Page 6 - AACL 25th anniversary

Anniversary Celebration of
Albanian American Civic League
HONOREE
SHIRLEY CLOYES DIOGUARDI has served since 1995 as Balkan Affairs Adviser to the Albanian American Civic League, the only registered volunteer lobby in Washington, DC,
representing the concerns and interests of the Albanian people.
Cloyes DioGuardi has lectured widely and written more than 75 articles about the Balkan conflict. She has made forty trips to Southeast Europe, including fifteen to Kosova since the end of the Kosova war in 1999. Together with her husband, former Congressman and Civic League President Joseph DioGuardi, Cloyes DioGuardi has worked with members of the U.S. Congress to bring lasting peace and stability to the Balkans. She has assisted House and Senate members responsible for U.S. foreign policy in preparing legislation on the Balkans, and she has testified before the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives on six occasions—in 1996, regarding contested elections in Albania, in 1998 in support of U.S. ground troop deployment to Kosova, in May 2003 on the future of Kosova, in October 2003 on the status of Albanians in Montenegro, in May 2005 on the current and future status of Kosova, in April 2013 on the EU-sponsored agreement between Serbia and Kosova, and in September 2014 on the emerging crisis in Macedonia.
In 1998, Cloyes DioGuardi developed the Civic League’s strategy to oppose the international attempt to unfairly criminalize the Kosova Liberation Army. During the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, she appeared, individually and with Joe DioGuardi, on more than fifty radio and television broadcasts. During this period, she also worked with the lawyers who prepared the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for genocide in Bosnia and Kosova that led to his extradition to the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In 2001, at the request of the ICTY, she wrote a paper in response to Milosevic’s three-day testimony at the opening of his trial.
Cloyes DioGuardi is also the creator of “Besa: An International Albanian Oral History project,” which began in 2004 with the production of a videotape on the role that Albanians played in rescuing every Jew who lived in Albania or who sought asylum there during the Nazi Holocaust. She first presented this at the annual meeting of the US Oral History Association, of which she is a member, in 2005. Her “Jewish Survival in Albania & the Ethics of ‘Besa’” was published in the January/February 2006 issue of Congress Monthly, the journal of the American Jewish Congress. In 2007, she and her husband participated in the recognition of the saving role of Albanians during the Holocaust at Yad Vashem in Israel, and in 2010, she was selected to present a paper to the International Oral History Association Conference, held that year in Prague, about the pivotal role that Kosovar Albanians played in getting Jews to safety in Albania. On January 27, 2014, Cloyes DioGuardi addressed the United Nations about the Albanian rescue as part of the first program on this subject at the UN’s annual observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Cloyes DioGuardi is the former publisher of Lawrence Hill Books, specializing in domestic and international politics. In 1995, she published Yugoslavia’s Ethnic Nightmare, the first book on the causes and consequences of the Balkan conflict written from the perspective of opponents to Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal warfare in the former Yugoslavia. She was raised in Westfield, New Jersey, and graduated from Westfield High School as a member of the National Honor Society. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Oberlin College and a Master of Divinity, specializing in systematic theology and culture, from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
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Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance