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ABOUT REMZIJE SHERIFI

Remzije Sherifi was born in Prishtinë in Kosova, one of the six children of an Albanian police instructor and his wife. When she was small the family moved to Gjilan in the south-east of the country where she completed her education. Later she attended Prishtinë University to study Electrical Engineering, but her heart was in other activities. Already she was broadcasting on the new Radio Gjilan. On graduating she took a full time post and carved out a career as a radio journalist.

In the course of her life Tito, the president of Yugoslavia, the communist state of which Kosova was a part, died and his passing eventually gave leave to forces that were first nationalist, then irredentist. Yugoslavia ceased to be. Through the Twentieth Century it had functioned, more or less, as a Kingdom, as an area of Axis occupation, as a communist state, and finally as a federal republic. Now it had gone and this long experiment could be seen as a failure of integration. Wars broke out when Serbia attacked Slovenia, later Croatia and Bosnia. On the same momentum Serbia attacked the Albanian population of Kosova of which Remzije Sherifi’s family was a part.

The number of Albanians killed by Serb forces, soldiers and paramilitaries, is generally accepted to be about 10,000. In June 1999 the United nations High Commissioner for Refugees noted that about 860,000 had crossed the borders into Albania and Macedonia. From all across the region there came tales of horror and brutality, houses were destroyed and the economy ruined.

With her immediate family Remzije Sherifi escaped to Macedonia and from there was evacuated to Great Britain, specifically to Glasgow in Scotland. The Kosovar reception was the best organised and greatest-hearted in history. Dr Elinor Kelly, an academic specialist in race and ethnic issues, describes it as a ‘model of good practice’ in an appendix. Sadly this model was not extended but allowed to atrophy and has not been replaced.

Most of the Kosovars eventually returned home but, for health reasons, Remzije Sherifi made the painful decision to stay. Already multi-lingual, but determined on personal integration, she set about learning English. In addition she took a number of voluntary, later part-time, jobs. This process culminated with the full-time post of Development Officer with the Maryhill Integration Network where she continues. Here she works with asylum seekers and refugees, pioneering new methods at the interface with, what she terms, the host community, and in assisting the asylum seekers themselves with such things as housing, confidence building, integration; also through detention and deportation.

SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN integrates the two great themes of Remzije Sherifi’s life by uniting her family and people’s history with the story of her work in Glasgow. Her view of the Kosova atrocities will surprise many as she places it at the culmination of a long persecution, and the persecutions within a longer history still. The book’s title refers to the failures of integration behind any constitutional re-adjustment. In particular it refers to the Yugoslavian constitution of 1974 that was designed by Tito especially to contain the cycle of violence, clearance and revenge after his passing.

Integration and the failure of integration are motifs throughout this book, often appearing when they are least expected. There are shadows crossing the face of the earth as we read, and more individuals and families are displaced than ever before. In a radiant closure Remzije Sherifi warns of dangers to come and urges us towards awareness and generosity.

The body of the book contains direct interviews with asylum seekers describing the conditions in which they live, thus placing the individual human being and the family at the heart of the tragedy. In appendices it also contains interviews with Dr Elinor Kelly and Janet Andrews, Secretary of the Maryhill Integration Network, and with Nick Hopkins, its co-founder.

SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN will be a record for future historians, for students of the asylum issue and as foundational testimony in the history of a new country in an evolving Europe. It is also generous and beautiful, a gripping read, the most important book to come out of Scotland so far in the twenty-first century.