British pop star Dua Lipa - whose parents moved to Britain from Kosovo in 1992 - has triggered an avalanche of comments by posting a message on Twitter which many people have seen as endorsing a "Greater Albania".
On Sunday, 19 July, the 24-year-old singer posted a map showing Kosovo, Albania and what appeared to be Corfu and part of Greece, embossed with the Albanian flag.
— DUA LIPA (@DUALIPA) July 19, 2020
Above it she defined the adjective "autochthonous" as meaning someone who is “indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.”
The tweet was a red rag to a bull with hundreds of Serbian, Macedonian and Greek nationalists criticising her and accusing her of supporting “the worst kind of nationalism.”
— מוסד סרביה (@kriticka_misao) July 19, 2020
Greater Albania is the idea of uniting the states of Albania and neighbouring Kosovo into one ethnically Albanian state, which would possibly also include pockets of land in Macedonia and Greece.
Several Albanians and Kosovans came to her defence, with one claiming that she was not supporting the idea of a Greater Albania but merely trying to combat a “myth” pushed by Serbian nationalists that ethnic Albanians were not native to the Balkans and had moved into the area during the Ottoman Empire era.
— ᴋᴀʀʟᴏ (@mxdern_ecstasy) July 19, 2020
Dua Lipa’s father Dukagjin moved to London three years before she was born and her grandfather Seit Lipa was the head of the Kosovo Institute of History from 1990 until 1995.
She has not got involved in Balkan politics before and may think again after the response to her latest tweet.
Earlier this month the singer was one of 1,500 music acts who signed a letter to the British government asking them to take action to save the country's live music industry from collapsing because of the coronavirus crisis.
