Dua Lipa, a British pop star born to immigrants from Kosovo, has been accused of fueling nationalism after posting a map of Greater Albania that shows the country annexing large chunks of its neighbors, such as Serbia and Greece.
The singer, who usually makes headlines for her pop hits breaking streaming records, has now found herself at the center of attention for different reasons entirely – her apparently nationalist views.
In a tweet on Sunday, Lipa defended the “indigenous rather than migrant” origin of Albanians. Attached to her tweet was a map of Albania that shows it owning parts of Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, as well as that of Serbia and its breakaway province of Kosovo, with the word “autochthonous” written below.
au•toch•tho•nous adjective(of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists pic.twitter.com/OD9bNmLcZ4
It was the same banner that caused an international incident in 2014, when a drone flew it into a football game between Serbia and Albania in Belgrade.
It wasn’t lost on many viewers that the map illustrates a nationalist idea of ‘Greater Albania,’ a historical concept that promotes the unification of all Balkan lands having a significant ethnically Albanian population. Soon, the image drew thousands of users invested in controversial Balkan politics, along with many pop fans unaccustomed to this kind of discourse.
Many users took Lipa’s tweet as supporting an Albanian take-over of the Balkans. Serbian-Canadian filmmaker Boris Malagurski called her out for supporting the “extreme nationalist [and] expansionist project of Greater Albania.” Others even accused Lipa of “showing sympathy towards fascism,” since the only time an enlarged Albania existed was as an Axis vassal state during World War II.
Your advocacy for the extreme nationalist & expansionist project of Greater Albania shows that your mind is poisoned. Those who fought for your sick dream were designated terrorists by the State Department, their leader recently charged with war crimes. #NoToTerrorism
It’s a map of fascist Mussolini’s Albania. Kindly inform your expat celebrity that there is research on DNA haplogroups that shows who was indigenous to the Balkans & it wasn’t the Albanians. Serbs and other Slav ethnicities. It can’t be contested, nor a national history invented
Pop music fans on Twitter gave in to the moral panic and were surprised by what they saw as a pop-idol “coming out as a fascist.” Some users began pushing the #cancelDuaLipa hashtag.
OK but Dua Lipa coming out as a fascist isn’t the twist I was expecting today ??♂️ what is going on? pic.twitter.com/PUse7iksbU
Dua Lipa becomes the first and only female artist advocating fascist ideas in 2020 https://t.co/9gZqTws8OT
Others defended the singer, saying that her message was being misinterpreted. Team Albanians, a pro-Albanian US nonprofit, said that Lipa was debunking the “dangerous far-right claims that Albanians are not indigenous people in the Balkans.”
This tweet is not hate speech! Dua is debunking the dangerous far-right claims that Albanians are not indigenous people in the Balkans. This same ideology has even been used by Serbia to justify genocide. Kosovo War: 1M refugees, 11K killed and over 20K raped. #NeverForgetpic.twitter.com/jAGAp6CGiY
Lipa is no stranger to criticism. In January, she invoked the anger of online feminists, who at that time wanted to cancel her for throwing dollar bills at female strippers.
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