Blood feuds

While working in Albania recently I read Ismail Kadare's Broken April. It seemed like a good time to read a novel by Albania's most celebrated writer. It is a fine book, portraying a world, the world of the blood feud, that is utterly alien to modern society with a persuasiveness that only fiction can achieve. Of course, it is abhorrent, bizarre, that families, generation after generation, can have been bound, afflicted by this scourge which often had nothing to do with them personally, its origins lost in the mists of time, beyond the fact of their being trapped in such a diabolical cycle.

Particularly extraordinary is that it still goes on. While reading the book I met the head of an organisation that works to bring about reconciliations among families engaged in feuds. He estimated that some 3,500 people are confined to their homes, unable to leave for fear that the vengeance of the blood feud would be meted on them. It still has its hold. Sentences for murders are longer when they involve a blood feud - as much as 25 years in gaol. Yet young men in remote places are not deterred, accepting the sentence rather than the shame of not having avenged the blood of a family member. The modern state seems hardly to exist for such people, who adhere instead to the older law of the Kanun (code), perhaps the only example of the rules of the blood feud being codified in detail. I was especially amazed when the man told me he recommended, as part of a solution for those caught in the blood feud, that parts of the Kanun should be incorporated into modern Albanian law. The positive elements, he said, referring to sections of the Kanun that deal with reconciliation. The whole thing would be better consigned to the past, a past that was so forcefully portrayed by Kadare.