Musine Kokalari was a writer from Gjirokaster. She was one of the founders of Albania's short lived Social Democratic Party. She wrote for their newspaper, Zeri i Lirise (The Voice of Freedom). She owned her own bookstore. She studied in Rome and completed a thesis on the work of Naim Frasheri. She wrote and published three books. In 1946, at the age of twenty eight, a military court in Tirana announced that she was a “saboteur and enemy of the people.” She spent eighteen years in prison in Burrel, and another nineteen years in a work camp in Rreshen, where she died.

We know about Kokalari by chance, decades after her death. Circumstances made her a hero, but I doubt she intended to die a martyr. Real patriots make sacrifices no one hears about. Real patriots are quiet and a lot of the time their stories never reach us.

At the end of January Kosovo's parliament passed a resolution that this will be the year that supervised independence comes to an end. I fail to find this news exciting. Supervised independence was going to end sooner or later. The bigger question is how we are going to deal with ourselves. Loudness, greed and anger are rewarded and respected here. How are we going to deal with feeling powerless in the face of that big crowd of loud, greedy men who run this place?

Unfortunately, having experienced oppression doesn't mean that one isn't capable of becoming an oppressor. Our politicians can never be as bad as Kokolari's oppressors, but there is no strict scale of oppression. Most big oppressions start off as small oppressions, and there are countless examples across time and space we can learn that lesson from.

We have to deal with the complicated work of reconsidering what patriotism really means, and how easy it is to throw around the word “patriot.” Albanians from Albania know better than anybody else that speaking the same language doesn't necessarily make people brothers. We can also learn from Albania about how rhetoric about the nation can be twisted to justify any cruelty and injustice.

The war is over. Maybe it's redundant to say that, but it needs saying. The war is over, and there is nothing left but work and some sacrifice to make things better. The war is over, and we need to be deathly careful of not turning into our former oppressors. Otherwise we are a disappointment, to ourselves and to the people who will come after us.

The war is over, and nothing is forgotten. I'm not a religious person, but I believe that every life leaves something behind. Good lives leave a small legacy that doesn't disappear. There are enough good lives here to make Kosovo better, and although they are silent and unnoticeable, they will leave something behind that will not disappear. In the end it is a multitude of good lives that will transform how we live and how we govern ourselves – this is what will eventually, slowly, replace the fossils we've allowed to label themselves heroes and patriots. That's when we will truly be independent.

You boast that you have won the war, and now that you are the winner you want to extinguish those who you call political opponents. I think differently from you but I love my country. – Musine Kokalari

The article was originally written in English and Albanian.

Photo credit: Atdhe Mulla 

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