From Mustafa Merlika
Memorie.al / We are guests in a foreign home, and as such it is our duty to submit to the will of the host and to honour his wishes and interests. According to the rules of Albanian chivalry, the host must protect the invited guest or his servant from a third party, especially when that third party is also a guest of the house. But when circumstances leave no room for applying this rule of chivalry, the harassed guest has no choice but to leave and go away, or to harden his heart and endure! So neither law nor humanity allows us to jeopardise the interests of the country that has given us hospitality; and therefore we are forced to restrain our speech, even at the cost of denying ourselves, if it goes against the friendly and loyal States of this country.
Nevertheless, we do not believe there is any law or social rule that does not give us permission to respond to a letter or a French writer who, whether he wants to or not, knowingly or unknowingly, seeks to present us to the world in the darkest colours. A certain Colonel Thomasson, judging in Paris’s “Petit Journal” the events of these days in Albania, see how he covers with flowers (!) the martyrs of our homeland, fallen here and there across the Vjosa, on this side and that of the Seman:
“In this wild land – says the Frenchman of Albania – which still retains the customs of the middle Ages and can be compared to Morocco, there have always been two currents, one headed by the Italians and the other by the Austrians. Each of these could strengthen itself to the detriment of the other depending on the chances of the times. If the entire Austrian military force were forced to withdraw from Albania, it would not be at all safe from the Albanian bands which are with it today and tomorrow, without further ado, would turn against it and take the side of the victor”!
First of all, the military critic of the Parisian newspaper bestows upon us the title “wild”. This word is overly familiar to the French; when two street urchins get angry with each other, the first insult heard from their mouths is this: “sauvage” – wild! But could it be that the critic of an important newspaper like “Le Petit Journal” uses words as loosely as street urchins, without realising what they mean? We don’t believe it!
By characterising Albania as wild, he wanted to fully indicate a country that lacks the faith of civilisation that knows no humanity, recognises no government, understands no society, nor comprehends what they call nation, law and order; but we think thus, not wishing to place Colonel Thomasson alongside Vladan Đorđević, who presented Albanians to the world with tails!
But the French writer reveals his intention even better when he says that we still retain the customs of the Middle Ages and when he compares us to the Moroccans. The peoples of the middle Ages also had many virtues, such as loyalty, courage, chivalry, etc. But we, according to the “Petit Journal”, have lost all these and kept only the bad customs of that time, adding thereafter treachery in place of loyalty, wickedness in place of courage – in a word, we have fallen to the level of the Jews or, as the writer himself says, of the Moroccans.
We do not believe that a Colonel of France is so dishonest an enemy of our nation as to stoop to slander such shameless lies as those he is publishing about us in the Petit Journal. He is, we say, a man who has never seen Albania; he has never had the chance to sit and speak with Albanians or friends of Albania; he does not know of any impartial written works about us. Besides, who knows how many times he has happened to hear of our affairs from the mouths of our enemies or read them from their pens.
We cannot claim that we have a material civilisation like that of other regions of Europe; not like that of the writer’s country, nor even like that of our small neighbours. Nevertheless, whoever truly knows the Albanian cannot at all contradict us when we dare to say that morally, in terms of civic sentiment, we are not at all lower than our Balkan companions. We would go on too long if we were to bring here examples that show the moral and social character of other peoples, especially of neighbouring peoples, at the beginning of their free life.
We only advise our critics, if they are in the right, to study well and impartially the history of the rebirth of the Balkan peoples. Then let them examine with a liberal spirit also the living history of our own times, and especially this one, to better discover who are the wild and heartless bloodthirsty ones among the inhabitants of the Balkans, or even of all Europe!
- Thomasson speaks of the political currents of our country with a rather weak and mistaken spirit. The intelligent and educated Albanians, during the dark times of Turkish rule, saw France as the country where the sun of liberty for all peoples was born, and with good reason they placed great hopes in the homeland of those who, with the wonderful Revolution of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, opened the door to a new life for all of Europe, putting the spark of liberty into the hearts of all other nations.
Albanians would not be at all surprised if some new La Fayette emerged in 1878, in 1911 and 1912, and extended his hand to those men who were forced to fight with teeth and nails to save Albania, on one hand from the centuries-old yoke of Turkey, and on the other from the claws of the enemies all around who coveted to place us under new and even heavier yokes. But no! On the contrary, Albanian Ulcinj and Tivar were handed over to Nikola of Montenegro with the help of the fleets of the Great Powers, including that of France, the homeland of La Fayette and Danton.
This was the first time that Albania experienced with a bleeding heart that before interest, liberal principles or slogans had no value. But the bitter trials did not stop there for this wretched land: the national uprisings that began in the Highlands in 1911 and ended in Skopje in 1912 with the moral and material destruction of the Turkish army, thus opening the path to triumph for the Balkan League a few months later, were described in the pages of Paris in the most strange and unbelievable colours for a man.
When later, finally, we found ourselves before the London Conference of 1913, which was to distribute justice among the Balkan nations (!), after Turkey, first by Albanian arms and then by those of the Slavonic-Greek League, had been destroyed and almost completely driven out of Europe, we saw that the French Republic became the right arm of Tsarist Russia, together with which it tried, as far as its power reached, to prevent the creation of an Albanian State, to have the Arbëresh land divided between the Slavs and the Greeks, to, in a word, finish off the Albanian seed, to extinguish it under the tyrannical heel of its enemies.
In such a difficult situation, when the life of our nation and race was at the point of danger, about to become the victim of Russo-French injustice, who came forward armed and with an unshakable will to save it? Had it not been for the vital interests of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Italy, which would have been ruined together with Albania – in a word, had it not been for the Adriatic – our hopes, based on principles and ideology, would have left us in the lurch for life.
Faced with these truths, for Albanians there would never be any other right and reasonable path than to undress from dreams and dress in reality. Albania was saved by Austria-Hungary and Italy, who saw their own future at risk with its loss. So there is nothing more natural than that Albanians place their hopes in these two Great Powers, the saviours of their country and their nation.
But “so many heads, so many minds”, says an old saying; it is known, therefore, that some of us may have valued the work of one more, and some that of the other, towards Albania; some see one policy as more beneficial, some the other. This happens everywhere; for example, in France: Mr. Clemenceau sees his country’s good in the alliance with England, Mr. Caillaux with Germany!
Let Colonel Thomasson be sure that those Albanians who form the two pro-Austrian and pro-Italian currents in Albania are simple and convinced patriots, not men sold out and organised for the sake of special interests and the power and war profits of one side or the other.
We are speaking generally about those who understand politics, not, of course, about the popular masses who cannot have their own fixed opinion anywhere in the world. But we add that even among Albanians it is no wonder to find a Bolo, an Almereyda, a Turmel, or a Duval!
So if the character and spirit of an entire people must be judged by the deeds of traitors, this must be a general rule, not only for us! / Memorie.al
Newspaper “Kuvêndi”, July 23, 1918
