On the debate on Xhafer Deva and the folly of Albanian beasts.

Enver Robelli /  KOHA

Now that this topic of Xhafer Deva was opened, many beasts appear in public to sell their minds. That Xhafer Deva was an accomplice of the Nazis is documented. In one photo, he is seen with a Nazi officer and Kosta Pecanci, a Chetnik commander and Nazi collaborator, walking through Podujevë / Podujevo during World War II. How do the Albanian Chetnik and the nationalist go together?

They go because they are both collaborators of the Nazis. This job is so simple. There are other photos where Xhafer Deva is seen next to Nazi officers as their mercenary in Albanian areas. Seduced by the regime of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, some Albanian politicians sided with Nazism. They may have believed that this would secure the borders of an Albanian state in the Balkans, but the alignment was a grave mistake.

Other Albanians fought Nazism. Some believed in communism, some did not, but they were opponents of the murderous Nazi ideology and here they made no mistake: they were on the side of America, Great Britain, and other anti-Hitler powers.

Albanian collaborators promised the Nazis that they would mobilize up to 150,000 volunteers who would fight alongside Nazi forces. There were not even 7000. German Nazi officers complained about the colossal lack of discipline of members of the so-called "Skanderbeg Division". In October 1944 this "division" was disbanded. It was established in May. Not even 6 months did not work. The Nazi plan failed. Cooperation with the Nazis is not a chapter that Albanians should be proud of.

The restoration of Xhafer Deva's house is not a patriotic act either. Kosovo institutions must abandon this project immediately and distance themselves before this issue becomes a major topic in international opinion. The German ambassador's reaction was a warning.

For a start anyone who is interested in the history of Albanian collaborators of Nazism can read the book by the Swiss historian Franziska A. Zaugg (Albanische Muslime in der Waffen-SS. Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. 346 pages). Or the book by the historian David Motadel (Für Prophet und Führer. Die islamische Welt und das Dritte Reich. English: On the Prophet and the Führer. The Islamic World and the Third Reich).

These books should have been translated into Albanian. They have not been translated because our historians and history institutes deal with peripheral themes, forced patriotic narratives, or scandalous glorifications.

David Motadel writes that when the chief mufti of Jerusalem, based in Berlin, Mohamed Amin al-Husseini, visited Sarajevo, a delegation of Muslim dignitaries from Kosovo also came to the Bosnian capital. Who were these people? We do not know. Because it has not been researched.

When World War II reached its climax (1941-1942) and Hitler's troops infiltrated Muslim-populated regions of the Balkans, North Africa, Crimea, and the Caucasus, and were approaching the Middle East and Central Asia, the Nazis in Berlin began to perceive Islam as something that could be used politically - against the British Empire, the Soviet Union, America. And the Jews. So writes historian David Motadel.

The Nazis accepted sharia, Islamic foundations (waqfs), and madrasas. Nazi leaders referred to German Emperor Wilhelm II, who in 1898, after visiting Saladin's tomb in Damascus, Syria, declared himself a "friend of 300 million Muslims." Later, in the Nazi era, the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote: "This war can bring freedom to Islam." In Bosnia, the Nazis supported the "Hanxhar" division, in Albanian areas the "Skanderbeg division". In early 1943 the chief mufti of Jerusalem Mohamed Amin al-Husseini visited Zagreb, Banja Luka, and Sarajevo. He met with leaders of the Muslim community and called for an alliance with Adolf Hitler.

Some voices of digital idiots from the albanosphere mutter in defense of Xhafer Deva, saying that he fought communism. "CIA files" with allegedly positive descriptions of Xhafer Deva are circulating on the network. This is a ridiculous tendency to prove that everything Americans say is morally pure. It's not.

Take the example of the German missile engineer Wernher von Braun, who during Hitler's rule ran the V2 missile development program. After World War II he - now an American citizen - worked for NASA and made the essential contribution of later man landing on the moon. He was not the only Nazi engineer in the service of America.

Sometimes even Americans do not choose collaborators. They also used Xhafer Deva in their battle against communism. Even in America, the subject of the extermination of the Jews has long been silenced. Only in 1978, with the appearance of the four-part series "Holocaust", this topic penetrated the public. In 1979 he appeared in Germany and sparked widespread public debate on German collective responsibility for crimes against Jews.

That the Americans are also wrong is shown by the example of the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. The coup against him was organized by the CIA. Augusto Pinochet, a fascist, came to power. That the overthrow of Allende was a mistake is also acknowledged by American politicians. In short: He is not a patriot, he is a mercenary of the fascists. The bad thing is that this is not the way it is taught in Kosovo schools. And this is wrong.