Besa, Not Blood: Zvërnec and the Albania Worth Keeping

by Christopher S. Hyland

Every nation arrives, at intervals, at a threshold where it must choose between two definitions of itself – one open and one closed, one confident and one fearful – and Albania, a small country I have supported for the better part of my life, stands at such a threshold this week. The occasion is the coast at Zvërnec, where a protest against the conduct of a private security firm, and against unanswered questions about a fragile lagoon and the ownership of southern land, has become something larger: a contest over what kind of country Albania intends to be. Among the legitimate voices a slogan has surfaced – Shqipëria e shqiptarëve, jo e tradhtarëve, “Albania of the Albanians, not of the traitors” – offered as patriotism. Having worked for three decades on Albanian and Kosovar affairs, and for the cause of interfaith understanding across the region, I would respectfully submit that this phrase belongs to no Albanian tradition worth keeping.

Its provenance is, in fact, foreign and familiar. It is a single template that the European far right has reused for a century, changing only the name in the blank: Deutschland den Deutschen in the Germany of the 1930s; La France aux Français in the rhetoric of the National Front; Italia agli italiani; and, immediately across Albania’s southern border, “Greece for the Greeks,” the creed of Golden Dawn. Each presents itself as devotion to the homeland; each is, on inspection, a claim about who may be excluded from it. The phrase’s second clause – “not of the traitors” – descends from nearer home, from the wartime motto of Balli Kombëtar; and a nation is right to be cautious when its slogans are inherited from the most ruinous chapter of the twentieth century. These are, in the end, among the pathologies that flourish whenever identity is reduced to ideology.

Albania, of all nations, has reason to know where the closed definition leads, for it has already endured it. From 1944 to 1990 “Albania for the Albanians” was not a slogan but a system – sealed borders, enforced self-sufficiency, the conviction that a people is safest alone – and it produced, in the end, only impoverishment and departure. When the system fell, roughly a third of the population emigrated within a single decade, so that today more Albanians live beyond the country’s borders than within them. That diaspora – in Athens and Thessaloniki, in Rome, Milan, Munich, Geneva, London, and across the United States – is not a misfortune to be regretted but one of the steadiest foundations of the national economy, and it endures precisely because other societies received Albanians as welcome minorities. A citizen who chants exclusion in Tirana might consider, in candor, what the same principle would mean for his cousin in Athens. The first to suffer under “a nation for its own” are seldom the strangers within a country; they are that country’s own people living everywhere else.

There is a better inheritance, and it is the opposite of blood. It is Besa – the Albanian word of honor, the obligation that binds a host to protect whoever has entered his home – and its most luminous demonstration is a matter of record, not legend. When the Second World War delivered the Jews of Europe to the camps, Albania became the rare occupied nation to finish the war with more Jews within its borders than at its start. In Krujë, a seventeen-year-old named Refik Veseli persuaded his parents, Vesel and Fatima, to conceal the family of the photographer Moshe Mandil; his name stands today among the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, and he was one of many. This is the spirit of a land where, for centuries, Muslim and Christian have lived as neighbors and treated hospitality not as a weakness of faith but as its fullest expression – a conviction rooted in the spiritual dignity of every person. (It should be said plainly, and then set aside, that the antisemitic images lately circulating online about the Zvërnec project – the southern coast cartoonishly wrapped in an Israeli flag because one of its American investors is Jewish – are a small affront to precisely this history, and merit no more attention than naming them requires.) This inheritance, and not ethnic arithmetic, is the one worth defending.

On the facts, precision is owed, for precision is the first casualty whenever a slogan takes command. On the thirtieth of May, masked private guards dragged and beat a demonstrator at the fenced site beside the Narta lagoon, and Albanians were right to be appalled. What followed, however, deserves the greater attention. Within a single day the State Police corrected their initial account; the regional police director in Vlorë was removed; a guard was arrested; and the developer publicly apologized and terminated its contract with the security company. In the days since, the licenses of two private security firms have been revoked, criminal proceedings have been opened, and the special anti-corruption prosecution has begun to examine how the protected status of the Vjosa–Narta landscape was altered. The Albanian state, and Prime Minister Rama, deserve to be commended rather than condemned for a correction so swift and so public – for this is precisely the constitutional reflex, the subordination of force to law, that accession to the European Union requires, and that Albania is steadily showing it has acquired.

Seen without the distortion, the investment itself is not a calamity but an opportunity, and it answers Albania’s truest need. The country’s deepest wound has never been foreign capital; it has been emigration, the continual loss of its young. A nation keeps its sons and daughters not by sealing its frontiers but by building, at home, the work and the futures for which they now cross the sea. A substantial tourism investment on the Riviera – financed by American partners and by Gulf Arab capital, with Qatari investors prominent among the backers – promises construction, employment, infrastructure, and a rightful place for Albania in the legitimate global economy. Honest questions remain, and they ought to be answered in the open: the ecology of a delicate coastline, the transparency of how title to the land was transferred, and the rights and property of the Greek-minority families of the south. These are matters to be resolved under law, by a confident and constitutional state – and not occasions for conspiracy, nor pretexts for the imported grammar of exclusion.
What is emerging in this corner of the Balkans, for those willing to see it, is something more hopeful than a quarrel over a shoreline. It is the prospect of an Albania that completes its passage into the European Union; that takes its place, with Kosovo and its neighbors, in a Balkan Commonwealth founded upon constitutional democracy, religious pluralism, and reconciliation; and that offers the world a Muslim-majority society at ease with its Jewish friends and its Christian neighbors alike – a disposition that complements, indeed extends, the spirit of the Abraham Accords. Such an Albania has no need of a borrowed slogan, for it already possesses a better word of its own. Let the courts hold the guilty to account; let the prosecutors pursue every environmental and legal question wherever it honestly leads; let the developer meet the highest standard of transparency and care; and let the legal system itself rise, with judicious resolve and an unhurried fidelity to due process, to the full gravity of the occasion before it. None of this requires a scapegoat, and none of it requires fear. The Albania I have been honored to support is the Albania of Besa and of moral clarity – the country that sheltered the stranger when much of Europe surrendered him, and whose destiny lies not behind sealed borders but at the open threshold of Europe. It has kept its word before. It can keep it now.

Christopher S. Hyland is a veteran diplomatic advisor specializing in Balkan affairs, Iranian political dynamics, democratic transitions, and interfaith dialogue. A graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, he served as Deputy National Political Director for Ethnic Constituencies of the Bill Clinton Presidential Campaign, where he organized coalitions across multiple ethnic minority and diaspora communities. He was the originator or chair of eleven Clinton Presidential Transition Conferences, including first-ever convenings on Eastern Europe, Indian Country, and The Politics of Inclusion. President Clinton credited him in his autobiography My Life with laying the foundation for unprecedented White House engagement with ethnic communities. He currently serves as Special Envoy to North America and Europe for the Bektashi Worldwide Headquarters, a transnational Sufi-Shia institution based in Tirana, Albania. He is a recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award for contributions to interfaith dialogue and democratic engagement. He holds honorary doctorates from Kyiv National Economic University, Ukraine; Notre Dame University, Lebanon; and an equivalent honorary doctorate from UBT, Kosova. He is a Knight of Skanderbeg, Albania, and a member of The Order of Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, Kosova. The Irish Voice has described him as the “Unsung Hero of the Irish Peace Process.”