Page 12 - AACL 25th anniversary

Anniversary Celebration of
Albanian American Civic League
ZEF BALAJ was born in 1942 in the village of Mezi, in Puke, Albania. At nine years old, in the middle of the
night on in July 1951, he fled Albania with his family. Accidentally separated from his family and under the fire of bullets and hand grenades, Zef made it across the border into Kosova, then a part of Yugoslavia. Later, reunited with his family, Zef would learn that his brothers, Gjelosh and Pjeter, had been helping the guerilla fighters who were opposing the Communists and that the family had to flee Albania to save their lives. The Balaj family had to wait for ten years before they could escape from Yugoslavia into Italy. After spending more than two years in an Italian refugee camp, they immigrated to the United States on March 2, 1962. At the age of 20, Zef became very active in the new Albanian American community in New York as an organizer of anti-Communist activities. In 1965, Zef became a member of Vatra, the Pan-Albanian Federation of America, founded in 1912 to protect the rights of Albanians, out of his belief that without the work of Vatra founders Fan Stilian Fanoli and Faik Konica and former US President Woodrow Wilson, Albania would not be where it is today as an independent nation. Years later, in the early 1990s, he joined the Albanian American Civic League, founded by former Congressman Joe DioGuardi, because of its strong lobbying effort, which brought Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and achieved the independence of Kosova. He and his wife, Lina (whose family also escaped Albania in 1951 and eventually settled in Belgium with the exception of one son who would spend 15 years in Enver Hoxha’s prisons), live in Westchester County. Together, they built Balaj Realty, a successful real estate and property management company in New York. They have four adult children: David, a graduate of Fordham University with a Ph.D. from NYU, Geraldine, a graduate of Pace University, Daniel, with an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in education from Manhattan College, and Joseph, a graduate of Pace University.
FATON BISLIMI was born and raised in Gjilan, Kosova. In 2005, he graduated, summa cum laude, from Texas Lutheran University with a bachelor’s of science degree in computer science and a bachelor’s of arts degree in
mathematics. In 2007, he received a master’s degree in public administration and international development from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Kennedy Fellow. In 2010, he graduated from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, with a master’s degree in international relations, where he also served as a research fellow at the university’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies. Faton has lectured at several international conferences on issues related to education, economic and social development, conflict resolution, and interethnic relations. He has worked in Kosova for UNDP and RTI International, and he has also served as a lecturer at the Victory University College in Prishtina and the American University in Kosovo. Between 2009 and 2012, Faton was a Research Fellow and a lecturer at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at the EU Centre of Excellence at Dalhousie University. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Kosovo Public Policy Center, and is completing his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Alberta, in Canada, where he is a recipient of a SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship and is an EU Centre of Excellence Doctoral Fellow. In 2015, he won the Marshall Memorial Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He lives with his wife, Nora, and daughters, Fiona and Olsa, in Edmonton, Alberta.
LUAN BUKOLLA was born and raised in New York City. He is the son of Sali Sejd Bukolla from the hamlet
of Babaj i Bokës, Gjakova, Kosova, and Cymë Ismail Nezaj from the hamlet of Shipshan, Tropoja, Albania. A member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Albanian American Civic League since 1996, Luan has made several fact- finding missions with the Civic League to to Kosova, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Presheva Valley. Luan has been employed by the State of New York since 2001. He began his career in the Executive Chamber of then Governor George E. Pataki, as Representative of the Albanian community for the State of New York, and is now a Program Analyst of the Division of Community Services of the State of New York’s Department of State. Luan studied political science and public administration at Pace University in New York City and Westchester County, New York. He is married to Mejreme Kuqi-Bukolla, and they are the parents of Flamur, Liridona, Valon, and Adriana, as well as the grandparents of Janina Bajraktari, daughter of son-in-law Labinot Xhafer Bajraktari and daughter Liridona Bukolla-Bajraktari.
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Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance