Rama attended the evening organized by the youth of the “Arbën Xhaferi” Foundation, honoring the great Albanian scholar and politician, who, as Rama stated, transformed patriotism from a sentiment of nationalism into a mission for the institutional awareness of Albanians in the new century.

Describing him as a person of extraordinary dimensions, Rama emphasized that the work of Arbën Xhaferi is a multi-dimensional national opus that requires not only to be read but also to be re-read, discussed, and understood, not simply by being faced with it, but also through the dissemination of its messages by more than just yourself.

He brought to the attention of those present several of his sayings, through which Xhaferi echoed Western values.

“Arbën Xhaferi is asked what his greatest dream is, and he answers: the integration of the Albanian people into the system of Western values, both ethical and cultural. A simple sentence made up of words that have now become banalized, but which carry a very deep meaning and are very difficult to understand,” said Rama.

Rama recalled another saying of Arbën Xhaferi, which, according to him, had no possible competition in terms of the synthesis it encapsulates in just one sentence, highlighting the struggle of the Balkan peoples to overcome the past.

“People of the Balkans suffer from an ethnopolitical strabismus that makes them look at each other distortedly,” Rama quotes Arbën Xhaferi as saying.

Rama emphasized that the problem is not the peoples themselves, but the leaderships that, instead of curing this ethnopolitical strabismus, actually use and exploit it. They continuously try to shift the focus of discussion and the need to avoid seeing each other in a distorted way, diverting it to a place for the ethnostrabic eye to catch.

“Thus, a perpetual cycle is created, not by the people, but by the leadership, aimed at shaping the vision of the future through the lens of the past. However, for Albania—and not just for Albania, but for all Albanians—I believe there is only one way to achieve what Arbën Xhaferi describes as integration into the European values system: by focusing the vision on the future and viewing the past through the eyes of that future. This creates a distinction, where, with words, everyone—indeed, in a race to outdo one another—claims that the future will be better than the past, but in practice, the majority do the opposite, holding the future hostage to the past,” said Rama.

/j.p/sm/