Kadare says Balkans peace based on Albanian, Serb co-existence

TIRANA, June 19 – Albanian novelist and long-time Nobel-prize candidate Ismail Kadare gave an interview to the New York-based Illyria newspaper mainly speaking on Kosovo, its relations with Serbia and the Balkans.
Kadare said that Serbia should really apologize for the genocide against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, also adding that Albanians should continue to insist on one.
Kadare said it was unacceptable that the Albanian side was not doing enough to show the crimes against them.
“Denouncing the crimes in Kosovo and in the whole Balkans will open the way of the true emancipation,” he said.
“Serbs should forget the anti-Albanian pathology,” said the writer.
The writer said that the violence, be that of the Serbs and also from Albanians, should be judged accordingly and punished.
Kadare said that it would be good to have investigations conducted in all the cases, because very often its absence damaged the Albanian image. He took the burning of the Orthodox churches in Kosovo (which has seriously damaged the Albanian image) as an example saying that investigation could bring out other crimes than those that had been trumpeted.
He said that burning of so many churches within a night was a “monstrous action also an anti-Albanian one calculated to neutralize the truth of the tragedy Kosovo had suffered: crimes, deportation, killing of babies, raping of many Albanian women and girls.”
He said that Albanians had never burnt Serb churches, even under the Ottoman Empire when the government was not so much willing to protect them.
Kadare also called a fantasy the report given in the book written by former Hague prosecutor general Carla Del Ponte of organ trafficking of Serbs in Albania.
The writer said that the normalcy between Albanians and Serbs is the key to the Balkan mediation process. “But this normalcy cannot be done with cosmetic creations.”
He said that Balkan people should be treated and respected evenly, mainly in Europe, in which they are a part.