Family Feuds Are No Game in Albania

For 11 weeks, Zeke Rrushi could feel the tremors of NATO bombs and Serbian shells exploding on the border with Kosovo less than a mile away. He listened to intermittent sniper fire and to the staccato of automatic rifles so close to his farmhouse.

But to Rrushi’s mind, the only real danger to his family came from the barrel of his neighbor’s shotgun.

The Rrushis have been fighting their own war for seven years, locked in a blood feud with their neighbors that has taken at least four lives and threatens to take many more.

Except for a few weeks during planting season and the harvest each year--when their enemies grant them a truce--Rrushi and 24 other adult males in his family have not set foot outside their compound of rustic farmhouses since 1992 for fear of being killed.

A few lucky ones have escaped the country, but the rest are prisoners in their own fortress and do not expect to be freed any time soon. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization may have negotiated a peace with its foes, but not the Rrushis.

“No one has come to mediate between us and the other family,” Rrushi, 60, said. “There is no light at the end of this story.”

Rrushi’s story takes place deep in the mountains of northern Albania, where little has changed for centuries. Land, family honor and revenge are the currency of these forgotten parts; the arm of government and rule of state law do not reach here.

Instead, the farmers of northern Albania live by a 500-year-old code called the kanun of Lek Dukagjini, which dictates rules of behavior for family and village life. The kanun of Lek, named for a 15th century Albanian hero, lays out formal “laws” for marriage, birth, death and inheritance and also determines when it is permissible to kill an enemy in a blood feud.

It was, adherents and academics say, a system for administering justice among the warring tribes of a remote mountain region of northern Albania and southern Yugoslavia that even the occupying Ottoman Turks found difficult to control. Originally, the kanun meant to limit revenge killings in the hinterlands by regulating them.

Handed down orally from generation to generation, a version of the kanun was put into writing in the 1920s by a Franciscan priest from Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

The Communist government that ruled Albania from 1944 to 1991 tried to wipe out vendetta killings and the kanun. Publication of the code was prohibited, and possession of the text was outlawed. Blood-feud crimes dropped dramatically.

But the number of feuds has climbed steadily in Albania since the fall of communism and, particularly, since the collapse of the central government in 1997, when many Albanians lost their life savings in get-rich-quick pyramid schemes. A new Socialist-led government under 31-year-old Prime Minister Pandeli Majko that took office last year has been struggling to assert its control over armed bandits, tribal leaders and a cynical public.

An independent blood-feud reconciliation agency says there are more than 2,700 ongoing feuds in Albania, some of them old quarrels revived after lying dormant for half a century.

Although some academics say this estimate is far too high, inflated by Mafia-style killings and run-of-the-mill crimes, there is no doubt that Albanians are resorting to the kanun to fill the vacuum of modern law and government. Today, paperback copies of the kanun can be purchased in kiosks in the Albanian capital, Tirana.

The Rrushis own a dogeared copy that is full of pencil notations, as if they have studied for a life-or-death exam. They say they are following the book in their feud with the Bardhoshi family, their neighbors who live less than half a mile away.

Blood feuds have been known to start over anything from a game of cards to untoward advances on a woman. But like many post-Communist disputes, the one between the Rrushis and Bardhoshis is over land--about six acres.

To hear the Rrushis tell it, the Bardhoshis are Johnny-come-latelies to the region, having arrived about 160 years ago to settle on a plot of land the Rrushis say they once owned.

“We have been here for centuries. We gave them a small piece of land at that time, and then they abused our hospitality,” Rrushi said.

After the collapse of communism, when collective ownership of the land was abolished, the Rrushis say the Bardhoshis “occupied” a plot of land that belonged to them. The Rrushis countered by seizing another plot of land belonging to the Bardhoshis, triggering the family feud.

“They started slapping and hitting. Then we got our weapons,” said Isuf Rrushi, 70, another family elder.

The Rrushis attacked in June 1992. They say three Bardhoshis died in the gun battle; the Bardhoshis insist that they lost four family members.

According to the kanun, “blood is paid for with blood.” An eye for an eye or, in the kanun, “a head for a head.” Killing violates family honor, and “an offense to honor is never forgiven.”

The Rrushi killers had to retreat into the confines of their home or face execution, because the Bardhoshis were entitled to avenge the deaths. According to the old kanun, only the killer could be targeted for revenge, but later versions extend the blood feud to all males in the family, which is interpreted to mean all males over 18.

Now the Rrushi men are pale from so much time spent inside. Their shoes are splitting and their clothes threadbare, a sign of their sore finances since only women and children in the family go outside to work.

“This is all because we lack a good government,” Rrushi said. “Laws exist, but they are not applied. That is why we were forced to do [the feud]. And now the result is that we all have to stay indoors.”

For years, the Bardhoshis waited and watched. They agreed to a few short truces under the kanun so the Rrushis could reap enough food to eat. They were patient. Then, in 1997, they got their chance: They killed the son of 71-year-old Ali Rrushi as he stood by his front door.

According to Ali Bardhoshi, this is a moral punishment for the loss of his cousins and of land the Bardhoshis insist is theirs.

“We can even live without the land, but if you consider what they have done to us, it’s quite another thing,” the 45-year-old Bardhoshi said.

Although the kanun sets out the values of family, hospitality, honor and community that are still deeply felt in Albania today, Bardhoshi considers the code out-of-date on many topics. For instance, it treats women as the property of men, whom it says they must serve in an “unblemished manner.” A father selects his daughter’s husband, whose family pays a “bride price” for marriage.

Bardhoshi says the blood feud also should be a thing of the past.

“We are waiting for a real government to take responsibility and establish law even in this corner of the world. But when there is no law, there is the kanun,” Bardhoshi said.

Not to take revenge, he explained, is akin to admitting guilt or wrongdoing. “Then you have suffered the abuse and are embarrassed in the community too,” he said.

Under the kanun, the Bardhoshis still may avenge the other deaths the family suffered. Once they do, however, the Rrushis will be free to come out of hiding, and it is the Bardhoshis who will have to go indoors to escape the continuing cycle of revenge unless there’s a truce.

Theoretically, the two sides could negotiate a besa, or sworn truce, to end their feud with the mediation of a committee of village elders or respected members of the community. In some instances, the pact includes cross-clan marriages to ensure peace.

But the Rrushis and Bardhoshis say there is no trusted and impartial mediation team in this case.

There have been several attempts in Albania to establish formal mediation councils, but they have met with only limited success.

Other people have tried to tackle the problem through education. A Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution Center was established at Tirana University in 1995 to promote nonviolence in schools and between feuding families.

“The message, especially to young people, was to find new ways of dealing with old, traditional revenge,” said British anthropologist Antonia Young, who was involved in the project. “The message was not to take revenge. It’s something that doesn’t happen overnight.”

But after the government collapsed in 1997, the center closed for lack of funding. Young and others are looking for the means to revive it.

Police forces do exist in Albania, but they are rarely called in on kanun cases and are hesitant to intervene, in part because they often come from the same region and share the mind-set of the families involved.

“Reconciliation would be good for us, but we don’t want to get involved in this business,” said Naim Allaraj, chief of criminal police in the nearby town of Krume.

“Frankly speaking, the people don’t want kanun, but the government is weak, so the people find a solution,” Allaraj said.

“We don’t recognize kanun, but kanun exists. It is a reality.”