Mother Teresa

The Saint and Her Nation

Gëzim Alpion

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789389165067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A personality of Mother Teresa's calibre and global reach does not come about by chance. To provide a well-rounded portrait of this influential figure, this book approaches her in the context of her familial background and ethnic, cultural and spiritual milieus. Her life and work are explored in the light of newly-discovered information about her family, the Albanian nation's spiritual tradition before and after the advent of Christianity, and the impact of the Vatican and other influential powers on her people since the early Middle Ages.
Focusing on her traumas, ordeals and achievements as a private individual and a public missionary, and her complex spirituality, this book contends that Mother Teresa's life and her nation's history, especially her countrymen's relationship with Roman Catholicism, are interconnected. Unravelling this interconnectedness is essential to understanding how this modern spiritual and humanitarian icon has come to epitomise her ancient nation's cultural and spiritual DNA.

Part One

WHO ARE MOTHER TERESA’S ALBANIANS?

Chapter 1

VICTIMISATIONS OF ALBANIANS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

The second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century were quite turbulent in the Balkans. The gradual lifting and final removal of the Ottoman lid over the Balkan cauldron was bound to bring to the surface with a vengeance ancient rivalries and simmering ethnic tensions that had laid dormant in this traditionally volatile region since the Ottomans finally put it under control in the fifteenth century. As will be shown later, by the time the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was imminent, some Balkan countries like Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece, suffering from ‘a weird megalomania’,¹ exploited these chaotic times to expand their territories at the expense of their neighbours.

Such territorial ambitions did not go unnoticed by the Great Powers that publicly opposed them half-heartedly while directly or indirectly encouraging individual countries to pursue their own chauvinistic goals. This fickle and short-sighted policy on the part of Russia, France, the British Empire, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, which ultimately aimed at retaining and expanding their influence in the region, would soon come back to haunt them.

At the close of the nineteenth century, Count Agenor Romuald Gołuchowski, Austria-Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs, is believed to have referred to the Balkans as a ‘powder keg’, adding that its ignition would have dreadful consequences for world peace.² He was proven right shortly afterwards. The Balkan Wars (1912–1913), which resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people, were a prelude to the First World War.³

Of the estimated forty million casualties of the First World War, of which almost half were deaths, at least two and a half million fatalities were recorded in the Balkans. These figures do not include the silent victims of ethnic cleansing policies pursued by several Balkan countries against some ethnic groups and nationalities from the start of the twentieth century.

Albanians often were the main target of what could be described as a continued pogrom that the neighbouring countries launched either on their own or in conjunction with regional partners to either exterminate or forcefully remove them from territories earmarked for annexation. Following the 1878 treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece started implementing in earnest their expansionist strategies at the expense of Albanian-inhabited territories.

The 1878 Treaty of Berlin launched the first of the two scrambles hatched up by the big European Powers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The first one was triggered mainly by the imminent demise of the Ottoman Empire and affected to various degrees all the peoples in the Balkans but especially Albanians, who currently live in six Balkan countries.⁴ Devised at a conference in Berlin between 1884 and 1885, the second scramble affected all of Africa.

In the wake of the Berlin treaty, Albanians were faced with an existential threat; so much so, that Otto von Bismarck’s statement that ‘Albania is merely a geographical expression; there is no Albanian nation’ could well have been the epitaph of the Albanian people.⁵ Known for ‘his brutal disregard of facts which did not suit him’,⁶ Bismarck was the host of the Berlin conferences where the schemes to carve up the Balkans and Africa were devised and implemented.

Here are some of the atrocities perpetrated against Albanians during the twentieth century. As reported by war correspondents of several countries dispatched to the region during the Balkan wars, Albanians were either massacred or forced to flee their homes while their properties were confiscated or looted by the Serbian and Montenegrin regular armies and paramilitaries roaming across Albanian territories in present-day Kosova, North Macedonia and Albania. The information that appeared regularly in the American media and European newspapers—both Eastern and Western Europe—including some Serbian papers, was complemented by reports submitted by a number of diplomats stationed in the Balkans.⁷

One of the foreign correspondents covering the Balkan wars in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania was Leon Trotsky. Shortly after the Serbian invasion of Albanian territories in October 1912, Trotsky sent off a report to a Kiev newspaper that, by his admission, was almost a verbatim recording of an account, received from a Serbian friend, of some of the crimes perpetrated against Albanians in Kosova and Macedonia by Serbian soldiers and civilian thugs. Trotsky’s piece throws light also on the systematic looting of Albanian properties by the Serbian army and paramilitaries as well as by Serbian peasants who had travelled from all over Serbia to Albanian territories with that purpose in mind, often executing civilians.⁸

To investigate the Serbian and Montenegrin forces’ reported atrocities against Albanians, the Washington DC-based foreign policy think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set up an international commission that, a year after arriving in the Balkans in 1913, reported:

Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind—such were the means which were employed and are still being employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.⁹

During the Balkan wars, in total ‘120,000 Albanians were exterminated’, ‘hundreds of villages’ were shelled by artillery and ‘a large number of them were burned down’ across Kosova and Macedonia.¹⁰ The figures do not include the people killed in present-day Albania and the devastated houses, villages and towns that Serbian and Montenegrin soldiers left behind when they were eventually forced to retreat.

As a direct result of Serbia’s occupation of Kosova in 1912, hundreds of thousands of Albanians from the Kosova Vilayet¹¹ were forced to flee to neighbouring countries and beyond. A century later, the Syrian conflict that erupted in 2011 unveiled new information on the distance some of those unfortunate Albanians had to flee to escape Serbian atrocities. By July 2015, it was revealed that the war in Syria, resulting in the displacement of millions of people, also turned into refugees a significant number of members of the ethnic group known as the Arnauts. This word is an ethnonym used by the Turks to denote Albanians.¹² Currently, some 10,000 people in Syria trace their origin from various parts of Kosova from where their descendants’ painful exodus began in 1912.¹³

The end of the 1912–1913 Balkan wars did not put an end to the sufferings of Albanians also caused by Greece. In the regions of Korça and Gjirokastra in present-day Albania, for instance, where Greek forces had moved in in 1912, the massacres against civilians continued until 1914.¹⁴ When the First World War broke out in the same year, ‘neutral’ Greece violated Albania’s territorial integrity, although the latter had declared its neutrality since its foundation two years earlier.

Greece saw the First World War as an opportunity to expand its territories at Albania’s expense. According to Alexandre Lambert, Greek soldiers burned down 400 villages in the south of the country in 1915.¹⁵ By then, in addition to the Greek forces, parts of southern Albania were also occupied by the Italian and French armies.

The end of the First World War did not mean the liberation of Albania. Seven years after Albania became an independent country, the Great Powers were still hatching up plans to put an end to the new Albanian state. Such plans were thwarted, to a large extent, thanks to President Woodrow Wilson’s timely intervention.¹⁶ As a result, the Italian, Serbian and Greek armies were forced to withdraw from Albania in 1920.

The efforts on the part of Serbia, Montenegro and Greece to annex Albanian territories by decimating the local population, either through large-scale massacres or by forcing it to leave the entire areas, also continued during the Second World War, by which time Albania was fighting the occupying fascist and Nazi armies. On 5 and 6 January 1943, for instance, Serbian and Montenegrin paramilitaries unexpectedly began a killing spree in areas inhabited primarily by Albanians in Sanxhak. A part of the Kosova Vilayet up until 1912, the region currently lies between Serbia and Montenegro. As a result of this rampage, known as the Massacre of Bihor, that went on unhindered for two full months, 9,200 Albanian civilians lost their lives, eighty-two villages were destroyed and 32,000 people were forced to flee for their lives in the middle of winter.¹⁷ During the 1941–1945 period, more than 47,000 Albanians were also exterminated by Serbian and Montenegrin armies and paramilitaries in Albanian-inhabited territories across present-day Montenegro, Serbia and North Macedonia.¹⁸

Between June 1944 and early 1945, Greek paramilitaries led by the Greek ultranationalist Napoleon Zervas ethnically cleansed the Albanian region of Çamëria, which—like other Albanian-populated lands—was unjustly left outside the borders of the newly independent but severely dismembered Albania that emerged from the London Conference in 1913. As a result of the Çamëria onslaught, over 5,000 civilians were massacred in cold blood across sixty-eight towns and villages where some 5,800 houses were destroyed. Over 30,000 people managed to survive the butchery by crossing the border into Albania.¹⁹

The Çamëria massacre did not happen out of the blue; its roots lie in the proclamation of the Megali Idea, which is Greek for ‘Great Idea’. Put forward for the first time in 1844 by Ioannis Kolettis, Megali Idea was partly inspired by the indignation the Greeks felt about the decision of the Great Powers to leave a number of territories outside of the newly independent Greece. This early irredentist manifestation of Greek nationalism was steeped in a Byzantine-inspired concept of nationalism. By putting adherence to Eastern Orthodox Rites at the top of the list of the features constituting modern Greek identity, this form of nationalism would inevitably make vulnerable those who, by then, were affiliated to another division of Christianity or followed other faiths altogether.²⁰

In cleansing Çamëria from its Albanian population, Greek ultra-nationalists were doing a disservice to the Albanians who had rendered an inestimable contribution in bringing about the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire in 1821 and in laying the foundations for and masterminding the modern Greek state. George Finlay notes that the Albanians living across the current territory of the Greek state were not the only ‘foreigners’ to devote themselves to the cause of the liberation of Greece.²¹ All the same, as Nicholas Hammond points out, ‘in the Greek War of Independence, the Albanians, above all, drove the Turks out’.²²

Following the Çamëria massacre, some 4,300 Kosova Albanian men were executed by the Serbian and Montenegrin partisans between March and April 1945. This is known as the massacre of Tivar,²³ after the name of the city in present-day Montenegro where it took place.²⁴

The twentieth century was painful to the end for Albanians. During the 1998–1999 Kosova War, over 10,000 Kosova Albanians lost their lives.²⁵ Close to one million Albanians, almost half of the population of Kosova, were forced by the Serbian army and paramilitaries to flee their homes and settle elsewhere, mainly in neighbouring Albania, during the March–June 1999 period.²⁶

The Balkan countries behind the atrocities against Albanians over the last two hundred years have been keen to present themselves as ‘Christian’ and depict Albanians almost exclusively as a ‘Muslim’ population. Such efforts became apparent on the eve of and following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This propaganda was fuelled especially by Serbia and Greece that aimed to annex Albanian territories under the false pretence that Albanians had settled in the Balkans during the Ottoman era and that those newcomers had benefitted more than anyone else in the region from the Ottoman rule.

Chapter 2

THE ALBANIAN NATION, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND TURKEY

Albanians are consistently critical of the five-century-long Turkish occupation of their country. All the same, they are eager to mention that a number of grand viziers (prime ministers) of the Ottoman Empire were Albanians or of Albanian descent. They also take pride in the fact that some of the most renowned draughtsmen of the Ottoman period, including its chief architect Sinan, and other great masters such as Sedefkar Mehmet and Mehmet Isa, originated from Albania. These and other Albanian masters were behind some of the architectural wonders constructed during the Ottoman era, including the Süleymaniye Mosque and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (widely known as the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul, Stari Most in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Taj Mahal in India.¹

The Ottoman period is not the only time when the Albanian nation produced trailblazing politicians, military strategists, charismatic religious leaders of Christianity and Islam, inimitable artists and ingenious craftsmen. This tradition began in Illyrian antiquity. Since then—during the Roman ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Who Are Mother Teresa’s Albanians?
• Part Two: History from Below: Mother Teresa’s Albanian Roots and Skopje Years
• Part Three: Mother Teresa’s Relations with the Holy See and the Albanian Nation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Select Filmography
• Index
• About the Author