EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS should bring pressure to bear on the Albanian authorities to stem the rise in the number of “blood feud” killings in that country, a leading expert on the topic has said.
Dr Alex Standish of the University of Durham, a specialist on blood feuds in ethnic Albanian communities, said there was evidence that the number of killings was increasing and that Albanian police were unwilling to involve themselves in confronting the issue.
“We should be pressuring the Albanian government, which is an aspirant member of the European Union and a signatory to a whole range of UN accords. We should be holding them up to the same standards of accountability that we hold our own national governments to,” he said.
Under the Kanun, a set of 15th-century traditions codified early in the last century and revived since the fall of the communist regime in 1991, “blood must be paid with blood” and a victim’s family is authorised to avenge a slaying by taking the life of any of the killer’s male relatives.
The National Reconciliation Committee, an Albanian charity that works to eliminate the practice, estimates at least 78 blood feud killings were carried out in the country in 2006 while a further 860 families were imprisoned in their own homes because of threats on their lives. This de facto imprisonment arises because the sole restriction in the code is that the boundaries of the family home must not be breached.
The problem appears to be worsening, with the US State Department estimating the number of deaths in 2006 represented an eight-fold increase on the previous year.
Property disputes accounted for four-fifths of formally declared cases, with the remainder pertaining to issues of honour or violations of the home such as theft or trespassing. Several hundred more stemmed from trafficking, which are often not declared out of shame, the committee believes.
Mr Standish, a former BBC foreign correspondent who is editor of the Strategic Intelligence Review, said that with significant numbers of men involved in feuds fleeing abroad and in some cases seeking refugee status in European states, it was imperative for EU governments to inform themselves of the issue. It is understood a number of Albanians have sought asylum in the Republic on the grounds of such threats on their life.
“This is not a fantasy that refugees come here and say, there’s this thing in our country called blood feuds. It’s so well documented by almost every international authority, I don’t think it’s possible to doubt its existence and its impact,” he said. “I’m all in favour of a rigorous weeding out of bogus claims because they undermine the claims of legitimate persecution or requiring humanitarian protection. But at the same time to simply ignore the objective evidence is not a good way forward. Sooner or later, there will be a family who will claim blood feud persecution. They will be refused asylum, be deported, a young boy will be killed.” Such practices thrived where there was weak policing and a weak justice system, and the exponential rise in the number of blood feud cases suggested the Albanian state did not have the will or the means to fight the problem, he said..