They will return like the swallows

(Impressions from Hamit Toçi,
major, police officer)

When I read the books of the writer Shefki Hysa, I feel immediately that they convey Chameria flavor. They bring in front of my eyes the primeval Albanian nobility and they unfold in the readers’ minds the resistance and the survival of the Albanian man in front of the barbaric invasions that have threaten him for centuries. In the arms of that heroes’ world that they reflect, is raised and echoes magnificently the Cham ballad too, appears his hero, the big poet Bilal Xhaferri, who looks grievously his native land, the martyr Chameria, with its lands abandoned from the violence of the Greek chauvinism. In front of your eyes appear, like birds that chirp in olives, the dead people of those difficult years, when the Chams were violently deported, killed and massacred from the chauvinist hangmen.

It seems as though even the burnt woods and the bloody ground, the alleys with causeways, covered with the mud created from the innocent human blood and ash, scattered by criminal hand, talk and witness in these writings. The Albanian letters lighten and rumble in the book pages of the writer Shefki Hysa, who is at the same time the editor of “Eagle’s wing” magazine and the director of the Cultural Association “Bilal Xhaferri”. His writings, full of longing and pain, reflect with simplicity and sincerity the problems of a population, still searching the truth for the home lands, for the early childhood, the origin, for its work and war against the barbarians and the vandals that have prosecuted them for centuries. This is a distressing truth that is denied to them under the eyes of the civilized world.

In his writings, the writer Shefki Hysa speaks full of zeal for the friends and the mates, for the patriots and the remarkable men that Chameria has generated. The Cham land is and must be a nest for the Chams, the same as the hideout that the swallow builds for its birds and it never forgets about it, notwithstanding the winter migration. The Cham land can’t be abandoned because it has been for a long time a fatherly shelter for the grandfathers and the forefathers of today Chams, who were deported in a barbaric way from their homes. The Cham ideal seems like a dream today but it won’t last too much and everything will become a reality. The Cham world will flourish as once.

“Eagle’s wing” magazine, with its publications, speaks clearly for the negation of the Cham rights, but it shows how their problem is supported vigorously by the politics of the western diplomacies, such as America, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey etc. Necessarily, one day, their right will get out. Even the Cham organizations, such as Patriotic Political Association “Chameria”, Publishing House “Bilal Xhaferri”, Cultural Association “Bilal Xhaferri” etc., have contributed for this and with their work they have been imposed to all the patriots, wherever they are. And I can say by rights that the day when every Albanian will shout “Viva Chameria” is coming!

Inspired by the composition of the writer Shefki Hysa and his leading work in head of the Cham organizations, it’s my right to say that this insupportable and grave injustice toward Chameria, will find its solution with the support of Europe and America. Different political speculations of certain chauvinist segments that attempt to negate the Cham issue are going under.

Hamit Toçi
Major
Police Officer

March, 2009