By Ben Blushi
Today is our Great Day of Independence, achieved after 500 years of barbaric occupation by the Ottomans and their platform: Ottomanism.
But what exactly is Ottomanism?
Ottomanism is a religious and racial doctrine designed to assimilate conquered peoples.
Ottomanism stripped us of our love for work, for the arts, for our language, and warped our very relationship with time.
The Ottomans persuaded us that delay is not a bad thing.
A task not done today can be done tomorrow—or not at all.
Delay became a national trait.
This is how we were delayed for 500 years.
One of the tragic consequences of Ottomanism in Albania is the absence of photography in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Had photography existed to show the misery of Albanians of that time, today’s Albanians would be horrified.
Those who defend this cruelty would be ashamed, though the absence of evidence cannot be an excuse for those who defend the destruction of their own nation.
At that time, the roads of Albania were filled with ragged, malnourished, and sick people.
One third of the country lived in swampland.
There were no schools, no hospitals, no ports, the land was never drained or improved, and not a single railway passed through here.
Albania was an isolated territory from which only livestock and soldiers were extracted, and to which nothing was sent except weapons used to suppress those who resisted.
The tools used by the Ottomans were violence, hunger, malaria, killings, and taxes.
All the traits of Ottomanism classify it as one of the most savage forms of colonialism.
Those who do not know what Ottomanism is should know this: that barbaric empire taxed people based on their religion.
Whoever was not Muslim paid a tax.
This tax on faith was called xhizve.
States impose taxes on property, land, labour, profit, or trade.
The Ottoman Empire went even further and imposed a tax on the soul—making it the most soulless of all the conquerors who have ever pressed upon our backs.
Xhizve was a kind of boiling pot in which our national conscience was scalded.
Colonialism is always heavy, harmful, and destructive—yet there are different kinds of colonialism.
We were struck by the worst kind.
At the time when the Spanish, Portuguese, and later the English and French took to the seas to conquer the world, we—who lived so near to them—had the darkest fate.
The Ottoman Turks—who had no fleets to sail to America or Asia, to discover China or Africa—lunged instead toward the Balkans.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached America, the Ottomans fully conquered Albania after nearly 50 years of siege and brutal campaigns.
Skanderbeg had died in 1468, and Shkodra had fallen in 1479.
After these two losses began a phase of brutal occupation, and our tragedy is that unlike many other peoples, we were colonized by a nation less civilized than ourselves.
In every sense of the word, the Ottomans of the 1400s were far less developed than the Albanians.
They were small tribes that built a state by conquering us; we were small states reduced to tribes by being conquered.
It is cynical to say it, but we were less fortunate than the Native Americans or many African peoples who were conquered by nations more advanced than themselves.
We fell into a moral dampness that rotted us for 500 years.
This is why Ottomanism was not simply an occupation—it was a colonization.
When the Ottomans left, they left nothing behind.
Post-Ottoman Albania emerged as the poorest, most plundered, least educated, sickest, smallest, and hungriest country in Europe.
No enemy has treated us worse than the bloodthirsty Ottomans.
They stripped us of our need to work, to dream, and to live with justice.
They severed us from our own trunk and left us to rot in their swamp.
Without the Ottoman occupation, our history would have been brighter, and today we would likely be a larger European nation, fully integrated.
This is why Ismail Qemali’s effort—crossing through the mud of his time to declare Albania independent on 28 November 1912—is perhaps the most courageous act in our history.
All the evils we have suffered—and continue to suffer—originate there.
In those 500 years of darkness, humiliation, and national submission.
Ottomanism is our disease, one we must cure completely.
I am convinced we will succeed.
We will be healed.
Happy Independence Day to all.