Dr Aidan Hehir, Reader in International Relations at the University of Westminster, has spoken to Metro about the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Kosovo and how former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair inspired names across the country.
The article explains how Tony Blair’s intervention in 1999 to support a NATO bombing campaign to halt Serbian soldier’s advances helped liberate the country. His influence made him a hero amongst the Kosovars and caused a flurry of children being named Tonibler.
On the name he said that Western countries’ focus on it can be “quite patronising”.
He explained: “Sometimes UK journalists portray this as though the people in Kosovo are simple, you know, ‘isn’t this embarrassing that they have named their children after Tony Blair’.
“The vast majority of Kosovars did not do that, but you can also understand why it was done. It was not that they just really liked a foreign politician. He was a man who was instrumental in saving their lives, so I think we should be respectful.
“It’s unfair and it doesn’t tell the whole story. To understand why parents named their children ‘Toniblair’, you have to understand how awful it was during the war.
“Not just in the summer of 1999, but the decades preceding it. Kosovars had been oppressed by the Serbs and violently put down by Slobodan Milošević. And then in 1999, Nato came to free them.
“So the fact that people have chosen to respond to this by naming a small number of children ‘Toniblair’ is acceptable really.”
Read the full article on the Metro website.
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