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Arranged Marriages Spell Disaster for Many Women

09 March 2007   Girls from traditional Albanian families are still being packed off abroad to marry total strangers.

By Fisnike Rexhepi in Bujanovac (Balkan Insight, 8 March 2007)

Nora met her husband for the first time just before their wedding ceremony.

It was a typical arranged marriage. In traditional fashion, her family had picked the groom because he seemed well off, having worked in the West, like tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians from South Serbia, Kosovo and Western Macedonia.

After they wed the couple went to Switzerland where they stayed for a year. But the marriage quickly turned sour. Nora, 25, whose sole duty was to take care of the household and her man, had no job and did not know any of the local Swiss languages.

Soon after they got there, she claims she discovered her husband is an alcoholic and a drug addict. He also bored of his wife.

“He sent me back to live with his parents in the village and later sent me a message saying he was a free man,” she says.

Her husband said she was now free to look for another, as he had divorced her in the Islamic fashion.

Nora is among many ethnic Albanian women from the Presevo Valley, Kosovo and Western Macedonia whose lives have been caught in the clash between traditional mores and the modern world.

Hysnije Miftari, from the village of Nesalce, near Bujanovac, says she separated from her husband because “it was impossible to continue living with a man who only caused me pain”.

She described how her husband started seeing another woman and suggested Miftari leave home or agree to become his “second” wife in accordance with Islamic tradition.

Miftari opted to go but had to leave her son behind with her husband’s family.

“I constantly dream about my son,” she said. “Because of him I would go back to my husband but I don’t think there is any hope of that,” Miftari added.

The dilemmas facing such women are partly due to the growing interaction between what were once very isolated societies and the outside world.

The series of armed conflicts in Kosovo, Macedonia and South Serbia in the late 1990s and early 2000s created massive social disruption.

War and a chronic shortage of jobs has driven huge numbers from rural isolation to the region’s cities, from where many emigrate to the European Union, Switzerland and the United States. They often stay and work for years, many of them illegally.

The trend began in the 1950s when Albanians started migrating to Turkey. It continued in the 1970s and 1980s, when Germany and other Western countries replaced Turkey as the favoured destination.

The number has risen steadily since 1999 when the Kosovo conflict reached its climax. According to some estimates, about 30 per cent of the male population of in some areas of Kosovo, the Presevo Valley and Western Macedonia is working abroad.

Riza Halimi, president of the ethnic Albanian Party for Democratic Action, describes emigration as “a very serious problem in the Presevo Valley”.

“When the wars started in 1990s there was a massive migration of the Albanian population from these parts,” he said.

The emigrants took their traditionalist ideas with them. Close knit families often insist that their young men living abroad marry women from their home villages.

The clan or family elders usually make a deal, mainly aimed at increasing or conserving the family’s wealth.

As a result, young women are packed off to unknown countries to meets husbands they have never seen.

Many are socially isolated. Often unable to speak the local language, they are put effectively at the mercy of a stranger.

Ermira, 34, from Tetovo, in Macedonia, met her husband for the first time “at Munich airport”, she said.

“My father simply told me one day that I was going to be sent to a man in Germany to be his wife,” she added. “He refused to listen to my arguments that I had never met my future husband.”

In Albanian Muslim tradition, women are virtually the property of their husbands, while the marriage lasts. The wife may separate if she insists but the children will stay with their husbands.

“I spent a year in Germany, hardly ever leaving his apartment,” Ermira said. “But one day he came from work and told me to pack and leave. He didn’t even pay for my ticket back. I had to borrow money from a cousin.”

To be divorced in such a manner is a disgrace for women. Frequently they have to return to their families and seek a new marriage with a single father, usually a widower or divorcee.

“I don’t think I will marry again,” Ermira said. “That’s why I came to Belgrade to look for new life.”

Xhevahire Shabani, head of the women's organization Prosperiteti, from the village of Trnovac, outside Bujanovac, said too many women were still at the mercy of their husbands. “They don’t have the same rights ... simply because they belong to the opposite sex,” she said.

Prosperiteti is one of several citizens’ groups in the Presevo Valley that target women who need help to protect their rights. Many are illiterate.

Mirvete Shabani, a high school teacher, said such organisations were needed. Too few women take part in courses “about domestic violence, human and women’s rights, women in politics and about intercultural solidarity,” she said.

To help alleviate the problem, the authorities have set minimum quotas for the number of women in local politics. Eight of the 41 deputies in the Bujanovac assembly are now women. Five are Albanian.

But Vjollca Sadiku, director of the Vuk Karadzic cultural centre in Bujanovac, said people had only just begun to tackle the problem of women’s rights. “Action in this direction is still limited,” Sadiku said.

Fisnike Rexhepi is a journalist with weekly Perspektiva. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.

This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade, as part of BIRN's Minority Media Training and Reporting Project.