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Get Me Rewrite!
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by Ljubica Grozdanovska Dimishkovska
3 November 2009 A first attempt to chronicle the history of independent Macedonia sows rancor inside and outside the country.
SKOPJE | At a football match in Pristina on 28 September, fans of the Vellaznimi and Pristina teams were on opposite sides, but they came together to burn the Macedonian flag. Some held up banners that read, in imperfect English, “What the fuck do you know about encyclopedia?”
Around the same time, Hisni Shakiri, an ethnic Albanian and a former member of the Macedonian parliament, announced he would lead a 1 October protest in front of the government building in Skopje, where he invited participants to burn the country’s flag.
The football supporters and the politician were angry about the first edition of an encyclopedia on Macedonia that, from its mid-September launch, caused an uproar among Albanians in and near Macedonia. The volume was denounced by the country’s Albanian political parties, who asked the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences to change its entries on Albanians.
The academy has defended its integrity but has withdrawn the volume and has agreed to some of the objectors’ demands.
The ruckus started on 17 September, when the academy released the first Macedonian encyclopedia.
The work refers to Albanians, who make up about a quarter of Macedonia’s population, as Shqiptars and as primitive people who came from the mountains. Shqiptars is a term used primarily by Albanians in Albania and Kosovo to refer to one another, but it is considered derogatory when coming from an outsider.
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| Ahmeti |
Controversial, also, is an entry on Ali Ahmeti, the leader of the Albanian Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), a political party that is a member of the ruling coalition. Ahmeti is a former commander of the National Liberation Army, which led the Albanian side in the country’s ethnic fighting in 2001. The entry calls Ahmeti a suspected war criminal. He at one time did face war crimes charges in Macedonia that outside investigators did not deem credible. Ahmeti has filed a lawsuit against the academy.
Ten years in the making, this is the first encyclopedia on Macedonia since the country gained its independence in 1991. It was funded by the government to the tune of about 300,000 euros, with an official print run of 2,000 copies.
Among its 1,671 pages, one entry cites four periods of Albanian habitation in the territory that is now Macedonia.
The entry says that the first significant presence of Albanians in Macedonia was noted in the 16th century and that their numbers grew in the second half of the 18th century. By the end of that century, it says, Ali Pasha, the legendary Albanian Muslim ruler and warrior, had extended his domain into what is now southwestern Macedonia. The Albanian population continues to grow, according to the encyclopedia, due to the high birth rate among Albanians originally from Kosovo and southern Serbia.
The article, written by Stojan Kiselinovski and Gjorgji Malkovski, states that Albanians are known among other Balkan people as Arnabasi, Arnauti, and Shqiptari and that Albanians pushed Macedonians out of some regions of the country when they settled there.
“What is the message the academy wanted to send?” said Djevad Ademi, a member of parliament from the DUI.
Artan Grubi of the Skopje-based Albanian rights group Wake Up says the encyclopedia jeopardized interethnic harmony in Macedonia.
"Get Me Rewrite!"
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