January 11th, 1991 – Formation of Omonoia
Omonoia is a Greek social, political and cultural organisation based in Northern Epirus, the Greek region currently occupied by Albania. It was founded in the village of Dervitsani.
After contesting elections in Albania in that same year of 1991, it was subsequently banned by the Tirana regime from participating ever again.
Several of its members and leaders have been arrested, tortured and imprisoned on bogus charges and had family members killed and kidnapped.
Albania has not conducted a proper census in decades. The last one in 2011, which Omonoia protested, contained numerous irregularities.
Some of those irregularities included fining people the equivalent of $1000, if they declared something different to what was written on their birth certificates. The Albanian regime obviously knew that under communist rule, Greeks were forced to put down anything other than Greek to avoid punishment. Making it virtually impossible for Greeks to identify as such today, for fear of a crippling fine.
