Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at ceremony of awarding Kosovo academic Rexhep Qosja the Big Cordon with Star for Public Acknowledgment:
Dear Professor Rexhep Qosja!
Dear Albin!
Honourable and dear friends!
This day makes me feel both proud and diffident. It is a day I have always wished will come since too long, but it has also been a day I almost conveniently put off and wished to be as distant as possible. Because expressing gratitude and honouring an admirable person means you would earn his blessing for free in exchange.
And it can’t make me happier than that, moreover given that I happen to be just the best Premier among the artists, whereas the professor is the ultimate and the greatest of intellectuals bound by same language and blood along a lifetime coinciding with some of the darkest and culminating moments in our history.
Rexhep Qosja’s patriotic consciousness is the distinguishing feature of the life of a committed intellectual and unwavering patriot. A true gentleman in the fullest sense of the Albanian phrase.
Professor Qosja has gone done in history as an example of the pursuit of the common good, in a country where noise and mental dust have long dominated the common public environment.
It was many years ago when as an Artistic Lyceum student, among the bookshelves that were somehow not subject to the communist fierce censorship, I happened to come across a book entitled “The Anatomy of Culture”. I don’t know how many times I went back to that book’s pages, which was not censored, but it triggered a completely different sense and it conveyed a completely different essence and feeling compared to that of the standard editions of aesthetics and Marxist-Leninist critique we were used to.
Since then I embarked on the tracks of the book’s author, which when looking at those few white and black pictures, to me it felt like a witness to the timelessness of the dynasty of the prominent witnesses to the Albanian history. For example, but I can tell you and it was really like that Rexhep Qosja’s portrait was the one to show up in my mind anytime when talking about Barleti or Gjeçov.
But Rexhep Qosja represents one of the cases when books don’t say it all about their author and his own life, interpolated with his own homeland’s breath, in each beat of his nation’s heart, it is a book now engraved in the consciousness of the community he belongs to.
Someone once has said history is always personal and, by issuing a formal apology in this occasion, I can’t help but highlight in my speech the fact that although the Professor deserves it all, no matter from me or whoever else who would honour himself by honouring the Professor and his work, for me Rexhep Qosja is one of the people I consider myself happy enough to be his contemporary and I consider it a privilege to be given the opportunity of personal acquaintance.
It is for me something deeply personal an episode in 2018, a special unifying, national event for Albanians on both sides of the border, commemorating and marking the 550th anniversary of death of Gjergj Kastriot Skanderberg. Professor Rexhep, along with Ismail Kadare and other prominent personalities of the Albanian culture, became one of the Godfathers of that anniversary. It his Pristina book-tower he privately agreed to accept the tiny gilded symbol awarded on the occasion of the Nationwide Year event, which he immediately pinned it on his vest, precisely on the heart’s side. I want to reveal it today that when I saw the picture of that day, showing the star of the seal of Gjergj Kastrioti with the 36 rays of our national alphabet on the heart of Rexhep Qose, I had the feeling that the symbol would live long.
This symbol is now engraved on the Public Acknowledgement Medal awarded by the Prime Minister of Albania and which I have the extraordinary honour to award our dear Professor today in the presence of this honourable audience and together with Kosovo’s Prime Minister, precisely on the 85th anniversary of his life, which is marked by the light of that star, but maybe today is also the day to reveal something very personal, dear Professor, to say that since I was in opposition, you now don’t criticize me for keeping my hands in the pockets.
I don’t know whether everyone else remembers it, but again I am referring to the inauguration ceremony of a school in Tirana when I used to serve as Mayor, but in the meantime I also used to serve as the opposition leader, when the cameras took me by surprise with the hands in my pockets and you, as a careful observer, panned me via a famous article entitled “Opposition with hands in pockets.”
It is not a secret it was a quite so severe reproof because of the images showing me with the hands in my pockets, and it had bitter consequences for the then opposition. It is now universally known that my critics are convinced that criticism does not impress me at all, but I challenge you all and I challenge everyone to find, since then, a picture of me with my hands in my pockets during a working visit to any construction site. You know what? It is not that I never keep the hands in my pockets since then, but believe it or not, as soon as I want to put hands in my pocket I promptly recall that reprimanding article by Rexhep Qosja.
After all, as the Professor puts it, a man should feel pain somewhere, and it is only fools who feel no pain at all. Isn’t it? So, since I was hurt back then, I never keep my hands in the pockets and this is just a minor, but probably very significant example of the influence of Rexhep Qosja’s criticism, whose strong power lies not simply on what he writes through those letters, but because those letters are written by the man who ha embodied it through the power of his example and the power of his words along a tough journey through a fortunately long life that I wish lasts longer.
I am recalling also here some no less reprimands of the oracle in the book “Secrets and Revelations”, which I think it would be wise to take them somehow personally, for example, when he says: “Speak as briefly as possible. Everywhere and in the light and in the dark, it is good to speak as briefly as possible.” Here I find it really difficult, in general, to speak briefly, dear Professor, let alone today as a I find myself in front of the monumental fresco of your life that, as your, Albin’s and my much preferred poet Zef Serembe would say, “it stirs up so many memories in my brain.”
The bare truth is that Rexhep Qosja is both a great and humble human soul. A great thinker, who has occupied the pan-Albanian infinite space. In his 85s, the Professor’s thinking, still wonderfully fresh and he himself seemingly unchanged despite the years from the look under the skeletons of these glasses, already mythical and under the sleek Socratic beard, Rexhep Qosja is undoubtedly and unfortunately one of the last giants of an era of dwarfs and media weepers, a leading and imposing voice, like that of the good shepherd caring with the same compassionate rigor of the first day for his flock.
Whoever has ever visited his Pristina hermitage retreat, surrounded by the solemn silence of the immensity of books, has definitely witnessed the embodiment in the Professor’s being, of the most prominent features of the thinker as distressed, so undisturbed by the cries of moral and mental poverty of the supposedly patriots and pseudo-intellectuals of our area. He is being heard as a as the resounding voice of reason and never as a deafening uproar of irrationality, and he is being read as the knight of a style that has led Albanian words and mindset to the untrodden paths of a messenger and propitiatory, both of identities our intertwined and of our common and inalienable Albanian consciousness.
I deem it necessary to illustrate I just said, because otherwise I would be rightly accused of selling flowers of adulation that would be not only superfluous, but also intolerable for a man like Rexhep Qosja. I would ask you dear Professor to cite here a quote from the last pages of the “Albanian Cause”, as I have read in the French edition by Fayard publishing house in 1995.
The translation is mine and just like any betrayal of the translator’s privacy, this translation can reveal the way the translator himself reads and understands. However, I would be happy if this translation would stir, though a little, the rediscovery of this major work of Albanian thinking, which came to light at the turn of two centuries and two millennia and of course I suggest that you find it in Albanian and read it through the eyes of a European, as I read it in French through the eyes of an Albanian.
“Albanians today think that the neighbours’ national interests should all be handled while protecting the interests of the Albanians. But the neighbours themselves must think that their national interests must be preserved by accepting and satisfying the national interests of Albanians. Albanians are demanding and should not demand more than the other nations in the Balkans, but no less than them, and towards others, the same obligations aimed at equality and well-being in the Balkans, for themselves, the right to be equal with the others. The Albanians’ unification is without any doubt a legitimate and democratic right, a right that is sadly delayed and rejected, but that is for everyone sounding more and more reasonable in the political and moral terms and inevitable in the historical terms. In the efforts they show to win their rights, Albanians must not forget that the Balkans have in common with all the peoples living in this region of the world and that everyone will always be a neighbour.
In the presence of the Professor, I would refrain from drawing comparisons between the news and current situation both in Kosovo and Albania. However, what clarity, what a call for wisdom and, above all, what guidance to balance the highest goals and render them coherence of actions towards achieving the goals. As Professor Rexhep himself said once “we will either move forward together, or we will not move at all!”
I apologize that I have to conclude my speech although I will not list today the titles of the complete work by Rexhep Qosja, as it should be the case, but such a list would be terribly long and inappropriate given the advice by the oracle of the Secrets and the Revelations, “Speak briefly, as short as possible.”
It would be unkind, for this selected audience of friends and academics too, who know his work much more deeply than I do and know how to evaluate it in a much more professional way than I do, as they have done, devoting much of their criticism and reviews.
As I conclude and as I invite Academic Rexhep Qosja to approach and receive the “Star of Public Acknowledgement, I just want to say the following;
To remember you on this important day, Master, it is a fortune. To read your work, to understand it and to convey it in the four corners of the Arberi land and beyond, is a gift for the soul and an honor for the intellect, as it is a privilege, today and always, invaluable to have you among the Albanian community as such an inspiring example of man’s compliance with his word!
Thank you very much for existing for all of us and for our children and for the children of our children, the children of Albania and Kosovo, the children of the Albanian nation, the children of same blood, same language, same history and future!
