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By:
Veton Surroi
- February 9, 2022 08:30 AM
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...and why should you read anything else besides the title of the text
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1.
Why should Xhafer Deva's house be renovated?
This is the title of this text, and the error in it is not the lack of a question mark. The title in this case is an explanatory sentence, not a question. So, the title belongs to the text that should explain my support for the joint project of the Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of South Mitrovica and the UNDP for the renovation of the building made in 1930 by its owner Xhafer Deva. So that there is no dilemma: I fully support this project.
The project is the renovation of an architectural value of a public building in Mitrovica, in order to serve the cultural needs of Mitrovica and its wider area - among other things, also by creating a visual arts gallery space.
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So the error in the title is factual. The building we are talking about was built by Xhafer Deva's family in 1930 and was their property until 1945, a total of 15 years. Then, in different forms and different powers, this building lived for almost eighty years as public property.
This public property, which has architectural value (that is, artistic) should be renovated, even more so when its renovation will give life to art in the city and its surroundings.
2.
The factual error is to blame for one of the two problems with a political dimension that arose around this project.
The first problem is that of the wrong perception that this is about the renovation of Xhafer Deva's house, i.e. an attempt at rehabilitation or, depending on the perspective from which his figure is viewed, elevation of that figure. Within this error is the impression received by the German ambassador in Kosovo, who wrote that he is very concerned about the plans for the restoration of the house of Xhafer Deva, a collaborator and Nazi protagonist of the infamous SS Skanderbeg division.
And, the ambassador who comes from an exemplary country in dealing with the culture of memory, driven by the traumas of the Second World War, added: "don't distort the truth about the Holocaust or the war crimes committed by the Nazis and their local collaborators."
The second problem then was equally derived from this error. A number of public figures who make public pronouncements (including a politician who had been Russia's envoy) defended the figure of Xhafer Deva. The summary question of all these reactions was almost: "why not rehabilitate/promote Xhafer Deva?".
3.
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The first problem is not difficult to solve. Yes, the building was built by a man who, eleven years after its construction, stood out as a prominent Nazi collaborationist figure among the Albanians; from the Serbs and in the same photo with Xh. Chetnik voivode Kosta Peqanci came out on the camel, together with an Abwehr officer. And yet, the building may have changed hands immediately after the Second World War, but it cannot bear the sins of its original owner.
Cultures and civilizations that have cultivated memory know this very well, and Germany is exemplary among them. In fact, the ambassador has a very close relationship between the building and the memory, because the German Foreign Ministry itself is located in Berlin today in a building that was once the Central Bank of the Nazi Reich and in the period 1959-1990 it was the Central Committee of the Communist Party ( Workers' Socialists) of the GDR. The fact that in the offices and halls of that building decisions were made against human rights, the dignity of German citizens everywhere and those who had to protect the interests of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" did not prevent the Government of the united Germany from establishing one of the most important ministries in today's world of diplomacy.
So, from this point of view, it is even welcome that the house that once belonged to Xhafer Deva is a cultural center in Mitrovica.
The second problem is deeper, and the mistake in determining the owner of the house served only as a catalyst to bring to light the problem of critical historiography in Kosovo, namely the culture of memory. In the absence of a critical historical evaluation, based on meritorious documents that are abundant today everywhere from London to Berlin and Rome, the figure of Xhafer Deva is brought up in social networks as one equivalent to Western democracies. The problem with this narrative is that it runs into the first inconsistency: being both an exemplary collaborator of Nazism and an exemplary Western democrat does not work. As the already comprehensive Albanian narrative about the salvation of the Jews does not go; in Kosovo we can tell about the bravery of some families who saved the Jews in the worst times, but in official, political and academic Jerusalem, there are abundant files on the SS Skanderbeg Division.
The depth of this second problem becomes greater when it is put in the context of the XNUMXth century, the century from which we have sufficient historical distance today. If we still do not have an attitude of our collective memory towards Nazism and collaboration with it, that is, if the Second World War still continues in our narratives, with what instruments of memory will we face a whole difficult and challenging period, what were the different eras that followed World War II?
4.
The lack of memory culture in Kosovo contains an internal paradox, which we will discover as time goes on and to what extent there will be serious or frivolous mental investment in it. On Twitter, at the end of the photo of the Nazi officer, the Chetnik Voivode Kosta Peqanci and Xhafer Deva (who roamed the streets of Podujeva in 1941) I noted that the independence of Kosovo was achieved "painfully, but finally as a victory of anti-fascism, of the Transatlantic force who defeated these three from the picture".
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This formulation was part of my belief (based on reading and life experience) that the idea for Kosovo's self-determination, formulated during the war against Nazi fascism at the Bujan Conference, was an attempt to legitimize Kosovo's freedom as part of the Atlantic Alliance . Half a century later, after the sacrifices and extraordinary efforts of the citizens of Kosovo, this Alliance enabled a process of self-determination in opposition to Serbian fascism.
