DAY 81 - LEZHE TO SHKODER: 24.1 MILES (48,200 STEPS)

Albania’s Dark Secret

11^th July, 2011

24.1 Miles (Total: 778.9 miles)  48,200 (Total: 1,490,891 steps)

‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’ Mahatma Gandhi

I set off early on a very long and hard days walk, which almost ended with another bout of heat exhaustion. I arrived in Shkoder, late afternoon, and for some reason felt a distinct unease in the place. Many men I passed on the street would stare, eye to eye, without a smile or refuse to acknowledge my smile or greeting. In at least three cases, men spat on the ground in front of me—I was later assured this was not personal, as some men would spit on the ground everywhere. I checked in to the Razafa Hotel, an old Soviet style hotel, but great value at 15 euros right in the centre of the town.

That evening I met with Elona Prroj, who was to lift the veil on a dark secret about the northern parts of Albania. The secret was blood feuds. It sounds like something from the dark ages, but it is estimated that today as many as 1650 Albanian families are in hiding because of blood feuds. The blood feud is part of a system of ‘justice’ practiced in the rural areas and based upon a 500-year-old Canon of law called ‘Kanuni I Leke Dukagjinit’. The ‘Kanun’, as it is known, lays down the basis for seeking revenge for blood spilled. So, if a member of one family is killed by a member of another family, then the ‘law’ not only permits the grieving family to take a male life from perpetrators family, it tells them that their family can have no honour until the blood is avenged.

As the blood is avenged, then of course the avenged blood must be avenged by the other family, and so the cycle of violence goes on and on. The consequence is that when a family is ‘in blood’, in other words awaiting vengeance, then they all become prisoners in their own home—given that the blood feud can extend to cousins, then there can often be twenty males who are in self-imprisonment.

Now when I was in Tirana claims of the existence of blood feuds was often dismissed as mere folk lore, but I had reason to think again. The reason was that this story was being told to me, over a coffee on a balcony high above the city of Shkoder, by strikingly beautiful young lady named Elona Prroj.  Elona has established a charity called ‘Trapoya’, which works supplying food and counselling to families ‘in blood’. Elona spoke perfect English and was surrounded by members of her family and church while she told me of the events six years ago when an uncle of her husband had shot an off-duty police officer during a row in a restaurant.  Within days the uncle had fled into the mountains—some of the villages do not have any road access – and twenty-four male members of the uncles’ family went into hiding.

Elona’s husband, Dritan, was a church pastor in Shkoder and had resisted calls to go into hiding because he wanted to serve members of the church; for five years he lived with constant threats on his life and two attempts. Then in November 2010, a young man gunned him down in the street outside of his church when he was on his way to collect his two young children. The courage of this family was incredible, but the grace in first publicly forgiving the assassin of her husband, so as not to prolong the feud into another bloody round, then to devote her life to serving families who are under a similar threat.

The encounter with Elona had a deep and profound effect – some enlightening and some mystifying:

We discussed how the Olympic Truce, or simply the concept of truce, could be used to try and break the cycle of violence. I told Elona how the original truce was instigated to allow fighting men to lay down their arms and pursue peace without looking weak because they were competing in ‘manly’ sporting games. The key concept was that if you could have a truce for a few days, then it meant that peace was possible and could be tried for longer.

I realised that the aggressiveness that I encountered on my way into to Shkoder, was actually expressions of people living under a dark fear, not so much of the blood feud, but more of losing face and honour. I wanted to shout from the balcony, “your honour is not worth a single drop of anyone’s blood”. In some ways it would be understandable if the blood feud extended to the uncle who had killed the young man six years early, but to make entirely innocent people the target of vengeance is a demonic blood lust.

This practice of blood feuds and the essential restoration of ‘family honour’, could partially explain the propensity of conflicts and brutality of conflicts in the Balkans.

The more I thought I wondered whether these people were actually that different to perpetrators of gang violence in London or terrorist activities in Northern Ireland. At stake seems less the issue and more the need to restore honour for fear of looking weak to your opponents or supporters.

I reflected on a great weakness of Albanian culture, in that is that it is male dominated—the absence of women from what might be called the public square and the town square. Albanian town centres are filled with men drinking endless cups of coffee, women are virtually invisible and certainly when it comes to politics and business. The promotion of women in cultures such as Albania is not a matter of political correctness, it is a matter of moderating the testosterone driven macho-ness which is so fearful of looking weak, that it will perpetrate unspeakable acts of wickedness against the sons of mothers.

There was one other aspect of this encounter that I found most troubling.  It was pointed out to me separately that the Kanun was largely a code for Christians, who had fled to the hills following the invasion of Otterman Turks and their requirement of conversion to Islam. They further pointed out, that the Kanun was justified because there is a strong avenging of blood theme that runs through the pages of the Judeo-Christian faith. Jesus was the ‘final blood sacrifice to pay the price of our sin’. Yet this was for an all-loving God, who demanded blood satisfaction from an innocent for the rebellion of the guilty. Yet, Jesus said: ‘  ³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matthew chapter 5) Who says “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” (ibid) and whose final request from the cross of crucifixion was “Forgive them father for they know not what they do”?

To begin to counter the evil of the blood feuds one needs not look through the pages of the Kanun, nor even of the bible, but to simply look at the example of Elona Prroj and her response to being brutally and undeservedly robbed of a good and innocent man whom she loved. For through Elona’s response, we see the triumph of love over hate, hope over fear and light over darkness and catch a glimpse of the true nature of the person to whom she and Dritan devoted their lives to following.