Letter from Rome:Last Wednesday, I thought a lot about "Mary". There was a major news item from Reggio Emilia, up near Bologna, that troubled me. It concerned a 40-year-old Albanian, Klirim Fejzo, who had shot and killed his wife, Vyosa, in court that day.
Klirim and Vyosa were just one of many couples who went to the Reggio Emilia courthouse last Wednesday to attend separation proceedings. In the hustle and bustle of Aula 6, no one paid them and their little groups of relatives much attention. Klirim had met up with his lawyer, Galileo Conti, at the courthouse bar, as agreed. "He seemed calm, very calm to me. He had even dressed up well to create a good impression with the judge. My client had already had two hearings in court, attended by his wife. No one could have imagined that he wanted to kill her," a shocked Conti said afterwards.
Klirim, however, was perhaps not quite as calm as he seemed. As soon as his wife entered the courtroom, he opened fire with a Beretta 7.65 revolver, first hitting her lawyer, Giovanna Fava, (fortunately not seriously injured) and then turning the gun on his wife, Vyosa, inflicting wounds from which she later died.
At this point, Vyosa's brother, Arjan, entered the fray. He had been waiting in the corridor outside the courtroom with the couple's two daughters, aged 16 and 12. Hearing shots, Arjan burst into Aula 6 and made straight for Klirim, pulling him to the floor in a desperate attempt to disarm him. As the two men struggled, the gun went off again, this time killing Arjan.
At that point, two policemen who had been attending a case in a nearby courtroom arrived on the scene. They told Klirim to lay down his gun. He opened fire on them, injuring one of them in the knee. As he continued shooting, the other policeman, Stefano Marcaccioli, fired back, killing Klirim.
Three dead and two injured at the end of a day of ordinary folly. Down at the Casa Delle Donne, a sort of battered wives' home run by the Not Alone association in Reggio Emilia, people expressed outrage but only limited surprise. They are used to violent husbands, many of them of the homebred variety, many from Reggio Emilia itself.
Vyosa had been threatened many times by her husband, according to fellow inmates of Casa Delle Donne. The point about Vyosa is that she turned up at the home 10 months ago, dressed in a summer jacket and sandals even though it was a cold November night and with her face badly swollen and bruised. She had come from a hospital casualty ward, accompanied by a policeman who explained that she could not be allowed go home to her violent husband.
Vyosa was well known to the Reggio police. She had filed at least three formal complaints about her violent husband. He, by way of response, had merely threatened her, telling her that he would kill her. Klirim absolutely could not accept his wife might decide to leave him, leave home and escape from the nightmare of daily violence.
Significantly, in a series of interviews, Klirim's friends and relatives refused to condemn his actions, pointing out that he was "distraught", adding that "we were all on his side, even his dead brother-in-law". For some macho eastern European men, a wife who leaves home evidently remains a source of profound shame, a shame that according to some sort of perverted code of honour can only be exorcised with violence.
Klirim had directed his anger not just at his estranged wife, but also at the women who had taken her in. "He had threatened us with death, too. We reported him last January 30th. The police had to come down here, in front of the home and deal with him on a number of occasions. This was just the story of an all too predictable death," said Not Alone president Lucia Gardinazzi.
For me, the sorry life and death of Vyosa Demcolli, her brother and her husband touches close to home. We have known "Mary", a Romanian cleaner in our village, for years. She has long had to put up with a drunken, violent husband who, when the mood takes him, threatens to kill her.
"Mary", encouraged by us and by others, has (for the second time) moved out on her husband. Living in an apartment on her own with her seven-year-old daughter, she is these days much happier. But will she survive, will she resist the pressure and the fear that might induce her to return to her husband? Or worse, would her husband ever enact his worst threats? Domestic violence is everywhere and we do not need to look to eastern Europe to find it. What is sure, however, is that many eastern European men have missed out entirely on concepts such as women's liberation or women's rights. Should there be a place for their type of primitive and violent hatred of women in the modern enlarged European Union?