Albanian parliament vice-speaker refers to … Chams — Irredentism making a comeback?

“Albanians of .. Cameria” was the latest irredentist “pipedream” heard in the increasingly tense western Balkans this week, uttered by none other than an Albanian lawmaker who assumed a vice-speaker’s position in that country’s Parliament.

The phrase belongs to one Shpëtim Idrizi, listed as the president of the small nationalist Party for Justice, Integration and Unity.

In referring to “Cameria”, he means Thesprotia, the northwestern most prefecture of mainland Greece, which up until WWII, and specifically 1944, hosted a minority Albanian-speaking Muslim community known as the Chams. A sizable portion of that community’s active males joined armed pro-Axis bands towards the end of the war and were involved in numerous atrocities against their ethnic Greek neighbors, rather than venturing into combat against resistance guerrillas.

When the Wehrmacht high-tailed it out of the Balkans in the second half of 1994 — squeezed by the Red Army on the east and the Anglo-Americans on the west — the Greek resistance in the border area went after the armed Cham collaborators. Practically the entire community subsequently fled into Albania as the war was winding down, a smaller scale version of the fate of the Sudaten Germans.

Asked by reporters in Athens over the comment on Friday, Greek foreign ministry spokesman Konstantinos Koutras merely noted that “the selection of people advocating irredentist views, ones linked directly to Europe’s repulsive fascist and Nazi past, to occupy important positions  does not promote friendship, cooperation, stability and good neighborly relations between SE European countries — nor is it helpful to Albania’s European prospects.”

Following his election as one of the Albanian parliament’s vice-speakers, Idrizi also conveyed his view that “when the Albanians of Cameria in Greece win their rights, we’ll soon have a … Cham vice-president in the Hellenic Parliament.”

Thesportia’s population, by the way, doesn’t exceed 50,000 souls…