"Greater Albania poses threat to all of Balkans"

Source: Blic

BELGRADE -- Serbia's Ambassador to France Dušan Bataković says that the Greater Albania project is seriously endangering the fragile stability in the Balkans.

This diplomat, a historian by trade, noted that the term "Natural Albania" was but another name for "Greater Albania", and added:
"For a number of years this project has had a significant support of Albanian elites in all the countries where Albanian live, and it is, as has been announced, gradually becoming a reality."

"This process has advanced a long way, and it threatens our vital national interests in an essential manner, and seriously endangering the fragile stability in the Balkans," Bataković told the Belgrade-based tabloid Blic.

As a historian, Bataković has been studying the Kosovo problem for decades, to recently publish a book on the subject entitled, "Serbia's Kosovo drama: A historical perspective". In it, he points out to the neglected aspects of the Serb-Albanian relations from the era of the Yugoslav Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito, and the roots of the conflicts after 1945, especially the methods used to drive Serbs and other non-Albanian ethnic groups out of Kosovo.

"There was a scientific need for a comprehensive study to take into account the whole Kosovo drama, and especially its dominant, Serb dimension, as opposed to books published in English based on a one-sided concept, which treat the one thousand years of history of Old Serbia's central region as exclusively a part of the Albanian question," he told the newspaper.

Bataković also stressed that it was "a great ideological misconception that the Kosovo legend was our grand illusion", and added that as a nation, we are at this point undergoing "a great identity crisis, shaken at the foundations by the negative aspects of Yugoslavism and Titoism".

"A return to the tried-and-tested values offered by our heritage, aerated by modern sensibilities, is a big task ahead of our elites," the ambassador concluded.