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Letra e Sami Repishti drejtuar George W Bush me rastin e vizites ne shqiperi
PETITION
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Your decision to visit Albania on June 10,2007, has
been greeted with great enthusiasm as a historic day
by ten million Albanians in the United States,
Albania, Kosova, Mace-donia, Montenegro, Serbia,
Greece, and around the world.
Your visit there will cement the existing cordial
relations and the very friendly feeling Albanians
nourish for the United States. Since the days of the
late President Woodrow Wilson’ s protection of
Albania’s independence to the near-providential
U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosova, in 1999, there
has always been a strong and pervasive conviction
among Albanians that the United States is a land of
liberty and justice, a model of democracy with a
quasi-religious respect for the law, a beacon of hope
for oppressed people, and a proven ally of Albania,
and the Albanians. During your visit there, you will
find that Albanians are, reflexively and emotionally,
the most pro-American people in the Old Continent.
This is a major factor in guaranteeing Albania’s
contribution to peace and stability in the region.
Mr. President, in Albania you will find a population
resolved to reman faithful to the tradition of
freedom, and determined to honor in every individual
the human greatness we all possess. Having been for a
long time “the aggrieved party”, Albanians have not
fostered the illusions of “great design”, ‘thirst for
conquest”, or a “superiority complex” so dangerous to
themselves, and to their neighbors. They have
developed a natural propensity for solidarity with
oppressed people. Cruelly oppressed themselves, the
noble act of providing safe haven to victims of
cruelty, for them is a matter of national pride. This
display of humanity has been recorded during the WW II
years, with the protection of the distressed Greeks,
Italians, and especially Jews, and again in 1999, in
providing comfort and consolation to half million
Albanian Kosovars,victims of Serbian aggression.
In Albania today, you will find a general confidence
that after the shameful downfall of Communist
dictatorship in 1991, progress and prosperity will
come to Albania. You will find that Albanians know
enough, care enough, and are willing to work together
hard enough to make it come. There was confusion and
instability in Albanian society brought about by the
rapid changes, after 45 long years of violent and
forceful introduction of Communist arbitrary
legislation. One can still see the homo sovieticus in
a frightful dec-line in morals, a disregard for honor,
truth, piety, and the inevitable shameless corruption
President George W. Bush
page two
The accompanying general impoverishment, and the
discouraging decline in ethics are negatively
affecting the process of the country’s recovery.
Communism in Albania killed the elite, mistreated the
average, and glorified the inferior in mind and heart.
It is this Communist legacy that is still hounding
that country. Even today, by thinking of their
opponents as enemies, the political forces are showing
that they are willing to deal with each other with
force. Today, politics has been brutalized by a class
of new politicians who swear to democracy, but remain
willing prisoners of Communist mentali-ty. A nation
which suffers such trauma needs a generation to gain
perspective, and create a fertile political culture.
The tasks of social change are tasks for the
tough-minded and competent. Those who came to the task
with the currently fashionable mixture of passion and
incompetence
only added to the confusion. Albanian political
leaders have embraced the position which claims that
“my party” is “my country”. Thus, a culture of endless
rebellion has been created, coupled with a humiliating
tendency to constantly look to outsiders to gain an
advantage over rivals. Furthermore, the resulting
harmful silence of the majority has corrupted many
people’s moral fiber to the point that they seem
unable to recognize repressive regimes anymore, or to
forecast the uncertain future.
It is painful for me to state that almost everything
that has happened in Albania for the last sixteen
years is so preposterous that one can suspect a state
of fatal mental confusion on the part of Albanian
politicians. Their constant insistence on general
obedience, without understanding - a main feature in a
Communist society- has created a state of
quasi-servitude. It is corruption, it is inhumanity,
it is the opposite of a healthy tradition of
constructive dissent!
Mr. President, the political leadership in Albania
should be reminded that our relations with their
country are decided with due regard to the principles
of legality and morality, and not with reference to
the abominable disputes now being waged in a wild race
for absolute power. We must rely on people who work
hard and play by the rule. Albania needs an age of
critical reflection! Your message will be heard!
Mr. President. Today, the only tool I am left to
protect the powerless victims of Communist terror is
the written word in this Petition.
These victims have been neglected for a long time
by successive and insensitive administrations, led
mostly by hardcore former communists. Today, they feel
the danger of ending in oblivion. No one seems to be
able to help shape the cultural justice, and perhaps
find ways of addressing the injustices of the past and
present, by integrating the victims fully into the
society. One should visit the Museum of National
History, in
President George W. Bush
page three
Tirana. A small portion of it is the guardian of
universal suffering, a repository of the horrors of an
unimaginable world. Only then, one realizes that the
glorious generation
who opposed Communist dictatorship, who lived that
nightmare, is about to fade away. Very few are left to
stand up for the values of human rights and democracy.
We should give them a helping hand. We must dispel
their justified fears that communist death cells and
concentration camps of forced labor will ever again
find a place in Albania, in spite of man’s proven
capacity for infinite depravity. That’s their best
reward!
Mr. President, I implore you to meet with their
representatives, and assure them that these United
States will never forget them. I implore you to lift
their spirits!
Respectfully submitted,
Sami Repishti, Ph.D.
City University of New York
Former political prisoner
in communist Albania (1946-56), and,
in communist Yugoslavia (1959-60)
Human rights activist
cc: The Honorable Ambassador Marcie B. Ries
American Embassy
Tirana, Albania
4512
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