TIRANA, May 25 – Well-known Kosovo writer, critic and political figure Sabri Hamiti has been honoured in a special ceremony awarding him the Albanian citizenship at the President’s office in Tirana.
“Through this act, the decree of granting the Albanian citizenship to academic Sabri Hamiti, I want to express the gratitude and honour of Albania for a symbolic figure of preserving the national identity. A mission accomplished through his multifaceted work of more than 35 volumes, of resistance, intuition and erudite vision, where the Naimian ideology “You, Albania, give me honour, and you name me as Albanian, is present everywhere,” said President Bujar Nishani citing national poet Naim Frasheri.
“Kosovo’s independence was a great project, an initiator and inspirer of which was also Sabri Hamiti,” added Nishani.
Hamiti, also a deputy Speaker in the Kosovo Parliament, described the Albanian citizenship as his greatest honour.
“Everything I did, I did it to establish an Albanian spiritual and cultural unit. Let us work as much as we can so that Albanians as historically and geographically European, can be such even politically,” said Hamiti.
Hamiti, 65, is a renowned writer, critic and political figure in Kosovo. Born in Dumnica in Podujeva, Hamiti graduated in Albanian language and literature from the University of Prishtina in 1972. He did post-graduate research in comparative literature in Zagreb in the early 1970s and spend a year at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1980. Hamiti completed his doctorate at the University of Prishtina in 1987 with a dissertation on modern Albanian literature.
In 1989-1990, under the influence of Kosovo’s independence leader Ibrahim Rugova, Hamiti began to play an active role in the struggle for the independence of Kosovo, promoting the political objectives of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). In 2008, he was elected as a regular member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo and is also now a leading figure of the LDK parliamentary group in the Kosovo Parliament.
In September 1998, just before the outbreak of the Kosovo-Serbia armed conflict he was severely wounded in an assassination attempt at his home in Dardania.
As a poet and writer Sabri Hamiti has clung more to intellect than to emotion, despite his strong affinity for the pantheistic mysticism of late Albanian poet Lasgush Poradeci.
As an innovative literary critic, Hamiti has introduced new notions and concepts to the study of Albanian literature, insisting on an interpretation independent of extra-literary processes. This stance alone was refreshing in view of the strict ideological filter through which every printed word has to pass in Albania, says Robert Elsie, a specialist in Albanian studies. Hamiti is also known for his editing of innovative texts of Albanian literature for schools.
