September 15, 1999
Compassion replaced
hatred for Albanian woman
___LONDON (ABP)--An Albanian woman speaking at a Baptist meeting in London urged fellow Kosovars not to respond to "Serbian barbarism" with the "spirit of vendetta" and hatred.
___Amid news reports of violence by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for Serb atrocitiesduring NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia, Kimete Basha called for reconciliation in the Balkans at a Baptist-sponsored conference on religious liberty and human rights.
___As wife of the Albanian ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Basha has a platform to potentially make a difference in the aftermath of ethnic-cleansing horrors in her native Kosovo.
___But she admits she had to work through her own feelings to come to her present point of view.
___"Anger and hatred boiled in me," she said. "But I had to refuse to respond to it and look inside to see what makes us human."
___What she found was compassion, which she said is necessary both "to help those who are suffering" on both sides of the conflict and to promote the idea of reconciliation and forgiveness.
___When the rector of the University of Pristina issued a call for help in reopening the damaged university in Kosovo's capital city, Basha responded quickly.
___She did so "as a symbolic gesture" to help a school where Serbian and ethnic-Albanian students "once studied together peacefully and even fell in love and got married," she said.
___Basha, who was librarian at the International School in Brussels for 18 years, took on the University of Pristina library as her part of the project. She set out to replace all the books in the Albanian language that Serbs had burned.
___Response to her calls for help included a $10,000 gift from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, CBF representative Lonnie Turner told participants at the conference sponsored jointly by the Baptist Joint Committee and Atlanta-based Fellowship.
___Basha, who is deeply involved in several projects to help ethnic Albanians, dreams of creating a foundation to help Albanians, wherever they live in the region, and instill a new vision in them for forgiveness and peaceful coexistence.
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