It’s part of our fundamental notion of justice – we believe fundamentally in private justice rather than public justice.
History of how our notions of justice developed outside of the state
Historically we were almost always subject to foreign powers and culture – the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires for example with some brief periods of occupation by regional states like Venice. Those powers often tried to imposed their notions of justice on us, which greatly differed from our cultural values.
They didn’t try too hard though because the Albanian highlands were hard [and expensive] to control and have very limited economic value to justify the expense of repression policies – in fact, most of the time, these empires left us alone and only occasionally demanded that we supply some irregular troops for their armies (which we often did as we got to keep the loot taken during a campaign!). In these circumstances Albanians developed their own customary law which we call the Kanun (a word derived from the Latin ‘Cannon’ law).
Every region in Albania had its own Kanun which differed from other Kanuns and reflected the values of that region in particular. The Kanuns were basically living laws (which means they were not codified and kept changing with new generations – people just memorized the key rules). Some people memorized a lot of the rules and the judgments given in old rulings and these specialists acted as jurists – if you had an issue, you would seek out one of these guys for advice and to act as your representative in disputes. They would be able to speak well and cite cases from previous decisions in order to support your case.
Some priests tried to write down The Kanun by consulting the jurists who knew the Kanun at that time but often times, by the time they wrote down the Kanun, it had already changed with new cases coming about.
It was very similar to early English Common Law in that it was based on the cultural values and practices of the people (and previously decided cases) rather than on the diktat of the state. But it differed from English Common Law in that there were no Kings judges and it was not centralised – there were some well respected notable men who acted as arbitrators in complex disputes though, and some clans even had their Bajraktar (I.e. standard bearer) act as judge.
Overall, Albanian justice was mainly a private affair (with a few exceptions where the entire town or village was required to take part in enforcing the law, for example if a guest was murdered on their territory by a clan, they had to burn the entire property of the clan and expel them entirely as the guest in our culture is considered semi-divine so to kill him is like committing murder and offending god at the same time).
Logic behind the vendetta
With regards to the vendetta, it is essentially the regulation of the death penalty in an anarchic society with no recognized or legitimate state or police.
Like any death penalty, it was very serious and therefore highly regulated. For example, the act itself had very specific rules such as before killing someone in vendetta, you had to show yourself and call his name, he had to face you, and you had to shoot him in the front. You could not shoot him whilst he ate or drank. You could not shoot women or children. You could not invade his home to shoot him (at least in my region). When you shot your target, you had to take his gun and put it on his hand and turn his body so that his face is towards heaven (it must not face the ground).
The necessity to kill the murderer existed in circumstances where the Albanian clans did not have prisons and needed to punish murder (if you did not do it, murder would go unpunished). Those who carried out justice were, naturally, those who were wronged [i.e. the family of the victim]. Logically, why would anybody else enforce justice other than the people most effected by the injustice?
There was a spiritual element to this also – for example, the dead man’s shirt would be left out to dry with the blood still on it and it would be left out until his murderer was slain. The people thought that as the blood dried and turned yellow, it was signalling the suffering of the dead man in the afterlife and it could only be eased when justice was got for him (or some other solution found). The church tried to put an end to this line of thought, and did so in some regions, but it was very hard to do as these notions pre-date the church.
There was also a lot of cultural pressure to get justice – for example, if your clan is in a vendetta (I.e. they had a member killed), then every time you had a drink poured for you by somebody who knew of this, they would only pour it half way to remind you that you are only half-honorable until you got justice for your dead member. It’s not offensive to the person in with the half filled drink because they get it, they are only worthy of half a drink until they make things right. This was deeply effective in the old days. This practice still continues in some places.
Aside from how you killed your target, there were also many rules on where you could kill him. We were not savages. We had standards. Some roads which connected villages/ towns were sacrosanct and blood could not be spilled – people needed to conduct travel and trade without walking past a guy hiding in a bush every few miles waiting to kill somebody. He might just mistake you for his man and shoot you. So these roads were off limits (mostly). Some clans were so f*ckimg primitive they didn’t have such war heavens. Also, if we had war and the clans needed to be mobilized to fight off some outsiders, the standard bearers of the clans called ‘bajraktart’ declared a general truce which temporarily halted all vendetta’s until the situation was dealt with. Each clan had its own head, but a bunch of clans belonged to a bajrak which was basically a collection of clans who traced their origin to the same mythical founder. In my region there are about 7 bajrak, but many more clans. The word bajrak translates literally to ‘standard’ – as in the standard of a military unit. The bajraktar was not really their leader but was more like a kind of primitive foreign secretary and commander who dealt with other bajraktar diplomatically and lead your bajrak in war. Very respected and influential position, and almost always hereditary through a senior clan [who would elect their best male to be the bajraktar].
These rules were largely obeyed so as to avoid outrage and loss of esteem in society, and also to ensure the vendetta could be ended. It’s a misconception that vendetta’s lasted until the entire clan was wiped out. This did happen on rare occasions, but it was very rare, and the clans involved were disgraced. Even today we refer to certain clans with disdain for ‘killing themselves over a dispute over a donkey or boundary dispute’. It was extremely common for a murder to take place, and the clan of the victim to then kill the assailant or his brother or nearest male relative, and then the vendetta ended with the very rapid intervention of virtually every other clan in the region. Even in modern times, when a killing happens, the first act is for all the men in the village to visit the victim’s family with a priest or imam [depending on their religion] and plead for mercy and forgiveness of the killing and try to persuade him not to take revenge if the offender agrees to flee, or maybe pay compensation. If the family insists on ‘hak marrje’ [which means ‘taking what’s owed’, basically a life] then soon as they get their revenge, all the noteworthy men of the village then visit both families to plead for an end to the vendetta – provided it was a good kill (the rules were followed and the dead man was not disgraced), the vendetta almost always ends.
In some regions blood money was accepted if the death was as a result of an accident (to compensate the man’s family for loss of an able bodied man). Even more often, a lot of murders were forgiven entirely! For example, a guy from my clan about 80 years ago had killed his own third cousin (who was a known trouble maker). The victims father forgave the killer because he knew his son was a trouble maker and he died in a fair fight and moreover he knew the killer was not a bad sort of guy. In addition, our clans were basically related as we belonged to the same bajrak so he did not want to kill an able bodied male of that clan (we helped each other defend the region from raiders from Montenegro – the chetniks really gave it to us sometimes!).
Changes in the modern era
In communist times the vendetta virtually ended because the communists would terrorize the entire clan if a killing happened. Our culture changed drastically during communism and in the modern era, people have forgotten the very intricate rules of the vendetta, and they mainly use it as an excuse to murder. The need for the vendetta has not gone away however as the state now is similar to the Ottomans and Byzantines etc in that their notions of justice are not based on Albanian culture – our criminal code for example is entirely a copy and paste job of the Italian Penal Code. The death penalty is not enforced and the value system of the highlander Albanians is not reflected at all in the penal code, and what’s worse, the courts are often corrupt so murderers get very lenient or non-existent punishments.
Unfortunately, this has lead to some Albanians (particularly from the old strong holds in the Northern highlands) to carry out vendetta’s but they are a kind of perverse vendetta… basically just killing a member of the clan that killed your guy but doing it without following any of the customs. Ultimately, it’s a dying institution because the person who carried out a vendetta is often then also jailed and a lot of ‘modern’ thinking people don’t want to do it. But a lot still do.
Interesting anecdotes and the extended social function of the vendetta
The threat of the vendetta is very powerful. For example, my cousin once had a very serious business dispute with a guy [who incidentally was thought to be his illegitimate half brother from his dad who was a known womanizer!] who threatened to kill him after my cousin attacked him in public and sort of humiliated him. When my dad and uncles got word of this, they quickly sent some notable men to visit the other guy’s family and basically offer to resolve the business dispute in their favour. They accepted. Both sides knew the very delicate situation could lead to two people dying here. And you don’t know which two people it will be – it could be any of us, and any of them. Better to sort it out quickly.
On my mum’s side of the family, her father’s blood brother [a weird Albanian ritual that used to exist many decades ago and made you into blood-kin such that you couldn’t even intermarry] had a family member killed by some complete idiot loser. For revenge, he killed the best male in the opposing clan (i.e. the most educated, richest, most capable guy they had!). The opposing clan lost their best male whilst their trouble-maker who did the killing lived. It really f*cked with the other clan because they resented the fool who did the killing, and they had to go without the sound judgment, income and esteem their top male. Their value as a clan diminished greatly – they ended up getting lower quality marriages, lower quality upbringing for their kids, lower quality business and less influence. Today, decades later, they are a low quality clan whereas long ago they were decent – and all because they couldn’t keep their dumbest member under control. It’s not a situation you want to be in generally so you avoid vendetta’s as much as humanly possible by basically reigning in all the idiots in your family. Everybody has idiots in their family so the entire clan goes above and beyond to keep them in line so they don’t bring a vendetta to your house! Some clan’s have a lot of idiots, so many idiots that they are, in effect, idiot clans – there is one in my town in Northern Albania which I will not name [because they are dumb as f*ck and even shot somebody once for cheering on the wrong football team apparently] that constantly get in vendetta’s. They have almost been wiped out. They have one older male and only juvenile males left last I heard. My mum knows a woman married into that clan, and they have a lot of outstanding vendetta’s so she fears for her young son. Soon as he hits 14 years of age, he’s in line for the bullet too. She just prays the other boys of the clan get the bullet first and not her son. Horrible situation to be in to pray your nephew [by marriage] gets killed. But idiot clans die out in idiotic ways.
O, you’ve probably figured it out by now but in case you have not, I should also add that the basic social unit for accountability in our culture was not the individual, but the family [it’s sort of changing now]. So it seems a little callous that you could get killed because your idiot first cousin killed somebody. It’s not nice, but in an anarchic society, it worked because most clans kept their bad eggs in line and kept vendetta’s down to an appropriate minimum. It doesn’t always work though – for example, in my area, a clan killed two guys in the late 1990’s. One of these guys had gone to Switzerland in the early 1990’s as a teenager and had gone on to become a big fish in the narcotics trade there. He was used to dealing with the Swiss and had forgotten the rules. He came back to Albania in 1998, flush with cash. As a young man he wanted some female attention and ended up going for a very pretty girl, who allegedly rebuffed him so he allegedly raped her. The girl’s family sent word to this tough guy’s father (who was quite old) to make the situation right. The old man spoke to his son about paying compensation, and marrying the girl [I know this is f*cked up]. The tough guy was having none of it and showed up at the girl’s father’s place of business, pulled out a gun in front of customers, pointed it in his face and said to him that his daughter was a whore, he didn’t rape her, she wanted it, and he wouldn’t marry a girl who spread her legs so easily or compensate them in any way. Well. Shit. ‘Ja ka ba per borxh’ – in Albanian culture somebody can do something so extreme to you that they forfeit their life to you.
So, the father of the girl convened a family meeting and they elected to kill the tough guy – they set up an ambush on the only highway connecting the two major towns in the region. One of their members was about 1km ahead, and when he spotted the very distinctive Benz the tough guy was driving, he notified his brothers with a radio – they were waiting down the road. They blocked the road with some big log apparently. The tough guy slowed down to avoid the barricade. They popped up from a canal by the roadside and machine gunned the car from very close range – apparently emptied 2 machinegun clips into the tough guy [and his unfortunate young cousin sitting in the passenger seat]. That was that. The vendetta continues to this day – the clan that did the killing left the village they were from and moved to another part of Albania where they bought an apartment building and they all live in there now. Heavily fortified. The idea was to get away from the place which had a lot of the enemy clan around and maybe go some place they wouldn’t be easily recognised and get a bit more freedom of movement. A few years ago, they had one of their businesses raided by armed men – one of their wives tried to rush at the door to close it to stop the armed men from coming in to kill her husband and got killed instead. Her husband [the target] lived. As I said above, the vendetta of today is bastardised. Women getting killed in an armed invasion has no basis in Kanun. Its also lost much of its deterrence effect and other social functions.
For one, the initial killing was planned (in Albanian culture you are supposed to do everything possible to avoid killing somebody and meticulously planning a murder is not looked upon well – yes the tough guy messed up but we recognise that life is precious and shouldn’t be taken like that). Secondly, they carried out the killing on a main highway as an ambush. Not sure if the highway was sacrosanct, it might have been as it connected two main towns but nobody cares about the details anymore. Thirdly, they didn’t announce themselves. Fourthly, they shot the guy up bad, really bad … he couldn’t have a proper funeral. And they just left his body like that, not facing up or anything. Details, details, details. In response, the dead guy’s family also didn’t follow any rules and attempted to raid their premises and killed a woman. Another big no, no. At this stage its just straight up revenge killings with no order or rules. Horrible. O, if you are wondering where the police is in all of this, well, the clan who killed the two guys bribed the police to basically go after one of their teenage sons as the chief suspect – the teenager being hunted by police for the killings was then sent abroad and set up for life. So nobody went to jail. Besides, the police are our people, they know how the cookie crumbles. He now works for a major bank in a major European country and is technically the chief suspect in a brutal double murder.
I suspect a lot of non-Albanians reading this are wondering how did people know who the murderer was. Did the Albanians have the best CSI teams in the world circa 1900’s? Well, no. It was customary that when you killed somebody, you went to the middle of the town and shot your gun in the air and loudly and proudly stated you killed [insert name] for [insert reason]. There were times when people were killed secretly – but when that happened, if the murderers identity was discovered, there was hell to pay – as in the vendetta could get very nasty, very quickly and its situations like this that sometimes lead to the entire clan being killed off. There are many instances were clans were extinctic entirely when they murdered a guest or killed somebody in secret. Nobody wanted to live next to a clan that killed people secretly, that’s just scary. We have many stories of how such murders were discovered and the terrible consequences that befell the clan in question. My favorite story is that a woman married a man who talked in his sleep – one night whilst sleeping he muttered that he was the man who killed her cousin many years previously. She informed her clan who proceeded to basically massacre the murderer and his brothers in an ambush in their fields. Brutal.