that some of those ways can be politically and psychologically damaging. She has several related purposes in her commentary on these poems sung by Albanian preservers of a centuries-old oral tradition, about (sometimes admittedly) legendary events grounded in the historical battle outside Pristina in 1389 that cleared the way for the Ottoman empire’s further expansion into the Balkans. First, and possibly least important for the general reader, is to present these poems, in facing pages of Albanian and English, to a broader audience. More broadly, she tries “to rescue them from marginalization as folklore, or from turning them into a new prison for collective memory,” managed by “memory entrepreneurs” with axes to grind. Given the complexities of Balkan history, the second is probably, and unfortunately, impossible, since many Serb commentators “have reduced Serbian history and politics to a story” in which facts must give way to “uninterrupted remembrance.”

    CENTURIES OF CLAIMS AND COUNTERCLAIMS

    Most important for the observer of contemporary politics is Di Lellio’s analysis of the significance for Albanians of the ways in which the story of Murat’s death helps to create a national narrative by establishing their nation, and more broadly their people, as a part of Balkan resistance against Turkish invasion and, by extension, as part of European Christendom – and, not incidentally, resident in Kosovo from prehistoric times. Strategically this is important because, she says, Serbs have used Albanian allegiance to Islam to support an exclusive claim to Kosovo that “goes almost always undisputed in western diplomatic and intellectual circles.” The counter-claim by a young Kosovar I recently met that his country (greater Albania?) is 40 percent Catholic, 40 percent Muslim – figures that would be a surprise to the compilers of the CIA World Factbook – is clearly an attempt to refute the Serb position.

    The complementary Serbian and Albanian poetic narratives pose many contradictions, most obviously the name and nationality of the hero who killed Murat even as the Ottoman forces were victorious on the field of battle. No historical authority seems to support either side. In Serbian epics, he is a Serb called Milos Obilic and early in the last century and during and after the battles following the dissolution of Yugoslavia he “evoked a medieval past of national greatness.” In Albanian, the hero is named Millosh Kopiliq, an Albanian who was for centuries a local folk hero who became part of the national narrative during the Kosovan struggle for independence, useful as indicating a Western identity before what is referred to as the long parenthesis of Islamic domination and conversion, and a complement to the contemporary figure of the slain Kosovo Liberation Army commander Adem Jashari as a symbol of armed resistance.

    Of much later date, this painting glorifies the Ottomans’ enemies in the
    Battle of Kosovo even as it captures the convoluted course of that day’s events.

    As might be expected in the Balkans, since we are dealing with human beings, neither side can fully agree among its own cohorts. Albanians are ambivalent about whether Islam is bad in the West/good, East/bad Manichean dichotomy or whether “multi-confessionalism” and religious tolerance (which much resembles indifference) is the more profitable stance, especially if it is vaguely Christian. Or, as De Lellio puts it, whether “Muslim identity … is conceived as foreign, or as constitutive of the nation.” At one point, there was some discussion in Kosovo about mass conversion to Catholicism, though it came to nothing. Especially in the period after 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, that discussion was likely, and perhaps calculated, to appeal to the European Union and the United States.

    The Slav-Albanian battle over facts and interpretations extends far beyond the use and misuse of these epics from the oral tradition. Di Lellio points to the controversy over entries about Albania in the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, published in Croatia in 1980, after which the Serbs demanded that the reference to Albanian descent from the ancient Illyrians be deleted in an obvious attempt to demonstrate the Albanians had no historical place in and therefore right to Kosovo. Almost 30 years later, a similar battle has erupted over the new Macedonian encyclopedia which refers to Albanians, who make up about a quarter of Macedonia’s population, as Shqiptars – a term that Albanians consider derogatory when used by outsiders – and as primitive people who came from the mountains.

    The prime minister of Albania condemned “the racist, anti-Albanian doctrines of our neighbors [which] are based on the need to find an identity, because those who fake history just confirm that they are searching for their own identity. Albanians are not.” An Albanian rights group spokesman said the reference work “jeopardized interethnic harmony in Macedonia.” Cynical observers will be surprised that he has been able to find some. In any case, the offending entries will be deleted.

    In the 1990s, a friend joined me in Vienna to travel to Hungary. She asked, “Why can’t these people over here just get along with each other?” “We’re only going to be here two weeks,” I said. “I can’t possibly explain it in that short a time.” More than a dozen years later, I still can’t. Anna Di Lellio deals with some of the causes, but she is really interested in furthering “the democratic project” of “deconstructing a national creed.” People of good will, not always easy to find in any region, can only wish her luck.

    Robert Murray Davis regularly reviews literature and books on the Balkans for TOL.