Renovation of Nazi Ally’s House in Kosovo Halted After Outcry
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Kosovo’s Culture Minister Hajrulla Ceku (centre) in front of Xhafer Deva’s house in Mitrovica on February 3. Photo: Hajrulla Ceku/Facebook.
The UN Development Program, UNDP and the EU announced on Tuesday that they have halted the renovation of the former house of Kosovo Albanian politician Xhafer Deva, who was interior minister in a Nazi collaborationist regime during World War II.
“UNDP and the European Union express our strong regret for any unintentional offense caused when announcing the initiating of works while omitting the historical background of Xhafer Deva,” they said in a joint statement.
The statement condemned anti-semitism and said that the project had been intended to “bring communities together and contribute to social cohesion by using cultural heritage as an instrument for inter-community dialogue”.
While the renovation work is on hold, the UNDP and EU said they will be “assessing the possibility to use the current controversy as a timely opportunity to openly address the past through open discussions and consultations of all relevant communities.”
The project had been criticised by the EU rapporteur for Kosovo, Viola von Cramon, who wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that she is “personally worried” by the renovation of Deva’s former house.
“There must be no place for WWII history revisionism and Holocaust denial,” von Cramon said.
The German ambassador to Pristina, Joern Rohde, expressed concern on Monday, urging the Kosovo authorities and international organisations not to “distort the truth about the Holocaust or war crimes committed by the Nazis and local collaborators”.
The director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, described the renovation as a mockery of the victims of the Nazis and their local collaborators in the Holocaust.
Kosovo’s Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports, Hajrulla Ceku, responded to the criticism on Tuesday, saying that the house is of architectural importance.
“The restoration of monuments is done to serve the community, not for historical revisionism or rehabilitation of figures,” Ceku wrote on Facebook.
Deva was the interior minister of Axis-occupied Albania as part of a Nazi collaborationist government in 1944, and recruited Kosovo Albanians into units of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s armed force.
His former house in Mitrovica was built in 1930 by Austrian architects, the first modern Western European-style building in the area. It is on the temporary list of protected cultural heritage sites in Kosovo.
The renovation of the building, which is intended to house a Regional Centre for Cultural Heritage, has received some support amid the criticism.
Nora Weller, an international cultural heritage expert, said on Tuesday that the German ambassador’s criticism of the project was “very diplomatically damaging”.
“This building in Mitrovica is surrounded by a community whose lives evolve around it,” Weller wrote on Twitter, urging the ambassador to “engage with the community and local authorities” if his aim is to “help restore cultural memory and heritage”.
