A delegation of the National Assembly’s Committee on Relations with Serbs Living Outside Serbia, comprising deputies Aleksandar Cotric, Committee Deputy Chairman, Zoran Bortic and Zoran Nikolic, Committee members, visited the Republic of Albania from 26 to 28 January 2011.

During their three-day visit, the delegation members traveled to Tirana, Fier, Shkoder and Vraka and met with representatives of the Serbian ethnic minority in Albania. All the meetings were attended by H.E. Miroljub Zaric, Ambassador of the Republic of Serbia to Albania.

On the first day of the visit, the delegation members met with the representatives of the Serbian community in the town of Fier and visited a school conducting classes in Serbian. On the occasion, deputy Aleksandar Cotric addressed the students, commending the parents’ and children’s decision to learn Serbian and pointing out that the knowledge of the language would help them contact their mother country and learn about its culture – literature, music, films, and also communicate with a large number of people from the Balkans. Cotric proposed that the best students be awarded a visit to Serbia, as well as appropriate gifts. The deputies went on to talk to the representatives of the Serbian community in Fier. Ekrem Duljevic, initiator of the Serbian language learning programme whose own house is also the venue where the classes take place, said that he decided to take this step so that the Serbian language may not be forgotten in his part of Albania. “Considering that three of our villages and several settlements in the Municipality of Fier are home to more than 500 households of Serbian Muslims and Christians, I decided, along with our Moraca-Rozafa Association of Serb-Montenegrin minority from Shkoder, to launch a Serbian course in my own home for the benefit of our children, so that our mother tongue is not forgotten”, stressed Duljevic. According to Duljevic, his idea to launch the course was fully supported by the Ministry of the Diaspora of the Republic of Serbia and the Serbian Embassy in Tirana. He has also begun to prepare the terrain on his own property for the construction of a school that would teach in Serbian and he expects his plans to be supported by Serbian businessmen, the people and state of Serbia.

On the second day, in Shkoder, the delegation visited the headquarters of the Moraca-Rozafa Association of Serb-Montenegrin minority and discussed the affirmation, defense and development of ethnic rights, freedoms and interests of the Serbian minority with the members of the organisation headed by Pavle Brajovic. In the meeting with the delegation, Brajovic stressed that Serbs are the most underprivileged minority. In 1934, the five Schools teaching in Serbian on the territory of Albania were closed down. According to him, the Serbian minority has the right to education in its own language, information, representation in parliament, government and local authorities on paper alone and is largely marginalised when it comes to business and employment, which is particularly true of the educated and intellectuals. All this puts extreme emphasis on the upcoming common census to be held in Albania in April 2011, so that after many decades the real numbers of the Serbian minority may be finally established. However, the preparations for the census are followed by the Albanian authorities’ efforts to again discriminate against the members of ethnic minorities and discourage them from freely stating their ethnicity, religion and mother tongue. That is why, late last year, the representatives of the Moraca-Rozafa Association of Serb-Montenegrin minority addressed the Albanian and international public in a Declaration endorsed by the representatives of other underprivileged minorities.

The delegation members attended a liturgy and recital at the church of the Holy Trinity in Vraka near Shkoder served by priest Radomir Nikcevic from the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and Littoral on St. Sava Day. The recital in the continuation of the visit was given by Serbian students from Shkoder and the women’s church choir from Niksic. Deputy Aleksandar Cotric addressed the guests on the occasion, greeting them on the behalf of the President of the Republic of Serbia and Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia. Cotric endorsed their demands and promised that the delegation members would work on developing regular contact and cooperation with the institutions in the mother country.

On 28 January 2011, in Tirana, the deputies and H.E. Ambassador Miroljub Zaric laid flowers on the monument to the Serbian soldiers who died on Albanian soil in the Balkan Wars and World War One. The monument to more than three hundred soldiers, members of the second battalion of the infantry regiment of the Moravska brigade, is in a cemetery in the Albanian capital.