Serbian Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin has doubled down on ethnic slurs against Albanians in an official reply to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama’s dismay to Vulin’s previous slurs and calls for all Serbs to unite against “Greater Albania”.
Following the regular Kosovo-Albania joint governments meeting on Friday, Vulin had called on all Serbs in the Balkans to “institutionally unite” against the “Greater Albania”, which Prime Minister Edi Rama is allegedly creating.
Vulin used the ethnic slur “shiptar” for “Albanian”.
To no avail, Rama called on Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to condemn Vulin’s statement.
.@avucic is this real or it is a meme making fun of drained brains and dirty mouths that kept all our region in darkness for centuries? I very much wish it is a meme, otherwise this would be a despeakable show of miserable thinking that you should condemn without any doubt! pic.twitter.com/cXrJtmeW6v
— Edi Rama (@ediramaal) October 3, 2020
Instead of a condemnation and possible words of good faith by Vucic, with whom Rama has established good relations and undertaken common initiatives in the region, Rama got a reply through Vucic’s minister of defense, insulting Albanians and calling him personally “brainless”.
“If Edi Rama had a brain, he would not try to create ‘Greater Albania’; if he had a mind, he would not pose under the flag of ‘Greater Albania’; and if he cared about peace in the region, he would not praise the killers of the so-called KLA,” Vulin stressed in his statement published on the governmental website on Saturday.
He further blamed Rama for the alleged portrayal of Serbian heritage as Albanian in the country’s textbooks, and made fun of Rama’s way of dressing himself and lack of “great ideas”.
Vulin then said he would never identify “shiptars” with Rama, noting the name of a controversial Albanian historical figure who closely collaborated with Serbs until the WWI, Essad Pashe Toptani, as an honorable “shiptar”.
