"Milos Obilic - hero or coward, Serbian or Albanian"

Despite the animosities and stereotypes, cooperation between Serbia and Albania is possible, says Zvezdana Kovac

Izvor: B92

Wednesday, 18.05.2016.

12:04

Milos Obilic depicted in a 1861 painting by Aleksandar Dobric (Wikimedia Commons)

"Milos Obilic - hero or coward, Serbian or Albanian"

Presenting a project dubbed "Joint history project" that provides a number of different views of the same event, she said that students need to have more facts, while "their critical thinking needs to be encouraged."

Her presentation about multiple versions of one event - the example being Milos Obilic "presented as a hero in one country and a coward in another" - was interrupted by Albanian journalist Ben Andoni, who noted that as a student of history, he was taught that "Milos Obilic was Albanian."

"Here's the third version," Kovac reacted, after which the participants agreed that this was "yet another example that suggests events should be viewed from multiple angles."

Kovac also announced that the Center will soon finish work on a textbook about the wars of the 1990s, with the support of education ministries from the region. "It took us ten years to manage to have this become a textbook and be used," she said. One of the obstacles, she continued, was that all countries wanted a cartoon that depicted Albania as a beautiful woman, Serbia as a snake, and Montenegro as a monkey removed.

"We did not want to remove that, because we work with historians who have credibility," Kovac said, and pointed out that the goal of her organization was "not to change national history but to help teachers in schools."

The Center for Democracy and Reconciliation Commission has published a set of workbooks dealing with the period from the Ottoman Empire until World War II, available to teachers throughout the region, and their greatest quality is that they provide different perspectives on the same events. During the conference on relations between the two countries it was said that Serbs and Albanians do not have enough information about each other, that there are many prejudices and aversions, but that both nations want better relations.

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