I would not remember the Croatian President at all if his statements about Kosovo yesterday were not so vile, although I have met him once with the desire to forget him.
With the tongue of a drunkard in the Balkan taverns, he filled his mouth with material and glaca. He shot at the old friendship of the Albanians with the Croats as a spokesman for Putin the conqueror in Europe, you have a thick tongue and red cheeks.
He shamelessly said that "Kosovo was stolen from Serbia by internationals"! He proved to be drunk, ignorant, allied with violence, nostalgic for the crime of the Serbian genocide and naturally anti-Western.
I happened to meet several times the iconic and liberal ex-President Stipe Mesic, who also served prison time in Tito's Yugoslavia. He felt lucky that it had happened to some Kosovars in the cells who had saved their lives from the criminals of the UDB. That's all, when he was talking about the war of the 90s, he said that where the Albanians were at the front, he didn't feel the need to turn his head back, focusing on their heroic contribution in general and that of individual soldiers in particular.
But sooner or later, the great revivalists who made Albania Father Gjergj Fishta, Father Shtjefen Gjeçovi, Father Pashko Bardhi who also worked as a teacher in Zara (Zadar) were students of the great Franciscan in Livno, Andrea Kačič, the poet of the Croatian Renaissance whose bust shines in Zagreb.
From him and with him they were protected with the formula Atme e Fe and returned to their homeland to do what they did for Albania.
If we want to go to the roots of history, we also have the alliances of King George (Skenderbeu) with the Republic of Ragusa (today's Dubrovnik). In October, a summit of the parliaments of 44 countries was held in Zagreb at the initiative of the Speakers of the Croatian and Ukrainian Parliaments. I happened to be part of the Albanian delegation headed by Ms. Nikolla. News was the participation of Nancy Pelosi, head of the American Senate, who with admirable courage broke every paradigm with her visit to Taiwan and also spoke against Russian aggression there.
It seemed like a speech from other times, where not diplomatic caution prevailed, but concern for democracy, peace, political blocs and western values threatened by barbarism. The surprise among the newspapers was that the Croatian President did not deserve to wait for her, but on the way to a village a few hours away from the capital, she took the banal excuse that Mrs. Pelozi will not be the capo of the Senate in a few weeks, so I will not wait for her.
They all passed it with a smile like the whim of a Balkan Moroccan who will make news with the stupidity of the portrait and the force. During our official visit, we had meetings with the Prime Minister of the country, a very charismatic and very supportive and friendly person with Albanian causes and demands in the Balkans and in Europe, as well as with the Speaker of the Parliament of Croatia, who was just as humane and attentive to strengthening relationship and friendship between the peoples of our countries.
On the last day, a meeting was planned with the President, who had a residence on the outskirts of the city in a typical Yugoslav villa that Tito once used in the middle of the greenery. A beautiful almost exotic place. We entered the presidency and lined up according to protocol! The Speaker of the Assembly of Albania was accompanied by the employees of that institution to the podium of honor. We were waiting for the president. But he had taken it by storm. After a few minutes, although an awkward waiting situation was created, he went down.
He looked a little pleased and as if addicted. In the meeting room, the same nopran atmosphere. Absurd, pompous, arrogant and declarative as a man who knew the Balkans from the beginning and had the magic solutions in hand and beyond.
Although in the Albanian delegation there were the Speaker of the Assembly, Zevendes the Speaker, MP Marnoj and others were joined by some diplomas of the nostalgic Yugoslav West, he had no ears to listen, but only a mouth to speak.
Mbllaciti mixed up some amorphous phrases for the relations between countries very far away with the vocabulary of the Croatian Prime Minister or Speaker of the Parliament or other political factors we met. On leaving, I couldn't bear to tell the other members of the delegation that in this man I saw all the boastful patheticness of the Balkans, the very complexes of this peninsula overlooked by history since ancient times.
So that our disappointment was not belied at the end, he shook hands with no one, violating every code of hospitality, and ran up the stairs like a neighborhood Dane.
I remembered everything when I read his comments, who, in order to get attention in relation to the pro-European and pro-Kosovo factors of Croatia, preferred to speak as Putin's lepe pece waiter and Vucic's adviser!!
When I heard it in Zagreb, I thought that the power of stupidity to make news should not be underestimated, especially in our Balkans. This is how things started.