Media, ethnicity and patriotism—the Balkans ‘unholy war’ for the appropriation of Mother Teresa

In the summer of 2003 an ‘unholy war’ broke out between the Albanians and the Macedonians over the filiation of a beatified woman. The decision of the Government of the Republic of Macedonia to erect a monument dedicated to Mother Teresa, not very far from the centre of Rome, aroused the Albanians’ suspicion and jealousy. This was not the first time the Albanians felt that they were being robbed of ‘their’ Mother Teresa; some of their neighbours had apparently tried to ‘appropriate’ her almost immediately after the Albanian Catholic nun was ‘discovered’ by the BBC’s Malcolm Muggeridge in 1968. By the time Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979, the competition of several Balkan countries to claim the celebrity nun as their own daughter began in earnest. According to Albert Ramaj, the Croats were the first to claim that she ‘belonged’ to them. The Croat government issued her with a Croat passport, which was handed on to her by the country’s ambassador in India in the early 1990s. The Croats base their argument mainly, if not exclusively, on the fact that Mother Teresa spoke Serbo-Croat better than Albanian. Several Slav reporters are keen to emphasize that, while she was fluent in Serbo-Croat, she spoke little or no Albanian; something strongly contested by the Albanians. Mother Teresa had a good command of Serbo-Croat because in India she was constantly in contact with Croatian and other Yugoslav priests. As for her knowledge of Albanian, argues Dr Lush Gjergji, the distinguished biographer and friend of Mother Teresa, who met her more than 50 times, she spoke her native tongue very well but was not very confident of her ability to use literary Albanian in public. Like the Croats, the Serbs have made some attempts to prove that Mother Teresa was originally from Serbia. Unlike the Croats, however, the Serbs have been less outspoken in their claim because Mother Teresa happened to be a Roman Catholic. Both the Croats and the Serbs, though, have suffixed her Albanian family name ‘Bojaxhiu’ to ‘Bojadžijević’, which has always enraged the Albanians.