By Risto Karajkov — Osservatorio sui Balcani

Mother Theresa, one of the icons of the XXth century, was born in Skopje. Her place of birth commemorates her with a special award for humanitarian engagement and a Monumental House in the centre of the capital of Macedonia “There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.” – Mother Theresa

Today her closest company is young Skopje skaters. They like the smooth marble and the many curbs and sharp edges around her small square. Skater blogs on the web indicate that the best skating ground in Skopje is next to Mother Theresa.

She wouldn’t mind this company, many would agree. Amid a siege of Beirut in 1982 she negotiated a ceasefire between the Israeli army and the Palestinian guerillas to save some other young skaters. Children have been trapped in a hospital near the front line. Mother Theresa made the war stop and lead the Red Cross to take the children to safety.

By awarding the Mother Theresa award to several deserving humanitarians last week, Skopje quietly paid its respects to its easily greatest native.

She was born here, in the Vlach neighborhood on 26 August 1910, in what was then the Ottoman Empire. There is confusion concerning the exact date of her birthday. According to some sources it was a day later, on August 27. That was however the date of her baptism in the Jesus Heart Church. It was this day she considered as the beginning of her Christian life.

The church, which is no more, was right where Mother Theresa’s monument is now. Half -way between the Stone Bridge and the Old Train Station, in the center of town. She went there with her school friends and sang in the church choir. The church was destroyed in the 1963 earthquake. As those were communist times, authorities were not eager to restore it.

On this very spot the government is now building the Mother Theresa Memorial House. Foundations were put in May and the memorial should be completed by the end of the year. It will comprise a monument, exhibition, an open gate, and a shrine. A local architect, Vangel Bozinovski, won the project on an international competition. The structure should combine traditional style with architectonic materials never before used in the country.

Mother Theresa lived in Skopje until she was 18, when she left to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto, from where she proceeded to her true home, Calcutta. In all truth, she always felt her real home were the poor.

“By blood I am Albanian, by citizenship Indian, by faith a Catholic nun, by calling I belong to the world, but my heart belongs to the heart of Jesus”, cited the words of the great missionary, Anton Sereci, a novelist, at last year’s 10th anniversary of Mother Theresa’s death commemorated in Macedonian parliament.

Mr. Sereci was one of the people who got Mother Theresa’s award this year. The price regularly goes to people with strong humanitarian engagement, or who have dedicated themselves to researching the great woman’s life.

The Saint of the Gutters, as LIFE Magazine once called her, was born as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, in a family of Albanian descent, originally from Skhoder, Albania. She was the youngest child of Nikola and Drane Bojaxhiu.

Her father died when she was eight years old after which her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. Early in hew childhood she becomes fascinated by stories of missionary work and already at the age of 12 she decides to commit to religious life. She leaves Skopje in 1928, at the age of 18. The rest is history.

No ranking of great contemporaries can be even imagined without her name. Consistently over the years Gallup polls had found Mother Theresa to be the most admired person in the United States. A poll from 1999 conducted in the US ranked her “the most admired person in the 20th century”.

“She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world.” said once of Mother Theresa former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

Mother Theresa returned to her native Skopje several times over the years; in 1970, 1978, 1980, and 1986.

In 1980, a year after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the City of Skopje declared her an honorary citizen.

In her unselfish giving she also gave something to her place of birth. And it is a lot. It is the right to associate itself with this contemporary saint.

When celebrated conductor and great humanitarian, Zubin Mehta visited the country last summer for the Ohrid summer festival, Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski gave him a small statue of Mother Theresa. Skopje should be proud of being able to claim even a little bit of Mother Theresa’s greatness.

The recent book “Mother Theresa of Skopje” by Stojan Trencevski, a dedicated researcher of the great woman’s life and president of the association with the same name, explores the life of the Bojaxhiu family in Skopje over generations and sheds light on her childhood years. The book stresses the emotional connection Mother Theresa kept with her native town over the years.

“If there had not been for Skopje, there would not have been me. There would not have been Mother Theresa.”

Whether Mother Theresa had actually ever said those words, or they are just a product of skillful narration, Skopje should be proud. It gets a chance to show that greatness and love can grow everywhere.

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By Risto Karajkov, Osservatorio sui Balcani, Rovereto, Italy, July 3, 2008

The Balkans is safer than thought. This is the basic message from a recently published report, “Crime and Its Impact on the Balkans,” by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The report, which was launched last week, made global headlines as some of its arguments run counter to common wisdom—that the Balkans is a gloomy and risky place.

With detailed, comprehensive statistics, the report concludes that the Balkans, contrary to widespread opinion, does not have a problem with conventional crime: “South East Europe does not, in fact, suffer from high rates of crime, at least in terms of the range of offences commonly referred to as ‘conventional crime’: murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and the like. In fact, most of the region is safer than West Europe in this respect.” The report notes, “This key fact is often omitted from discussions on crime in the region.”

The report focuses on the so-called Western Balkan countries (former Yugoslavia minus Slovenia plus Albania), Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova, but its comparisons include Central and Western European countries, and other parts of the world.

In 130 pages of in-depth analysis, the report gives a full account of all crime-related issues that concern the Balkans, from conventional to organized crime and corruption. It discusses both the socioeconomic and political preconditions of crime, and, in turn, the possible impact crime has on the region’s development.

The report first analyzes the social conditions in the Balkans and notes, “The social conditions in South East Europe are not the sort generally associated with high crime regions. In essence the Balkans does not represent a favourable environment for crime.” The report reaches these conclusions because of a set of factors that include the region’s demographic makeup—aging population, low fertility rates (with the exception of Kosovo), combined with strong outward migration, again mostly involving young people. The report considers the additional factors of income and education levels. Incomes are small but the number of people in abject poverty is limited. The region’s communist legacy has left a low, although now widening, income inequality, which is “regarded as the most robust quantitative correlate of crime rates.” Education levels are relatively high (by global standards).

After analyzing the standard indicators of conventional crime, such as murders and theft (especially auto theft), the report unequivocally concludes that the region is safer overall than Western Europe, “In terms of the standardized murder rates … most countries of the region fall at or below the European average. Moldova and Albania are exceptions, but even these two countries are safer than most of Eastern Europe.” For example, the West European average of murders per 100,000 people (2004 data) stands at 2.5, Macedonia at 2.3, Croatia at 1.8, Romania at 2.5, Bulgaria at 4.1, Albania at 5.7, and Moldova at 8.0. Russia has the worst statistics with an average of 19.9 murders per 100,000 people.

“Albania stands out as having a relatively high murder rate,” concedes the report, but “the number of murders committed in Albania in 2006 is only 5% of what it was after the collapse of government in 1997.”

In addition, the report notes the positive trend over the past decade of declining murder rates throughout the region: “Combining the data from Moldova, Albania, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Serbia, the number of murders in the region essentially halved between 1998 and 2006.”

In other forms of conventional crime, the report finds Western Europe “to have over twice the burglary, over four times as much assault, and 15 times as much robbery as South East Europe.” For example, in terms of vehicle thefts per 100,000 vehicles, the United Kingdom has the worst statistics with 1,330, Greece has 185, and Austria has 125, whereas Moldova has 184, Croatia has 166, Macedonia has 113, and Albania has 90. Bulgaria has the worst statistics in the region with 412 vehicle thefts per 100,000 vehicles, but the report notes Bulgaria’s declining trend.

With in-depth discussion and analysis for possible mistakes, the report concludes that these relatively positive numbers are not the result of government “adjustments” to look better before the international monitors: “The only conclusion that can be drawn is that South East Europe is one of the safer areas of the world, and that progress is being made in making the region even safer.”

The data on conventional crimes provides the good news; however, the report moves on to discuss the real issues in the region, and that is organized crime: “The issue that makes headlines in South East Europe is not conventional crime … but organized crime.” Here, the report notes two dimensions: “the role that groups from South East Europe have played in organized crime in West Europe” and “the impact that organized crime has had on the region itself.”

In the section on organized crime, the central issue is drug trafficking. A shorter section covers human trafficking and smuggling of migrants, but the report seems to consider these a much smaller threat, which is nevertheless declining.

The report provides details of the Balkans’ role as a major drug route from Asia to Western Europe: “The most valuable form of contraband crossing the region is heroin. South East Europe lies along the most convenient route (the so-called ‘Balkan route’) between the supplier of some 90% of the world’s heroin (Afghanistan) and its most lucrative consumer market (Western Europe). It is estimated that about 100 tons of heroin crosses South East Europe on its way to Western Europe, of which 85 tons eventually makes it to the consumer, a flow valued at US$25-30 billion. This is more than the GDPs of most of the countries of the region, and consequently this flow has great corrupting power.”

Although “the ‘Balkan route’ has been the continent’s primary heroin trafficking route for decades” the report notes, “the share of South East Europeans who consume opiates is half that of West Europe and one-sixth that of East Europe.” This, according to the authors, “suggests the flow has been conducted by highly organized groups determined to command the highest return for their product, rather than by a diffuse network of couriers who might ’spill’ some of the heroin into their local communities.”

The report additionally notes that “the problem of South East Europe as a gateway for drugs to West Europe must be distinguished from the problem of South East Europeans dealing drugs in West European countries, although the two issues are obviously related.”

In discussing drug trafficking as the most serious form of organized crime concerning the Balkans, the report strongly emphasizes the role of “ethnic Albanians” in the drug trade: “Since the mid-1990s, ethnic Albanian traffickers have been said to control the trafficking of this commodity west into Europe. Past estimates suggested that ethnic Albanian traffickers controlled 70% or more of the heroin entering a number of key destination markets.” For example, the report notes, “About half the heroin seized by the Italian authorities in 2006 was taken from Albanian nationals.”

In trying to explain the “ethnic colour” of organized drug trafficking, the report uses numerous references from national sources in Western Europe, which have singled out Albanian ethnicity: “‘Ethnic Albanian Criminal Groups’ are the only national group discussed in the 2006 Europol publication ‘The Threat From Organized Crime.’”

The report suggests that “ethnic Albanian heroin trafficking is arguably the single most prominent organized crime problem in Europe today.”

Corruption, which is a major issue in the Balkans, is not a focus of the report, but it does observe that “while conventional crime levels are low and organised crime appears to be in decline, [the] one area of criminal activity that is especially problematic in the Balkans [is] corruption and economic crime.”

The report refers to studies from Transparency International to illustrate the scope of corruption in the region: “Large shares of the population continue to report paying bribes. Albania had the highest rate of annual bribe paying (66%) of the 57 countries polled in the 2006 TI Global Corruption Barometer, and the South East European average was 4.5 times as high as the West European average.”

By offering detailed statistics and a realistic approach in analyzing the Balkan crime problem, the report is timely and relevant. It disproves some previous partial or incomplete research and statistics, which feed the stereotype that the Balkans is simply dangerous. The report provides a comprehensive overview of the state of crime in the region. The problem is organized crime and corruption. Conventional crime, although much higher than before the beginning of transition, is still low.

From Osservatorio sui Balcani.

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