TRIBUTE TO AN ICON
The human rights defender embodied Kosovo’s national resistance and was often called the ‘Kosovan Mandela’
AWEEK after the world celebrated the birth centenary of the late South African peace icon, Nelson Mandela, on July 18, the death of perhaps a lesserknown human rights activist, 82year-old Kosovan Professor Adem Demaci was announced in the capital, Pristina, on July 26.
Demaci deserves the accolade of a global peace and human rights icon as much as Mandela, and was one of my heroes when I started out as a journalist in the 1980s specialising in human rights, press freedom and governance.
Both Mandela and Demaci were incarcerated by brutally repressive regimes for most of their adult lives, with Demaci serving a staggering 28 years in Yugoslav prisons imposed by Josip Broz Tito, the communist political leader of the former Yugoslavia, who served from 1943 until his death in 1980.
Perhaps, had Demaci been from a country more prominent than Yugoslavia or from an English-speaking one such as Apartheid South Africa, which imprisoned Mandela for 26 years, there would have been much more protests demanding his release like that of other prominent Yugoslav Muslim activists such as Aliya Izetbegovic, who eventually became the inaugural president of an independent Bosnia Herzegovina.
Tito was the “darling of the West” because of his perceived “independent” stance against the Soviet Union, especially under Nikita Kruschev and Leonid Brezhnev. Tito, through his involvement as a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) together with Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, may have stood up to the Kremlin up to a point and won kudos for belonging to “the Initiative of Five” (as NAM was called), but at home he was a ruthless dictator.
And did he unleash his anger at the Muslims of Yugoslavia, the Bosniaks, whose heritage went back to the Ottoman Empire, Kosovans of mainly Albanian Muslim origin, and Muslim Croats.
The likes of Amnesty International, Index of Censorship and others campaigned on behalf of all the political prisoners in Tito’s Yugoslavia irrespective of faith.
The modern history of Islamophobia in Europe well precedes the action of today’s neo-fascists and far-right bigots. The Muslim Crimean Tartars, for instance, were brutally expelled en masse by Stalin from Crimea to Siberia in the aftermath of World War II, and their leaders such as Mustafa Dzhemilev and Ayshe Seitmuratova were similarly incarcerated in Soviet Gulags, almost oblivious to the outside world, but courageously highlighted through the samizdat (underground pamphlets written by dissidents) and circulated to the West.
I campaigned in my very modest way for the plight of the Crimean Tartars and the restoration of human rights in Yugoslavia, especially in the release of Izetbegovic and Demaci, amongst tens of others who were incarcerated in notorious prisons. I had penned articles on them in the widely-respected Index of Censorship, and in Arabia The Islamic World Review, Arab News, The Middle East, South Magazine and many others.
Some of this work culminated in a book titled, Muslims in Yugoslavia — The Quest for Justice, which I wrote and was published by CIC, Toronto, Canada in 1986.
There was a semantic difference between Mandela and Demaci in the eyes of Amnesty International. Demaci was adopted as a “Prisoner of Conscience” by Amnesty because he rejected the use of violence as a means of pursuing his political beliefs. Mandela’s African National Congress, on the other hand, was involved in isolated acts of violence against the white regime in Apartheid South Africa, whereby Amnesty found it problematic to adopt Mandela as a “Prisoner of Conscience”.
Demaci was a writer and a member of the Albanian Muslim minority in Yugoslavia, known also for his book Gjarpljr e Gjakut (The Serpents of Blood), which is an account of the plight and past sufferings of the Albanians of Kosovo. He was born in 1936 in the village of Donje Ljupee in Kosovo province, and before his arrest in 1975 he had been living in Pristina, the province capital, with his wife and five children. First imprisoned in 1958, he was sentenced to five years’ hard labour at the age of 22 for publishing a series of articles in the Albanian-language journal Jeta e Re (New Life) based in Pristina.
Demaci served three years of his first sentence (1958-61), but in 1964 was sent to prison for 15 years. This time he served 10 years of his sentence for alleged crimes against the Yugoslav people and state. After his release he was persistently harassed and had great difficulty in finding employment. He did, however, become a faculty member at Pristina University until his arrest in 1975, by when the Yugoslav regime was clamping down strongly on dissidents for alleged “anti-state activities”.
He and 18 others were tried in February l976 and sentenced to 15 years for advocating greater autonomy for the Albanian minority in Kosovo. At his trial Demaci protested that he had not committed any crime and that he was being silenced for his views:
“They are condemning me for my beliefs and ideals, not for anything I have done. This is as far as I know illegal and contrary to all human rights and international statutes.”
Demaci’s health was fast deteriorating. The harshness of prison life caused him to contract tuberculosis in 1982 and he lost most of the vision in one eye. After his release from prison in 1990, he won the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for his human rights work in 1991, which he continued for several years in between a stint as the political representative office of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought for independence from Serbia in the 1998-1999 war. This had resulted in the secession of Kosovo in 2008 after a decade of Nato bombing of Serbia.
It would be a sad indictment of the Muslim and humanist mindset lest we forget the struggles of the likes of Demaci and his fellow activists. Some call him “The Kosovan Mandela”. Perhaps, it could be equally appropriate to call Mandela “The South African Demaci!”
Perhaps, had Demaci been from a country more prominent than Yugoslavia or from an English-speaking one such as Apartheid South Africa, which imprisoned Mandela for 26 years, there would have been much more protests demanding his release...