We had a case in Brooklyn, which was unexpected for us, because we had gone in the name of the Albanian people to ask for forgiveness. They come from the Alzhanica region in Montenegro. When they came to reconcile, one of the brothers stands up and gives his hand to Mark Krasniqi and says, “On my behalf, and on behalf of the Muslim people, I forgive my brother’s blood.” No one speaks, the boy’s paternal uncle stands up and says, “This shows how far the enemy got.” He says, “He does not know two Albanian words,” he said, “because where he was raised, he did not have rights, and at the school where he went, he was told, ‘You are not Albanian, you are Muslim’.” He says, “This shows how far we got.” This was Shpend Haxha, a very popular figure in New York, who was the first cousin of the one who forgave the blood.
The late Bajram Kelmendi stood up and began to recite the Lahuta e Malcis [The Highland Lute, famous Albanian epic], by Father Gjergj Fishta. He mentioned the grandfather of the one who spoke, the one who said, “On behalf of the Muslim people.” In the Lahuta e Malcis his grandfather is mentioned, and [Kelmendi] recited that part of the war of Nikšić, where his grandfather was one of the leaders in the fight against Montenegrins, and then he sat down. He sat down and said, “This is misery. This is forgiveness, okay. So he did, he forgave, but the misery is in the situation our people are in, where the enemy has led us to erase this. On behalf of the Muslim people! Where is a Muslim nation? Where are Muslim people? Albanians can be divided into Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox. Albanians are an ethnic, not a religious group. As Albanian, they are an ethnicity, and not a religious group.”
When we left, we all laughed. We all laughed. He forgave, ok, he forgave and the family reconciled, they were Albanians, they spoke Albanian and the one who forgave did not speak Albanian. He even said, in Serbian, that they speak the Muslim language, but there is no Muslim language. There is the Serbian language and the Croatian language, because there is no Montenegrin language and there is no Muslim language. There are dialects, but not languages. They are almost like the Slavic languages, like one or the other. A Muslim language? No language is Muslim, it is the Serbian language. He said it in a way that when we went out, we were all laughing. But we did not go there to ask for forgiveness as Muslims. But it was good and it is in the past.
The audio interview section of Besim Malota telling the story that you just read can be found here