The BBC today carries the story of Abu Mohammed, one of the recent group of Guantanamo internees to be sent to Albania.
And now the end is near and so i face nanananana... Never did like that crappy song. But it's true nevertheless. Tomorrow in the wee hours of the morning we will be heading for the airport for the last time. I suppose it was too much to expect that I could have kept this going while getting ready to leave. So apologies for the lack of postings over the last weeks. This is post number 380 something so I suppose one post every two days is not a bad average. There were probably 380 more in my head or scribbled down on scraps of paper, but many of them are perhaps best left there. I suppose I should be penning - or typing - my final thoughts and reflections on two years in Tirana, but right now I don't have any. Maybe in a month or two though I might come back with something. Thanks to all of you who have read this blog - especially those of you who have become regulars. Thanks also for linking and thanks to all who left comments. As for the other stars of the blog, Bella now has h...
Comments
the war on terror can go on for centuries. Soon there will be more foreigners than Albanians here.
They just have to memorize how the alphabet sounds.
Both languages have a latin base.
For example, from the top of my head, hope-espere-shpres. The grammar is exactly like Italian and French. That's why Albanians "learn" Italian so easily just by watching 2 years of Italian tv. The language just enters our brains with no effort because it is similar. fitorja-vittoria. desire-deshire-desiderio. is-est-este-eshte.
The rest of the words that are not latin are short words that are easy to learn.
No one is forcing Europe to take them in, but at the same time if you're not willing to help it's better to shut up and not criticize the countries that are helping out. Heck, I don't agree with 99% of the policies of the Bush administration, but Europe is all words and no action, with the exception of the UK and maybe Germany. Does anyone really believe that the NATO intervention in Kosovo would have ever happened if it weren't for the US? And this Algerian doctor should be glad he's being given a second chance, since no matter how he tries to slice it, there is no good explanation for moving to the remote areas of Pakistan if you're not a religious biggot, to say the least. After all, why do the Algerian authorities want him?
To the second anonymous,
You can't be serious. You can't just give a couple of examples and claim that French and Latin and Albanian are similar. Just because they're all Indo-European languages doesn't mean anything. Yes the structure of the sentence is similar for all three but the same can be said for other languages, like English for example. Are we now to believe that we can learn all Indo-European languages easily.
Albanian is a very hard language to learn. The only easy thing to do is read it, since it's phonetic language. And anyway, I wouldn't want a religious freak practising medicine in Albania either way.
And I never said that the US was fighting alone in Afghanistan, but tell me the last time that a successful or major European military operation happened without the US at the helm. That's just reality. Europe is completely incapable to resolve any conflict on its own for many different reasons. After all, Europe couldn't even take care of the mess in the Balkans without the US.
As for Gitmo - no-one claims the people there are angels, all people - including plenty of americans - are saying is that you don;t defend democracy by locking people up with no rights, no lawyers, no process. If there all terrorists then prove it in a court.
And you are right that Europe screwed up in Bosnia and has a serious problem projecting military power. In Kosovo, though, it was Bill Clinton who refused to put soldiers on the ground and mainly European soldiers who went in following the Serb withdrawal.
If you open a French dictionary, try to find words that you inderstand.
It may look absurd at first because French has a totally different pronounciation. But, it's the same latin base. And, yes, after learning a latin, an anlgo-saxon, a slavic, based languge you can easily decipher most of Indo-European languages. (With exception to Hungarian, Finnish, Basque)
After you learn the first one, you know what to look for in the other ones.
If you really want a challenge learn Chinese or sth.