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As the great American historian Eric Foner wrote,
monuments are many things to different people, but mostly they are
“an expression of power, and indication of who has the power to
choose how history is remembered in public places.”
Which brings me to the controversy over the
monument to the “Unknown Fighter,” as it is best known in Gjilan.
Built in 1963 to honor the fighters killed between 1941-1945, the
monument replaced a 1918 statue of the Serbian King Petar I
Karadjordjevic, and is now slated to be replaced by a monument to
Idriz Seferi, an Albanian hero from the region, who fought against
the Ottoman Empire and later Serbia during the Balkan Wars. Agreeing
with the groups that are advocating its preservation, I believe this
should be an opportunity to break the cycle that gives the group in
power a monopoly on history, but also to not forget what was at
stake in WWII for Kosovo, Europe and the world.
There is nothing new or surprising in the story of
the “Unknown Fighter,” from its construction until its removal. For
the Socialist Yugoslavs, the statue served the purpose of indicating
that the new post-WWII regime would be completely different from the
old Serbian monarchy. The majority of Kosovo, the Albanians who had
paid the highest price for the annexation to Serbia in terms of
human lives and freedom, had reviled the King. It is clear why in
the mind of the Yugoslav leadership the monument to the Serbian King
had to go, as a promise that Yugoslavia would not be like Old
Serbia.
The “Unknown Fighter” Cubist-style statue shows no
particular sign of ethnic identification. It is in fact a
representation of piety, with the main figure holding a smaller,
lifeless one, in his/her arms. It honors the fallen in WWII, but it
does not specify which ones. The monument that the new municipal
administration intends to plant in its place is a very specific
monument, a realistic-looking statue that leaves no room for the
imagination, because it takes the semblance of Idriz Seferi, a hero
who rebelled against King Petar. We are back to WWI.
There are several reasons why this substitution is
not a good idea, besides the simple but very important fact that for
so many Gjilan residents the “Unknown Fighter” has become such a
fixture in the city center that they feel its displacement as the
arbitrary subtraction of something they owned, and a personal wound.
Why can’t the statue of Idriz Seferi be erected
somewhere else? The location of a monument/memorial is never
neutral; on the contrary it is very symbolic. The Yugoslavs who
chose that location for King Petar made it a hallowed ground, a
sacred place, the repository of the nation’s history. That is why
any replacement feels like a violation: it is a violation of a
history that is not felt like one’s own.
While the “Unknown Fighter” has an abstract shape,
and could represent anyone, it is a memorial, in the minds of those
who built it, to the Communist partisans. But partisan forces in
late December-early January 1945 massacred a large number of
civilians in Gjilan, as a reprisal for the seizing of the city by
Ballist forces. For those who made the decision to remove the
“Unknown Fighter” and their followers, the removal of the monument
is the just retribution for their own wounds and suffering.
I leave to historians the discussion of what
happened then, but here I would like to quote from an oral history
interview with a survivor, Enver Tali, in which he recalls being a
frightened teenager in December 1945, witnessing Serbian-speaking
partisans round up all his village just outside Gjilan, and kill
everybody, including his grandparents, none of them a Ballist. Enver
himself would have been executed had it not been for the
intervention of Shaban Haxhia, an Albanian partisan leader.
This episode is only one in the history of
inter-ethnic violence and mass violence against civilians during
WWII in Kosovo, Gjilan in this case, a history that during the life
of Yugoslavia was never talked about. In fact, it was such a taboo,
that even now it is not known by so many in Kosovo. It’s time to
correct this ignorance, and the monument could be a great
opportunity to do just that.
The “Unknown Fighter” needs a correction. It needs
a plaque to commemorate the civilian victims of partisans and
scholarly research as well as public debate on what happened during
WWII in Gjilan. It does not need to be relocated, and certainly not
to be destroyed, as some are advocating. Not now. Not when Fascism
is making the greatest comeback in Europe since WWII, with the
growth of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, authoritarian movements all
over the continent.
Kosovo was indeed liberated in 1944-1945, even
though what came later was experienced by a large part of the
country as yet another occupation. Had the Fascists and Nazis won
WWII, the world as we know it would not exist. There would be no
freedom for anyone, not even for those, like the large majority of
Albanians in Kosovo, who chose to ally with Fascism because at the
time it appeared to them as the lesser evil. Perhaps they were
right, in the very short term. But the neo-Fascist forces in Europe
that want to take us back to that era are not shouting today only to
kill the Jews; as it happened in Poland last week, they are invoking
a Holocaust of Muslims.
The “Unknown Fighter” reminds us that many fell to
fight precisely this racist genocidal evil. It has so far omitted
to remind us of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed
by those same fighters. Let’s use this statue to tell the full story
and honor the righteous dead.
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