Eqerem Mete ( 1943-2007) one of the most talented employees of the Albanian Foreign Service, passed away this week in Tirana.
Eqerem Mete, diplomat and Director of the Department for the Balkans and the Middle East at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1992-1996) is one of those very rare cases, where talent, knowledge and passion are kneaded with a modesty that was almost an obsession.
A brilliant scholar of English language, history and culture, Mete worked for many years in the Foreign Service of Radio Tirana, moving on, in later years, to the Albanian Institute of International Studies.
From 1992 to 1996, Eqerem Mete was the Head of the Department for the Balkans and the Middle East. The frequently difficult negotiations with neighboring countries, as well as the Agreements that were signed, were the successes of a group of diplomats, in which Eqerem Mete played an almost invisible, but irreplaceable role. I have often thought that Eqerem Mete was one of the most modern of the diplomats who were products of the old school. When I say “Old School” I don’t refer to his age; I certainly do not imply his many years of experience under the communist regime either. Eqerem Mete belonged to the “Old School” of diplomacy, in the most positive sense of early, traditional diplomacy. As you may recollect, in the early cabinets of diplomacy and foreign policy, apart from the clusters of the advisors and public negotiators, there were always the other officials who never drew attention to themselves. However they were just as vital as they were invisible. I never fully understood the decision of Eqerem Mete in 1996 to withdraw from the Foreign Service, just as I have never understood the indifference shown by the Administration of the time to try and refuse his resignation. However, irrespective of his withdrawal from the Foreign Service, Eqerem Mete continued to maintain links with international diplomacy and academia. During the last ten years, from Boston, U.S.A, he contributed to the strengthening and modernization of the intellectual contribution of the Albanian both the old and new Diaspora in the United States.
——————————————————
Albert Rakipi,
Former Deputy Minister
of Foreign Affairs
Bush Right on Kosovo Independence
By Eqerem Mete
At present, we are witnesses of Serbia’s increasing diplomatic activity to stave off the adoption of a new Security Council resolution on Kosovo’s independence under the pretext that Ahtisari’s recommendations imply “annexation of Serb territory and removal of Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo”. According to the Serb leaders, Kosovo’s independence would be in contravention of international law and a “classic case of secession from a sovereign state”. The Serbs and their mouthpieces have been laying greater emphasis on these theses recently, especially after the U.S. president George W. Bush’s statement in Albania on June 10, 2007 that Kosovo should have its independence now. Bush’s stance on Kosovo is a logical continuation of President Bill Clinton’s help to the Albanians during the Kosovo war in 1999 and President Woodrow Wilson’s stand at the Paris Conference in 1918-1919 against the European Powers that had planned to divide Albania up among its neighbors. But history gives the lie to the Serb theses. Mary Edith Durham, a British scholar, points out, “the Serbs, or rather their Slav ancestors, poured into the Balkan Peninsula in vast hordes in the sixth and seventh centuries”. She says that they “overwhelmed the original inhabitant, the Albanian. But though they tried hard, they did not succeed in exterminating him. The original inhabitant, we may almost say, never is exterminated. The Albanian was a peculiarly tough customer. He withdrew to the fastnesses of the mountains, fought with his back to the wall, so to speak, and in defiance of efforts to Serbize him, retained his language and remained persistently attached to the Church of Rome.” (Mary Edith Durham, Twenty years of Balkan Tangle, p. 52) The Nemanjids who ruled Serbia from the 12th century up to 1371 built churches and monasteries in Kosovo mainly on the ruins of Albanian Catholic churches and other religious sites, the very churches and monasteries which are used by the Serbs today as an argument to prove that Kosovo is “the cradle of their mediaeval state and the center of their Orthodox Christian faith”. According to Noel Malcolm, “the earliest foundations were mainly in the old nucleus-territory of Rascia, to the north of Kosovo: Studenica, Nemanja’s most important foundation, which still survives today, and a monastery dedicated to St. George, the ruins of which (near Novi Pazar) are known as ‘Djudjevi Stupovi’, ‘George’s Pillars’. Further to the north, near the central Serbian town of Kraljevo, the monastery of Zica was founded by Stefan the First-crowned; this was chosen by Sava as the seat of his autocephalous Church. (Only at the end of the thirteenth century, when Zica had been burned down by a raiding expedition of Tatars and Cumans, did the seat of the archbishopric move to Pec in Western Kosovo.) After Studenica, the second most important Nemanjid monastery was Mileseva, founded by Stefan the First-Crowned’s successor; this was much further to the west, towards the Bosnian border. And the main foundation of the next-but-one Serbian king was at Sopocani, which lies just to the west of Novi Pazar. In other words, the cradle of Serbian monasticism in the first two or three generations of Nemanjid rule was located where the cradle of the Serbian state had been: not inside Kosovo, but further to the north and west. It was only later, with the development of the Patriarchate buildings at Pec, and the fourteenth-century foundations of Gracanica, Decani and the monastery of the Holy Archangels in Prizren, that Kosovo gained any real importance for the Nemanjid church-building programme” (Noel Malcolm, Kosovo – A Short History, pp 45-46).
However, in the 15th century, Serbia covered more or less the area between the Danube, the Great (Velika) Morava and the Timok, a river in Eastern Serbia and Western Bulgaria.
According to chronicles, more members of ethnic minorities such as Serbs, Turks and Roma settled in the Albanian territory of Kosovo under the Ottomans. The implementation of the Serbian colonization program in Kosovo between the two world wars helped the Serb minority in Kosovo to grow although it did not exceed the 10 percent share of the total population. Under this program, the Serbs confiscated Albanian land at a time when more Serbian and Montenegrin colonists settled on Albanian territory. In the 1912-1918 period, thousands of Albanians were exterminated or deported to Turkey. In the span of 3 years, from 1910 to 1913, Serbia doubled its size at the expense of Albanian territories. On March 7, 1937, Dr. Vaso Cubrilovic, academician of Yugoslavia and minister in various departments in communist Yugoslavia after the war, presented the royal government of Stoyadinovic with his memorandum on “The Expulsion of the Albanians”. The outbreak of World War II brought its further implementation to an end although the Yugoslav leadership resumed its implementation in compliance with the changing circumstances after the war. Aleksandar Rankovic, the minister of the Interior, who also held the second highest post in the executive branch of the Yugoslav government until 1966, was mainly responsible for the brutal treatment of the Albanians and their deportation to Turkey. Vaso Cubrilovic’s memorandum draws on another wider-ranging program, the Serbian minister Ilija Garasanin’s work “Nacertanije” (1844), which from a blueprint to spread Serbian influence, became a geopolitical instruction for expansion into Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, the north of today’s Albania and today’s Macedonia. There is a host of arguments that account for the fact that Serbia’s annexation of Kosovo was illegal and that the Kosovo Albanians should enjoy and exercise their right to self-determination as their national right and as a majority population. Kosovo as we know it today was part of the Kosovo Vilayet, which was carved up as a result of the Balkan wars of 1912-1913 between the neighboring countries. The boundaries of the Kosovo Vilayet had been shifting as the Ottoman Empire lost territory to neighboring states under the Treaty of Berlin following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The Kosovo Vilayet had Skopje (today’s capital city of the Republic of Macedonia) as its capital. Serbia grabbed Kosovo from the Ottomans and annexed the province militarily without the consent of its Albanian majority population during the Balkan Wars. Serbia’s illegal annexation of Kosovo is an argument that Kosovo’s independence does not contravene international law. It would only put an end to a flagrant injustice against the Albanians with the connivance and tacit agreement of the European Powers. Serbs’ arguments are made up to cover up this century-old injustice. The Serbs, who settled the region by 630 AD, having been invited by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to suppress the local restive populations, use history as an argument to prove their case. If history is taken into account, we would say that Greece should claim Istanbul, Bulgaria and Hungary should claim Belgrade, Germany should claim a right over Sudetenland, Sweden over Finland and Norway, Mexico over Florida and California, whereas Albania should claim the Illyrian territories which are now called Serbia, Iraq should claim a right over Kuwait and so on and so forth. Returning Kosovo to Serbia would be the same as restoring Roman provinces to Italy and Ottoman provinces to Turkey. As an occupying power, Serbia’s claim to Kosovo would also be tantamount to giving their former colonies back to Great Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal.Kosovo’s constitutional position in the former Yugoslavia cannot help the Serbian thesis either. Historically speaking, Kosovo has never been legally part of Serbia. Although not a republic, Kosovo was a constituent part of the Yugoslav Federation with clearly defined territory and borders. The same as the Yugoslav republics, it was represented to the federal institutions not through Serbia but directly. It boasted the prerogatives of a federal constituent part of the Yugoslav federation, which are separate political and territorial identity and constitution. Hence, Kosovo was not part of the independent sovereign state of Serbia as recognized by the 1878 Berlin Congress. Nor was it part of Serbia at the 1943 Second AVNOJ Congress (AVNOJ – “Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council of Yugoslavia”). In 1944, this same Council did not assign Kosovo to be part of Serbia, already established as a federal unit of the second Yugoslavia.
(Continued on page 20)
