The Çam Cause: The Prime Minister of Greece will meet the father of the Çam Cause, Servet Mehmeti!

By Arian Galdini

Tirana, 6 November 2016

Servet Mehmeti is a man with snow-white hair. He was brought to Albania as a toddler, two, perhaps three years old.

He is one of many children raised by their mother alone, a woman of rare nobility. When he speaks of her, Uncle Servet’s eyes fill. The suffering and sacrifices his mother endured to feed, educate, and raise her children with dignity are carved into him like God’s Ten Commandments on Moses’ stone tablets.

That Çam mother never treated poverty, deprivation, or injustice as reasons to breed envy, bitterness, malice, surrender, or scheming in her children.

On the contrary, she dressed each day of misery in the joyful songs of Çamëria.

She wrapped every shortage and every wrong in stories of Çam men, brave men, who fought to defend their land, their fields, their property, and their families, who sailed the seas to trade with the world, who worked from dawn to dusk to build what is good, who, together, shaped the small towns, neighborhoods, and villages where they lived, who did not make enemies, who were born and died with their heads held high.

Never did Servet Mehmeti see or hear his mother curse, insult, or hate anyone for the heavy troubles that had fallen on her shoulders like mountains.

She could conjure a warm meal from almost nothing. She could fill her children with her joy and her smile. She could warm them, when they were cold, with her love.

When they had no shelter, she would tell her children that the brave men of Çamëria were the stars in the sky, and that those stars protected them from rain, snow, cold, and the wicked.

When they found shelter, she would tell them that the dust of those stars had made those walls and that roof, so they would remain close to, never separated from, the brave men of Çamëria.

And when the children asked why they had no home, why they had no father, why they were poor, she would lift her eyes to the sky, wet as the Sea of Arpica, the sea of her lost home, and answer:

We have the home.

We have what is rightfully ours.

We have the father.

We have them.

The children, who had never seen their mother weep, would sit around her and try to understand, from the waves of that sea of tears sliding down her cheeks, what could have carried those things far from them, if they truly “had them.”

We are in our homeland, their mother would say as she sighed, but not in our place.

With that, she would close the sea inside her eyes and begin to sing Tumankuqe, or some other joyful song of Çamëria.

No one has ever quite understood how that mother found the strength to close a sea of tears with a joyful song.

Not until the children grew, and the songs became stories, and the stories became memory, and memory became conscience, and conscience became a call.

Today, Uncle Servet is the old, wise man who stands at the crossroads and shows you which road takes you there and brings you back, and which road does not bring you back.

The Sea of Arpica, once in his mother’s eyes, has become the white foam of rough waves in his hair.

The songs of Çam’s brave men have become wisdom in his words.

The histories of Çamëria have hardened into resolve and a sense of justice in his thoughts and actions.

Memory has become the anvil and the hammer of his character.

Conscience, and the call, have become the reason he lives.

Just as he did when he was two or three years old, he still asks:

Why am I far from the Sea of Arpica, far from my home, far from my father, why?

With these questions he lived every day of his life.

With these questions he became one of the founders, and the first Chairman, of the Çamëria Association.

With these questions he fought in front of the Parliament of Albania in 2004, while police, protecting deputies who were afraid to vote the Çam Resolution, beat him until he bled. With these questions he won the Çam Resolution.

With these questions he stood beside and supported all those who would go on to found the Party of the Çam Cause.

With these questions he refuses to submit to the limits of age and, like an unbroken fighter, begins and ends his day swimming in the Sea of Arpica that his mother’s wet eyes planted in his mind.

He swims in those eyes, he swims in that sea, because he is searching for the shore. He is a modern Ulysses.

He seeks his Ithaca. He seeks the Ithaca where his home is, his father is, and the sea where his ancestors once sailed.

He wants to touch the stones his father laid with his own hands to build their house.

He wants to step onto the earth where his father rests, and where many others rest, too, who were killed and massacred treacherously by the paramilitary bands commanded by Napoleon Zervas.

He wants to see the threshold from which they were driven out by force, without cause, when he was only two or three years old.

He wants to go to his place.

In Tirana and across Albania, everyone who knows Servet Mehmeti honors him as a rare man.

Often he resembles one of those stars high in the sky, like the stories his mother whispered, descended here as a precious man of Çamëria.

Here he is in his homeland. Yet his mother left him a charge: never to forget his place, his home, his father.

When he hears Greece’s Foreign Minister, or other Greek politicians and officials, declare that the Çam issue does not exist, Uncle Servet feels his eyes become the Sea of Arpica.

When he is told that his home, his land, his father do not exist, the sea in his eyes rises with furious waves.

When he is told by Greek politicians and officials that, at two or three years old, he was condemned by a court as a collaborator of Nazism, the fury of those waves floods his cheeks and his heart.

No serious court on earth can call a two-year-old a war criminal.

Servet Mehmeti is in Tirana. His homeland is Albania. His home, his land, and his father are in Arpica.

If Greek politicians and officials insist on repeating that Servet Mehmeti does not exist, perhaps the Prime Minister of Greece should come to Tirana and have a coffee with Uncle Servet.

Uncle Servet is not an enemy of Greece.

He does not hate Greeks.

On the contrary, there, in Greece, he has his place, his land, his home, his property, and his father.

He only wants to see the Sea of Arpica.

He has grown old swimming in the Sea of Arpica through his mother’s eyes.

And he does not want his own eyes to become that same sea for his children.

He only wants to see the sea once with his own eyes, so he can finally let it go from his eyes.

Arian Galdini