TIRANA TIMES
TIRANA, April 25 – The Party for Justice, Integration and Unity of the Cam community in the country strongly denounced the acts of the Greek border police not letting at least two persons to enter their country due to their Cam ethnicity set at their passports.
A woman and a man were not let into Greece last weekend after Greek police read their birthplace as Cameri, which is an area in northern Greece close to the Albanian border.
The party also threatened that they would later insist on boycotting all Greek products in the country in a sign of protest.
Cams are Albanians who originally resided in the coastal region of Epirus in northwestern Greece, an area known among Albanians as Cameria, speaking their own dialect of the Albanian language.
Cams played an important role in starting the renaissance of the Albanian culture in the 19th century. Following the Italian occupation of Albania in 1939, the Cams became a prominent propaganda tool for the Italians and irredentist elements among them became more vocal.
Following resentment among the local Greek population after some irredentist Cams collaborated with Nazi Germans the entire Muslim Cham population had to flee to Albania by the end of the World War II, settling in Albania. Since the fall of Communism in Albania, Cams have campaigned for right of return to Greece and restoration of confiscated properties.
