[ALBSA-Info] DT

[Agron Alibali]

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) 


March 29, 2001, Thursday 

SECTION: Pg. 29 

LENGTH: 211 words 

The wisdom of Albania 


British heroes in Albania come in two forms. One man
achieves that status because he is held to be
apolitical. Into that category falls Sir Norman
Wisdom, whose films were considered ideologically
innocuous during the long Stalinist tyranny of Enver
Hoxha. The octogenarian comedian, who was in Tirana
for England's World Cup qualifier last night, has long
been a cult figure in Albania. The old dictator and
his egregious system have vanished, but Sir Norman's
fame remains. 

The other is acclaimed precisely because he is
political. Hon Col Aubrey Herbert, a Conservative MP,
championed the Albanian cause in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. In 1924, shortly after he died,
his memoir of the country during the Second Balkan War
of 1912 was published. It was in that year that
Albania, with Ismail Qemal Vlora as its head, declared
independence from the Ottoman Empire. Before the
Second World War there was a village in the centre of
the country named Herberti, after the British
politician. Now Helmasi, it was used by the
British-Albanian relief committee in the 1920s to help
Kosovar refugees. 

>From Aubrey's defiance of imperialism to Norman's
clowning: Albanian taste for things British is
catholic. 


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