Page 16 - AACL 25th anniversary

Anniversary Celebration of
Albanian American Civic League
RIFAT MEMETI was born and raised in the Albanian ancestral town of Gostivar, Macedonia. His father died when he was only three, and throughout his youth he worked in Croatia and Bosnia to support his mother, who passed away when he was eighteen
years old. Rifat then completed his mandatory military training in Yugoslavia. In 1983, a year after his marriage, he decided to move to the United States to create a better life for himself and his family. Rifat opened a restaurant in Brooklyn called “Not Ray’s Pizzeria,” and through dedication and hard work his business has been thriving for twenty-six years. He brought the same dedication to the Albanian American Civic League, where he has been a Board member for more than twenty years, working with the Civic League to protect the rights of Albanians in the Balkans and frequently joining Joe and Shirley DioGuardi and other Board members on fact-finding missions in Southeast Europe. Rifat lives in Staten Island, New York, with his wife, Lirije. They have two children, Vlora, who is completing a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and Flamur, who is completing a master’s degree in finance and accounting.
NICK MIRAKAYwas born in Puka, Albania. His mother died in 1955. A year later, when he was three years old, his father, brothers and sister escaped into Kosova, because the family was known as opponents of communism and were also in danger as Roman
Catholics in a now atheistic country. Once in Kosova, the secret police interrogated their father, Zef Nikoll Mirakaj, and tried to recruit him to return to Albania as a spy. He refused, and subsequently was arrested and brought to a secret prison camp in Brus in 1957. Still with no information about their father’s whereabouts, two years later Nick’s older brother, Tonin, then 23 years of age, arranged for the family to escape to Croatia (there would learn that their father had been murdered), from which they walked for four days until then crossed into Trieste, Italy. In Italy they were aided by the International Rescue Committee, which helped them gain political asylum in New York. The youngest, five years old, and the oldest, twenty-five, arrived in February 1961. Tonin began working in the maintenance business to support the entire family. Nick would go on to graduate from the City College of New York and develop the successful Anchor Building Management Company, which he owns and operates to this day. An active member of the Albanian American Civic League Board for two decades, Nick and his wife, Deborah, joined the historic delegation of the Civic League to the beatification of Mother Teresa at the Vatican in 2003. Nick and Deborah live in Middletown, New Jersey, and they have two successful adult children, Joe and Jennifer.
MARASH NUCULAJ was born in Koja, Montenegro. His parents raised him and his two brothers as Roman Catholics. Marash grew up in a poor family, but one that was very rich spiritually. The problems of poverty were compounded by being discriminated
against as minority Albanians in Montenegro. Until Marash left Montenegro, he experienced daily physical and mental abuse. Accepted to high school in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, as the only Albanian in his class, he was frequently taunted by the teaching staff because of his ethnicity. In 1985, at the age of 22, he decided to flee Montenegro to Michigan, where he became the owner of a successful chain of restaurants. A devout Roman Catholic, Marash attended the funeral of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India, in 1997. As an active member of the Albanian Civic League Board of Directors for the past sixteen years, he has traveled extensively with the Civic League on fact-finding missions in the Balkans, and was one of the organizers of the historic AACL August 2003 trip with the late Congressman Tom Lantos to ancestral Albanian lands in Montenegro. In October 2003, Marash joined the AACL delegation to Rome for the beatification of Mother Teresa at the Vatican, and then to the Arberesh town of Greci, the birthplace of Joe DioGuardi’s father, a descendant of Skanderbeg’s soldiers. He and his wife, Lula, are the parents of three children, Angelina, Gjon, and Nora.
HAFIZ SHALA was born in Kosova in 1943 in the village of Ujmir. He completed elementary school in Ujmir, high school in Peja, and completed a bachelor’s degree in the fields of transportation management and communications in Serbia at the University of
Belgrade. Hafiz worked for fifteen years at Kosovo Railways in various professional positions, including as an instructor for human resource training and development and as President of the Railways Unions for Kosova, Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Serbia. He served for four years as the Director of the National Bus Transportation Company “Kosovatrans” in Prishtina. He also served as the director of “Ramiz Sadiku” and as a founder of “Kosova Graniti”—two of the largest construction companies in Prishtina that employed Albanians who were later terminated by the Serbian regime after Kosova was occupied in 1989. Hafiz was a founder of Kosova’s first Independent Workers Union and also served two terms as an Assemblyman representing the municipality of Prishtina. In June 1990 during the convention of the Independent Workers Union in Gjakova—attended by thousands of delegates and organized by Hafiz—Serbian police surrounded the auditorium and shut down the gathering. In response, three months later, they organized a 24-hour general strike throughout Kosova. Because of his role, Shala was sought by the Serbian regime and fled Kosova to avoid imprisonment. In 1991, he moved to New York and joined the Board of the Albanian American Civic League and the staff of Skyview Owners Corporation in Riverdale, New York. He and his late wife, Mehrije, had three children—Lindita, who today is the Director of Consulting Services at Steel Bridge Ventures Consulting; Luan, who is the Director of Risk Management at Barclays Capital (and with his wife, Arianita, a dentist, has a daughter, Fiona); and Milot, who is the founder of Atelier Milot Shala Architectural Design Practice in New York City.
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Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance