Image via WikipediaBLOOD FEUDS: Quite an amazing article in the NYT about ongoing blood feuds in Albania, and their consequences. The article describes the life of a young man, 17 years old, who has spent most of his life imprisoned within his family's small house. He cannot go to school, cannot have a girlfriend, and has no hopes of a career. He is afraid that he will be killed if he walks outside his front door. The article continues: "[His] misfortune is to have been born the son of a father who killed a man... Under the Kanun, an Albanian code of behavior that has been passed on for more than 500 years, “blood must be paid with blood,” with a victim’s family authorized to avenge a slaying by killing any of the killer’s male relatives...
Blood feuds all but disappeared here during the 40-year rule of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist dictator, who outlawed the practice, sometimes burying alive those who disobeyed in the coffins of their victims. But legal experts in Albania say the feuds erupted again after the fall of Communism ushered in a new period of lawlessness...
[One nonprofit organization] estimates that 20,000 people have been ensnared by blood feuds since they resurfaced after the collapse of Communism in 1991, with 9,500 people killed and nearly 1,000 children deprived of schooling because they are locked indoors."
So: a brutal practice was once nearly eliminated, by a dictator who punished its practitioners by burying them alive in the coffins of their victims... One despairs of humanity.
And yet, at the same time, this story makes me (at least temporarily) incapable of complaining about the problems in my own life...
What a strange mixture of responses.
0 comments:
Post a Comment