Literally, the word homeland means the relationship or connection between people and space. If the circumstances change, the historical-geographical parameters can also change. Because of this, the term homeland can often intimately refer to a specific area, landscape, village, city, people, language and even religion. Basically, homeland does not even have to be considered a certain place, but that concept can contain the whole of the circumstances in which a certain person grows up, while creating an inexplicable symbiosis between man and the space that made him what he is.
Although this approach should indicate constants about the concept of homeland, today's time, and especially the real life we live, seriously puts us in front of a dilemma, whether due to a kind of socio-handicap, a person can really live without a homeland. I know apartrid is a stateless person, but even he must have a homeland in some sense. Sometimes it is just information from the personal document about where he was born, the language he speaks, and even the race he belongs to or the color of the skin he was born with. If all that doesn't meet the criteria from the beginning of this story, we wonder what, in fact, was his homeland? First of all, it is the country, city, place, and even the manager or neighbor that mean his life. Perhaps his imagined relationship to what ties him vitally or predominantly to a certain space, and if he does not call it that, is in fact what he can without hesitation consider his homeland.
Without pretensions to deal with sociological-legal theories, but with the intention of somehow reaching a clearer or more life-like answer to the question - what is the homeland in fact, and all with the intention of bringing the topic down to real ground, we will use an imaginary conversation with three similarly thoughtful men.
If by any chance, but depending on where, we met Bihorac, Gusinje or Rožajec and asked each of them what they consider their homeland, we would get very confusing answers: from the fact that his father was born in Gusinj and he in Brooklyn, we would get in Gusinj answer that America is his homeland, but if we asked him the same in Brooklyn, his homeland would be Gusinje. A man from Petnjica born in Luxembourg would reasonably assure us in Petnjica that Luxembourg is his home, and in Luxembourg that Petnjica is his homeland. When it comes to Rožajac, the matter is somewhat more complex and significantly more realistic.
Due to injustice, but also, I guess, historical anathema, for many from the homeland of Montenegro, even though he is not, Rožajac is a "Turk". If you go to Istanbul and look for a former resident of Rožaj, who was administratively stripped of his surname and given a different surname, probably because of assimilation as quickly as possible, who ended up living and dying there due to expulsion or "of his own free will", you will get the answer that he is a muhajer (foreigner). and there and here. But even if he has been there for a long time, where he even got great-grandchildren over time, at his great-grandson's wedding, according to everything that happens there and how, you will feel as if you are in Rožaje. What is his homeland now? It's almost impossible to get a reasonable answer. By all accounts, for the older ones, the homeland is what they left behind, for the younger ones, it is what they have not grown up with, or in fact, for all of them, neither.
Somewhere from the beginning of the seventies of the last century, or from the time when life in Rožaje became noticeably harder and harder, through the state and factory services, and later getting by as they knew how and even through marriages that really weren't, for young people from Rožaje, Germany became and remained the promised land all these years. Interesting, but true, is the data of the local Western-Union agency (it is the most expensive way of transferring money), which, as it says, has not yet recorded almost any money shipment from Turkey, but when it comes to Germany, the data says that every year it arrives in Rožaje via two million euros. Practically, it turns out that Rožajac, either the one who was forced to leave or the one who stayed, pays an old and heavy Turkish bill without cover. Equipped with textbook knowledge about the "satanic" wartime Germany, going there because of the need for work, they came across that other Willibrantian Germany that turned into the motherland and the source of life, but not only for the people of Rožaj, but also for all those who set out on an uncertain journey for the sake of bread . As a sign of gratitude or in return, all of them painstakingly built their trust, and over the years, by acquiring families and accepting the way of life, they became part of the society of the country that gave them a chance at life. Undoubtedly, each of them has their own life story, and all of them contain a unique answer - Germany helped the people of this area selflessly and in the best way, giving them the opportunity to work and earn. Thus becoming the true homeland of countless people, although they split their homeland emotions into two halves - the one that gave birth but also "betrayed" them, and the acquired one, which provided them with everything that they could not have in their country of origin, even if they had lived for three of life.
Homeland should be that place or country that selflessly provides every protection to a person as an individual, gives him a chance, trusts him, and he is always ready to lay down his life for it. In the hope that I have at least somewhat approached the essence of a realistic understanding of the concept of homeland, it remains for each individual, following his own feelings towards the country that gave birth to him, to find the right answer. But one thing is absolutely true, ie. that every reborn government during its long duration, especially the one that has forgotten man, gives the best "contribution" that each of us looking for our homeland, while remaining without our soil and hope, looks - somewhere far away, far away where someone else's sun shines.
It is not recorded that anywhere in the world anyone erected a monument to the state, but if it were possible, and in this case it should be possible, a monument to the state of Germany should be erected in the center of Rožaj - it would be a kind of gesture of gratitude that would have to be respected.
The author is a lawyer and executive director of the Montenegrin Committee of Lawyers for the Protection of Human Rights
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