“One of the wisest, most courageous and illuminated minds that I have ever known left the Albanian nation today. As it often happens to such people, they leave when they are most needed. Arb쮠was such a person, irreplaceable, especially now. He left when we most needed him. And as rarely happens, he will be missed by everyone.”
Ismail Kadare
TIRANA, Aug 16 – Albanians across all borders have woken today to the sad news of losing one of their brightest minds engaged in politics: Arb쮠Xhafferi, an imposing thought-provoking intellectual and politician with a strong voice in Macedonia and a refined presence in Albania, and advocate of national unity and national dignity was lost to the onset of illness and death.
Xhaferri is to be remembered as the central personality in Albanian-Macedonian politics, restoring much of the dignity lost to Albanians and facing up to the arrogant pressures of some figures in Macedonia. Paradoxically the inferiority and rivalry of his fellow Albanians in Macedonia might have been an even more serious challenge to his aspirations. A distinguished figure of the mind, of the letter, of the book he was often divided between considered a politician and a philosopher and almost always praised for his vision and clarity. He himself thought knew very well the difference, saying that a politician’s ability and power rest in decision making and the strength to take over responsibility.
Xhaferri signed on the Ohrid Agreement in hope that it would accommodate the conflict between Albanians and Macedonians, a conflict which threatened to awaken violence in the region as late as the beginning of the second millennium. However, later he sadly witnessed and admitted that the lack of implementation was very detrimental to the objectives of the agreement.
Mourners today lamented the passing of “a great Reawakening-man” (Red and Black Alliance”, “the atypical Albanians who said so many great truths and had a strong mental bravery” (Edi Rama from the SP) ” the master of dialogue who used it to solve even hopeless issues” (president Bujar Nishani); ” a man whose precious heritage and has to be acknowledged ( PM Sali Berisha) ” a philosopher-citizen with highlighted western features” (former President Bamir Topi).
Albanian journalists spoke at length about Xhaferri’s rarity as an individual encompassing many qualities. One daily in particular sings a special praise to his stature: “Which other man of the Albanian world could claim for himself what Arb쮠Xhaferri was? A political institution, a citadel which didn’t not wither from arrows and which shielded all hopes; a lighthouse who spread light around which all butterflies of Albanian thought in Macedonia and beyond would fly.”
Indeed his biggest dream, as confessed in an intimate interview for another media colleague from Kosova, was the integration of all the Albanian people in the system of western values: political economic and cultural. In the same interview he illuminate his roots, which are so meaningful in understanding the largesse of his figure: a patriotic father opposed to communism who sold his land to buy a radio from which he could hear the western stations and feed his hope, a mother who cultivated hundreds of rose varieties, a childhood spent in a house where old Albanian songs were the way to unburden the weight of living in the undesired captivity of the Yugoslav system.
He was first and foremost a proper graduate of philosophy. But he was also a film critic. An avid reader. A follower of sociology. His mind was fed and nourished from so any sources and hence was inevitably sharp. Hence, writer Dritero Agolli commented on his strength of mind as one that even illness could not fathom how to put down.
The echo of the mourning today is strengthened from the considerations from Prishtina, a city where Xhaferri spent long years of engaging in the media.
But above all this, those who will feel the strongest the loss of this brave intellectual mind and prominent refined politician whose word was clear strong and unequivocal are the very Albanians of Macedonia, a community which often misinterpreted him, sometimes challenged him but to which Xhaferri dedicate most of his life and the best of his political efforts. A community for which Xhaferi had dreams but not illusions, about which he was both visionary and practical in an original way. Albanians living in Macedonia are today as close to orphans as ever, having lost irreplaceably the brightest mind within their ranks, a brave advocate of their rights and aspirations.
To conclude, in the words of one of Xhaferri’s longtime life journey companions who expressed his grief anonymously: “Whoever lives in memory does not die but is only away. Dead is only the one who gets forgotten. And Arb쮠Xhaferri belongs to the pantheon of Albanian memory.”
