Albanian Blood Feuds

July 10, 2008
In Albanian Feuds, Isolation Engulfs Families
By DAN BILEFSKY
SHKODER, Albania — Christian Luli, a soft-spoken 17-year-old, has spent the past 10 years imprisoned inside his family’s small, spartan house, fearful he will be shot dead if he walks outside the front door.

To pass the time, he plays video games and sketches houses. Since he is unable to attend high school, Christian’s reading level is that of a 12-year-old’s. A girlfriend is out of the question. He would like to become an architect, but he despairs of a future locked inside, staring at the same four walls.
“This is the situation of my life. I have known nothing else since I was a boy,” Christian said, looking plaintively through a window at the forbidden world outside. “I dream of freedom and of going to school. If I was not so afraid, I would walk out the door. Living like this is worse than a prison sentence.”

Christian’s misfortune is to have been born the son of a father who killed a man in this poor northern region of Albania, where the ancient ritual of the blood feud still holds sway.
Under the Kanun, an Albanian code of behavior that has been passed on for more than 500 years, “blood must be paid with blood,” with a victim’s family authorized to avenge a slaying by killing any of the killer’s male relatives. The Kanun’s influence is waning, but it served as the country’s constitution for centuries, with rules governing a variety of issues including property ownership, marriage and murder.

The National Reconciliation Committee, an Albanian nonprofit organization that works to eliminate the practice of blood feuds, estimates that 20,000 people have been ensnared by blood feuds since they resurfaced after the collapse of Communism in 1991, with 9,500 people killed and nearly 1,000 children deprived of schooling because they are locked indoors.
By tradition, any man old enough to wield a hunting rifle is considered a fair target for vengeance, making 17 male members of Christian’s family vulnerable. They, too, are stuck in their homes. The sole restriction is that the boundaries of the family home must not be breached. Women and children also have immunity, though some, like Christian, who physically matured at an early age, begin their confinement as boys. Family members of the victim are usually the avengers, though some families outsource the killing to professional contract killers.

Blood feuds have been prevalent in other societies, like mafia vendettas in southern Italy and retaliatory violence between Shiite and Sunni families in Iraq. Appalachian bootleggers in the 19th century also took up arms to defend family honor.
But the phenomenon has been particularly pronounced in Albania, a desperately poor country that is struggling to uphold the rule of law after decades of Stalinist dictatorship.
Blood feuds all but disappeared here during the 40-year rule of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator, who outlawed the practice, sometimes burying alive those who disobeyed in the coffins of their victims. But legal experts in Albania say the feuds erupted again after the fall of Communism ushered in a new period of lawlessness.

Nearly a thousand men involved in feuds have escaped abroad, some of them applying for asylum. But even then, dozens of people have been hunted down outside Albania and killed by avenging families.
Ismet Elezi, a professor of criminal law at the University of Tirana, who advises the government and the police on how to tackle the problem, said recent changes to Albania’s penal code — including sentences of 25 years to life in prison for those who kill in a blood feud and stiff penalties for individuals who threaten to retaliate — had helped diminish the practice. Yet he noted that some still gave greater credence to the Kanun than to the criminal justice system, often with devastating social consequences.

“The younger generation is no longer looking to the older generation’s codes of behavior,” he said. “But blood feuds are still causing misery because the men stuck inside their homes can’t work, the children can’t go to school and entire families are cut off from the outside world.”


**rest of the article is in the link**

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/world/europe/10feuds.html?_r=1&sq=albania,%20blood%20feud&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

Albanian Sworn Virgins

This is an article about the "Sworn Virgins" in Albania who took an oath of virginity to have the same status as men within a family because so many men had died within clans because of blood feuds...

Qamile is one of just a handful of "sworn virgins" still alive in Albania: women, typically from poor rural communities in the north of the country, who opted to change their status, though not their sex.
According to the sociologist, Zydi Dervishi, who has interviewed more than 20 such women, some took such a life-changing decision in order to avoid an unwanted marriage; others, to make up for the absence of a male heir in the family.
He says that in Albania's historically patriarchal society, a family without a son or a father figure was often considered leaderless.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7682240.stm