Albania and Greece: Fuel for friendship and not for burning flags

By Jerina Zaloshnja
The public disclosure of video footage showing Greek soldiers undergoing training chanting a song which speaks about how the Greeks will slaughter Albanians and what they will do with their intestines and other organs, reminded me of another episode that happened in Summer of last year in Greece.
By mistake we had parked in the wrong space outside a hotel in the North of Greece. We apologized to the parking assistant, we even asked if there were any penalty to pay for the error, but very politely the employee showed us to the right slot. So we were taken by surprise when, about ten minutes later, the proprietor of the hotel came charging towards us, very annoyed, shouting in Greek obviously about the error we had made and for which we had already profusely apologized to the parking assistant outside. The Greek Hotel owner ranted and raved about “us Albanians”-as an Albanian employee of the hotel staff explained to us later on. The Greek Hotel owner could probably have continued ranting if somebody from Switzerland had not driven up in a brand new and very expensive vehicle, far more luxurious than the car of the -Albanians-.In fact we felt better when we saw that although the person from Switzerland parked in the same mistaken space, the Greek owner not only did not shout at him, but welcomed him humbly in Greek with a smatter of German and English thrown in. We felt good because we realized that he was nothing but a dolt who had absolutely no respect for himself. This Greek who thinks that all Albanians are automatically thieves and criminals, is by far, not alone in Greece. For a period of time, we can recall that although the authorities had no proof, a part of the Greek media blamed the Albanians for every murder, theft or violation of the law that occurred in Greece. And again this is only a fragment of reality. A fragment of a reality that is diminishing as people learn how to live and cooperate, enjoy cohabitation, as hundreds of thousands of Albanians work and live in Greece. There is also another reason too. The Albanians and Greeks are neighbours. With a neighbour you are either at war or peace, there is no middle road. But the time of waging war has long gone.
But let’s get back to the video footage of the Greek soldiers and the calls for war and murder. This incident awakened a reaction in Albania. There were debates in Parliament while a section of the Albanian print media firmly entrenched in the positions of a Greek conspiracy according to which Greece could only be an enemy of Albania, appear to have activated individuals or groups who began replying tit for tat.
In fact the appearance of the soldiers and the chant they had selected were primitive and barbarous and the least you could say is that they aspire to racism and hostility. However, this episode is very unfortunate. The servicemen of a European country and a member of NATO cannot be mobilized and inspired by a barbarous chant, typical of the fundamentalists who train terrorists. This all seemed to awaken sentiments of revolt in Albania and the reaction of the Albanian government, which came at the right time. To lessen the impact of the anti-Greek campaign of a part of the media, and of individuals or sporadically, also of groups of individuals, the Albanian Foreign Affairs Minister told the press to focus attention on the fact that it was a Greek newspaper that discovered the video and Greek Parliament that then debated the incident.
Meanwhile whilst the Greek authorities announced the opening of an inquiry, some of us in this country decided to reply to the national offense almost as primitively as the incident of the Greek soldiers- by public burnings of the Greek flag. The local media reported the burning of the Greek flag in several cities of the country. Burning the flag of another nation is nothing new, but I have always regarded this as reflecting weakness. Albanian legislation foresees a series of penalties for individuals who commit such acts, which we all witnessed. The burning of the Greek national flag in the main squares of several towns of Albania was headline news in last week’s papers, but there were no reports about arresting the culprits. Whilst the Albanian authorities demanded serious inquiries of the Greek authorities into the incident of the video footage, we did not see any sign of the Albanian authorities intervening as Albanian citizens burnt Greek flags, either in Fieri, Saranda or Tirana.