BROTHERS TURN INTO DISTANT COUSINS WITH DIFFERENT SHOPS

AIM TIRANA, September 17, 1999

PRISTINA - TIRANA. Mainland Albanians were taught in their books that Kosovo, in 1912, was an Albanian land that was unjustly invaded by the Serbs and cut off from its trunk. Kosovo Albanians were taught that Kosovo should have been Albania, and were thinking of that country as the heaven where there was no problem being Albanian.

But after more than 80 years of living in a separate state, and nearly fifty years of only symbolic contact, the contacts between the two communties as Albania opened up and became more accessible and Kosovo was under UN protectorate made the whole idea of a "great Albania" that would join the two look like a joke. Not only in geostrategic terms.

Now, mainland Albanians have the stereotype of Albanians from here as lousy and cheating, but rich, Kosovars, and those here the people from there as wild empoverished bandits.

It should have been predicted. In 1913, when Kosovo was finally awarded to Serbia as an Ottoman territory and "hearth of civilization", Albanian nationalist poet and Franciscan friar Gjergj Fishta said: "This is the worst that could have happened, I am afraid that they will never get together again."

The priest's prediction proves to be truer now, as the two Albanian societies have gone through different experiences that made their contact often a mixture of respective contempt and mistrust. The development of the two groupings as separate societies has created separate community belongings, in which, a common language and distant heritage cannot make the binding trick.

Albania has turned into a bitter experience for a lot of Kosovo Albanians, in Albanian Kosovars. When the country opened up in 1990, many thought it would fast turn into the paradise for them. But Albania's present harsh experience, an offset of the even harsher communist years, desillusioned the Kosovars. Media in Tirana and Prishtina alike occassionally report how Kosovars become prey of banditry in the north of Albania. This week, armed North Albanian bandits stopped a convoy of Kosovar cars that were taking the road from Durres to Kukes and then Kosovo. According to daily Koha Jone, one of the Kosovars lost DM 35,000 to bandits.

Such incidents, mixing dislike and envy with common banditry, were recorded even earlier in the 90s. Ibrahim Kadriu, a writer and journalist, recalled how a Tirana driver crashed the car into his in a visit in

1. "I got out of the car and told him "I want to get only your name and license plate for a complaint to my insurance company." He described the Tirana driver as a long-haired, badly shaved man in his 30s, a typical Albanian gangster. "He then responded to me, "You Kosovars, you are all bastards. Not only you are rich, but you want to get even more money. Then he threatened to kill me. A policeman was just standing there as an observer."

That was not an easy ride for Kadriu. He wrote down the license plate number of the man, and went to the police to find out the name, and have them confirm the accident. "The cop at the police station smoking slowly at the board, and told me, "You have to wait, our guys that can do this are out working, and this might take several hours to be done." "It was just a simple thing," said Kadriu, "and he was just waiting there to get a bribe."

Several other things made Albanians on each side of the border difficult to bind together and consider themselves as one society. The generally clannish and tribal background they inherited has made them consider the threat to the village was more important than the threat to the Albanian land. Even historically, what was praised as an Albanian historical movement, the 1878 league of Prizren, was more a collectivity of Northerners trying to defend some remote mountain areas trying to defend their territory.

Albania's creation as a state 1912 and the recognition of it boundaries the following year, was more a circumstance of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire than a desire of is own Moslem majority to build a nation state. Many historians do consider that it was a last insistence by Austria-Hungary Empire that made it a political unit. This went to show that when destitute Kosovo Albanians, left under Serbia, had turned to Albania as their Utopia, Albanians in Albania, busy with their poverty and struggle to build a political society, would not care. Albania's King Zog, who ruled between the two World Wars, crushed the Kosovar insurgency bases in Albania to that aim, as a means to establish power. A few thousand Kosovars that had left Ferizaj/Urosevac and Gnjilane areas to enter as refugees in Albania in the 20s had faced problems of reintegration into the society that persisted for at least one generation.

The harsh methods that a Kosovar strongman, Xhaferr Deva, used in Albania as its interior minister in the Quisling government of WW2 created resentment by Albanians from Albania. In Albania itself, Albanians had a different experience with the Germans, more suspicious of them than generally the Kosovars, who had joined with them wholeheartedly for the sake of getting rid of the Serbs.

During Communism, some Kosovars that entered Albania as a "free" territory in a romantic nationalist mode were jailed, interned, suspected as spies and were not having an easier fare.

Approaching a joke, Kosovar Albanian intellectuals in the 80s were watching Albanian television in the same fashion many Albanians were watching Yugoslav television through jamming of respective governments of each other's national stations. Kosovar Albanians, living in the more liberal Tito state during the gastarbeiter boom, were looking for things Albanian, while Albanians of Tirana were hungry for a window outside when they would watch Doctor Zhivago or Saturday Night Fever from the Yugoslav television.

There was a saturation in Albania proper with the Albanianness, in a time when Kosovo was hungry for it. Economic differences are also striking. Though they came from the poorest Yugoslav province, "with third world standards," according to a writer, the living standard of Kosovo Albanians was considerably higher then that of their Albanian counterparts, living in the most isolated European state of Stalinist Enver Hoxha.

Albania had for most of its existence enjoyed the uneasy reputation of the poorest country of Europe, while the Kosovars reaped the fruits of former Yugoslavia, the better off of the Communist countries. Many Albanians of Albania express amazement at the big and well-equipped houses of Kosovo Albanians, just as Kosovo Albanians were negatively impressed by the small flats into which Albanians of Tirana were packed into.

Linguistic problems also created culture shocks. The imposed acceptance of the mainly Tosk variant of Albanian, the southern dialect, as the standard language, has created problems for Kosovars, unmistakably Gegs. It is hard for a Kosovar to speak such a dialect, the same degree of difficulty showed by, say, a North Albanian. "To us, learning standard Albanian was like learning a foreign language," says Dukagjin Gorani, a journalist and political analyst. The more nasal Geg is a bit difficult to transfer into the more vowel-defined Tosk.

The binding, then, would become increasingly difficult on the psychological level. All sides were conscious that it was not Albania, "the mother country", but the NATO that ended the Serb rule over the province. "It is true that Albanians from here and there have the same stratum, they act the same," says Lirak Cela, an actor who became spokesman for top KLA commander Remi during the war to then lead the attempt of the Thaci government to build an artistic life in the province. "To that bondage, there is a saying, "Kosovar Albanians and Albanian Albanians are the same bullshit cut by a cart tire."

ALTIN RAXHIMI (AIM)