Kadare: Here is tomorrow’s Balkans
FROM THE WRITER’S PREDICTION AND AUTOPSY
Kadare: Here is
tomorrow’s Balkans
"Why does this tragedy happen"
Ismail KADARE
Predictions of the future have always been made in aid of humanity; nevertheless, what is happening to the Balkans, a study of its future, would risk sinking into balm, into the honey of consolation, only to later turn into a cloud of rust and of the incomprehensible. Endless questions, it seems, are today, across the world, all turning the point in the same direction: the understandability of this terror? This next illusion, along with the ones that came before, has always been one of the fundamental evils of peoples. That days so foggy should be cut open with a sword is the task that the processes of reason seek to carry out. And, in this somber sequence, from the Balkans, with a threatened state, with burned forests and a murdered river, the same question appears: why does this tragedy happen?
From a corner of Europe, through a living experience, a first answer had come: the eternal triad of their hatred toward one another. A) endless ethnic and religious disputes; B) the harsh climate; C) backwardness. In truth, these theses today seem like partial answers. Something else remains, deeper, tied to a long history of fears, with nonexistent borders, with alliances that are broken and rebuilt, with the memory of insult and the inability to forget it.
One expelled people and another terrified one, cities burned, women and children fleeing toward the roads of the world, and along with them the question that returns: who brought this evil? If twentieth-century Europe closes this tragedy with yet another silence, then its very meaning is put to the test. The Balkans, this knot of the continent, is not only a troubled edge, but its inner mirror. What happens here can, as an echo, happen elsewhere as well.
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