22 June 09
Commentary by Kim Mehmeti: “Grandfathers and Their Grandsons”
The peoples of the Balkans have a common characteristic: if you want to compliment them and make them feel good, you must not tell those who you are talking to how good they are, but how brave and noble their late grandparents were. In this way, they will not get offended if you tell them that young generations are worthless, a crowd without a clear collective identity, and that, with the exception of their glorious past, they have no other value with which their present can be identified.
But, they will get easily offended if you belittle their past, if you ridicule their roots from which they have sprouted and have become an ethnic branch. Some of the peoples of the Balkans, living in the hazy present and walking toward an uncertain future, feel most comfortable in the cave of their past where they keep repeating the tales of their grandfathers, forgetting that their every move today is a seed that will sprout plants of the future that will determine the fates of their grandsons.
And thus, some of the peoples of the Balkans have remained in a hole surrounded by the banks of an uncertain present and hazy past, which is almost always a mixture of truths and myths. And so, today, too, as we read history books of some of the peoples of the Balkans, we get the impression that we are reading fairy tales in which an odd true event may have slipped in. It is as if the peoples of the Balkans feel better in the shadow of their grandfathers’ glory than in the present marching on the path that should lead them toward the future. And as such, they dedicate more efforts to embellishing and preserving the past than to the fulfillment of their dreams for the future.
But, even as such, it seems that not a single people in the Balkans has gone so far as to do what those who call themselves ethnic Macedonians have been doing: to change the calendar of their past as though it were a seasonal fruit that can be uprooted and then planted back again in any other garden or as though it were a tree whose branches you can graft into any other tree you like. And so, many peoples in the Balkans have embellished their past with whatever they could, but no one has done what those who call themselves ethnic Macedonians have been doing: from time to time they change their birth certificates, amend their grandfathers’ names depending on political circumstances and, whenever it crosses their minds that, such as they are, they think that they deserve ancestors who are more famous than the true ones and that they are grandsons who deserve not just any grandfather.
And so, those who call themselves Macedonians today will soon learn their rewritten history, the most interesting chapter of which will be the one hidden between the lines, the one that explains what happens to history when it becomes a servant of daily politics. In this book, everything will be different from earlier books of the history of this people, from which generations of Macedonians learnt that they were the descendants of southern Slavs.
In the newly published book, “History of the Macedonian People,” the ethnic stem is completely different from the one that the branches of this people grew up until yesterday. In the newest amended history, it is said that today’s Macedonians are children adopted into the family of southern Slavs, a family that has been hiding with unprecedented jealousy their true origin. Therefore, according to the author of this book, the time has come to say to them that they are who they are — a people that everyone envies and whom everyone wants to usurp — the grandsons of Alexander the Great.
There is no doubt that those who call themselves ethnic Macedonians could change their history twice a year and it is not business of the Albanians in this country. But, there is also no doubt that, while rummaging through their past and patching up their history with the remains from the past of other peoples of the Balkans, they who call themselves Macedonians today are plunging the country ever deeper into conflict with neighbors, thus holding the future of Macedonia hostage, in which there are peoples that want to have a future that is as certain as their past.
With their uncertain past, ethnic Macedonians are holding hostage the future of the Albanians of this country, who, too, have things to amend in their history books written by communist ideologues, but they are by no means in any doubt as to their genetic tree and who their grandfathers were. There is no doubt that the latest history book of the Macedonian people will bring new troubles for Macedonia with regard to the name dispute with Greece. There is no doubt that, from this viewpoint, the Albanians of this country should make their own calculations as to their actions if they, too, get stuck into the hole of the hazy past of their fellow nationals Macedonians.
And, after having made their calculations, they should say clearly that they have sympathy for the grandsons who have just discovered their real grandfathers in the 21st century and that they want the ethnic Macedonians to keep digging deeper into the tunnels of their past in order to prove that they are grandsons of Eve and Adam more than any other people in the Balkans. But, they should also tell them that they do not want to be held hostage to ethnic dilemmas from which suffer those who used to brag that they had inherited the bravery of their Slavic grandfathers and who say today that they are the grandsons of Alexander the Great.
The Albanians of Macedonia should tell openly to those who call themselves Macedonians that they do not want to bury their present and their future in the graves in which they are looking for the bones of their grandfathers. They should tell them the truth that the history of a people is a passport for a group toward the future, but when history is made up of fancy stories, it becomes a broken mirror in which a people cannot see either the faces of their grandparents or of today’s generations. It has to be said openly that invented history is a mirror in which emerges clearly the truth that a people that lacks the will and ability to change the possible — the present and the future — and that wastes time trying to achieve the impossible — to change its past — is a people that is unhappy with who it is and what it is.
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