Modern Albania

From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe

Fred Abrahams, Fred C. Abrahams

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781479838097
• eBook ISBN: 9781479896684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe’s most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read “decadent” Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets.

Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime’s fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania’s relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country’s politics since 1990—including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army—and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.

Part I

Out of the Dark

The Leader’s Demise, 1985–1990

1

Hoxha’s Heart

Enver Hoxha’s doctors enjoyed their work. The dictator treated them well, and they had access to modern medical gear. They felt honored to care for the country’s elite.

The most coveted task was night duty in Hoxha’s large but unglamorous villa in Tirana’s forbidden “Block,” just west of Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard. After checking on Hoxha, the doctors slipped into the large library, full of banned books, mostly in French, which Hoxha spoke well. Translations of Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky lined the shelves, as did writings by Lenin, Machiavelli, and Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police, and novels by Agatha Christie and John le Carré.

One night towards the end of Hoxha’s life, the cardiologist Ylli Popa checked on his patient and retired to the library for a late-night read. He chose a book about Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police. To Popa’s surprise, Hoxha had underlined a passage with a red pen. It told of the infamous “Doctors’ plot” and the arrest of prominent physicians for allegedly conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. Trembling, the diminutive and soft-spoken cardiologist quickly returned the book to its place on the shelf.

The story, which Popa lived to tell, hints at Hoxha’s complex life. On the one hand, the leader was a cultured man who studied in France, wore dapper suits, knew history, and enjoyed literature. On the other hand, he was a paranoid and brutal dictator with a ravenous appetite for power who eliminated opponents real and perceived. He created enemies, distrusted friends, and ruled Albania with a mix of cruelty and charm.

* * *

Born in 1908 into a middle-class family in the southern town of Gjirokaster, Hoxha studied at the prestigious French lycée in another southern town, Korça, and won a government scholarship to attend the University of Montpellier. He returned to Albania in 1936 without a degree and taught French in his former Korça school—a cheerful and mild-mannered man, one of his pupils recalled. He became active in a local communist group, although Albania had no communist party at the time and, as an agricultural society, not much of a working class.

Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938. The next year, Mussolini invaded Albania and easily deposed its ruler, Ahmed Zog, a former prime minister and president who had declared himself king. Zog fled with his wife and two-day-old son, Leka, whom I watched try to retake the throne fifty-eight years later.

Under Italian rule, Hoxha lost his teaching job. He moved to Tirana—at the time with less than twenty thousand people—and opened a tobacco shop, which became the secret meeting place of the budding communist movement. The Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito offered help, and under his tutelage the Albanian Communist Party was founded in November 1941. Enver Hoxha, then thirty-three years old, became secretary general. He held the position for the next forty-four years.

During World War Two, Hoxha played a major role in the communist resistance with his close friend Mehmet Shehu, the Partisan military commander. The Partisans fought the Italians alongside other groups, notably the followers of King Zog, known as Legaliteti (Legality), and an anti-royalist nationalist movement called Balli Kombëtar (National Front). As in other Balkan countries, the resistance fractured along political and regional lines.

Italy capitulated in 1943 and Germany occupied Albania, installing a puppet regime with help from the nationalist Balli Kombëtar. In return, Hitler expanded Albania’s borders around Kosovo, the predominantly ethnic Albanian–inhabited region in Yugoslavia, and North Epirus, the area of northern Greece where many ethnic Albanians live. But by 1944 the Partisans were pushing north towards Tirana with help from the British. In October they formed a provisional government with Hoxha as prime minister. One month later, the Germans withdrew from Albania, and the Partisans marched triumphantly into Tirana under cover of Allied planes. Communist propaganda boasted that Partisan bravery had liberated Albania after a heroic fight. The history books conveniently ignored support from the Yugoslavs and hardware from the British and Americans, let alone Hitler’s decision to leave Albania. Instead, Hoxha crafted the image of a hardened guerilla fighter from the hills. The resistance and liberation myth, with stoic poems, movies, and songs, became the unifying theme that permeated post-war life.

Albania in 1945 was rural, poor, and devastated by war. The provisional government, with Hoxha at its head, began to nationalize industry, transportation, and land. Elections for a legislature in December 1945 had candidates only from the communist Democratic Front. The new assembly declared Albania a “People’s Republic” and appointed Hoxha prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and the army’s commander in chief.

From the start, Hoxha showed political skill and ruthless determination. The influential Central Committee member Sofokli Lazri, in the upper echelons of power throughout Hoxha’s rule, explained it to me matter-of-factly: “Hoxha had an incredible sense of smell for protecting his position.” Special tribunals tried “war criminals”—mostly supporters of King Zog and Balli Kombëtar—and sentenced hundreds of people to death. A targeted campaign hit the Catholic clergy in the north, whom Hoxha labeled Vatican spies.

Relations with the West soured. Britain and the United States disliked the lack of free elections and, more importantly, the country’s pro-Russian drift. In 1945, diplomats from both countries left. In spring 1946, Albania fired on two British ships in the Corfu channel. Five months later, two British destroyers struck mines while sailing near Corfu, killing forty-three men. Albania refused to pay compensation, and the U.K. withheld more than 2.5 tons of Albania’s gold, which it had confiscated from Germany. The gold remained a point of contention between Albania and the U.K. until 1992.

For support Hoxha relied on Tito. Yugoslav experts advised the government and brought food to ward off starvation. Yugoslav investments rebuilt the agricultural sector and some light industry. In return, Albania did not contest Yugoslav claims on Kosovo. Yugoslavia became the first state to recognize the Albanian government. In 1948, the Albanian parliament, under pressure from Tito, voted to merge Albania and Yugoslavia’s economies and militaries.

At the same time, divisions emerged in Albania over the extent of Yugoslav control. Some argued for even closer ties, but others feared that Tito would annex the small and vulnerable state. Hoxha remained neutral in the debate, but then made a decisive move. When Tito severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1948, Hoxha labeled the Yugoslav leader a corrupt, revisionist communist who had betrayed Marxist ideals. He gave Yugoslav advisors forty-eight hours to leave.

Hoxha seized the chance to eliminate his rivals, purging Albanian officials with real or suspected ties to Yugoslavia. He had fourteen of thirty-one members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee executed, as well as thirty-two of 109 deputies in parliament. The reign of terror had begun.

In need of a new benefactor, Hoxha turned to Stalin. Soviet advisors replaced the Yugoslavs, and the USSR offered a steady flow of aid. The Soviets built a submarine base on the island of Sazan off Albania’s southern coast, giving them a strategic post on the Adriatic Sea. At the first Albanian Communist Party congress in November 1948, on Stalin’s advice, delegates changed the party’s name to the Albanian Party of Labor. Soviet aid helped Hoxha improve the electrical grid, education, and health care. Illiteracy and infant mortality declined. Still, the country remained an agricultural backwater, neglected and remote.

Stalin died in 1953 and Soviet leaders tried to disperse the power that he had amassed. Hoxha mirrored the move towards “collective leadership” by handing the foreign affairs and defense ministries to loyal aides. In 1954 he passed the prime minister’s post to Mehmet Shehu, his loyal comrade who had led the Partisans’ military campaign during the war. Hoxha remained the all-powerful head of the Party of Labor, the undisputed head of state.

Two years later, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, the Albanian Party of Labor held a conference in Tirana, and delegates asked sensitive questions about developments to the east: Do Albanian party leaders enjoy special privileges? Are people punished illegally here? Is there a cult of personality in Albania? Hoxha rushed to Tirana and burst into the hall on the second day. The 580 delegates took to their feet and rhythmically clapped.

“I hear the meeting has become electrified,” one of the party delegates remembered Hoxha said.

At first Hoxha allowed the critics to speak. Then he struck. He insisted that the party was democratic, that no cult of personality existed, and that outside powers were trying to destabilize Albania. He defended Stalin and attacked the dissenters, some of whom stood to renounce their words. He expelled the critics from the party, forcing the most vocal out of Tirana or into prison.

Dissent in the party had been crushed, and along with it any hope of challenging Hoxha from within. Until that point, the party had tolerated some idealistic members. After 1956, the party drew opportunists and pragmatists who were looking to advance.

To the public, Hoxha was a caring and gentle man, always dignified and well dressed. His shoes and hats came from abroad. An Albanian tailor made his double-breasted suits with imported cloth. At home he ate with his wife, Nexhmije, a devout communist and the only person he fully trusted, and their three children—two sons and a daughter. They rarely had guests. One of his cooks told me that his biggest challenge was preparing three healthy meals a day because Hoxha suffered from diabetes. No taster checked his food. Hoxha smoked Chinese cigarettes but rarely drank, and his only sport was billiards in the Politburo Club.

Unlike Albanian politicians today, Hoxha studied and prepared. In remote districts he cited production figures and the region’s fables and epic songs. Building on a clan-based and patriarchal society in a poor country, he played the loving but strict father of a people in need. He was called the “Leader” and, by many Albanians, “Uncle Enver.”

Five bodyguards protected Hoxha around the clock, but the absolute control kept him safe. “He walked in the Block and we had no guards on the roofs because the people loved him,” his chief bodyguard for many years, Sulo Gradeci, told me. Gradeci said there was never an attempt on Hoxha’s life.

The secret police, or Sigurimi (Security), enforced control. An estimated one in four Albanians worked for the ever-listening agency, usually as informants. Neighbors spied on neighbors, husbands on wives, and pupils on teachers. Friends testified in court against their oldest mates. Unlike Eastern European countries that allowed a degree of dissent, Hoxha tolerated virtually none. The slightest word against the party could bring prison or worse. Whole families were banished to internal exile, where they worked remote fields, checking in twice a day with police. Children born into such conditions were marked for life.

The people nearest to Hoxha felt most at risk, former Politburo and Central Committee members said, because he repeatedly purged and executed long-time comrades and friends. Over time, the Politburo became a gaggle of obedient sycophants—villagers from the provinces who were indebted to Hoxha for their rise.

To his staff, Hoxha was polite. He did not interrupt people when they spoke, and he entertained dissenting views on technical matters from those bold enough to speak. But he ran meetings with authority. He came to the podium first, followed by members of the Politburo. Central Committee members tried to sit in the back, like schoolchildren who had not done their homework. When angry with a person, Hoxha pretended to mispronounce his or her name.

“You, Hamdi, why aren’t you taking notes?” he asked a Central Committee director in the 1980s, Hamit Beqja.

“Comrade Enver, I am Hamit,” Beqja replied.

“No!” Hoxha boomed. “You are Hamdi!”

Hoxha read the international press and closely followed international affairs. He knew world leaders by name and cited their speeches. He used advisors but conducted analysis himself, and he crafted much of Albania’s foreign policy. Among his special talents was utilizing shifts in global politics to his advantage at home, as he did after the Stalin-Tito rift. During his rule, Albania severed ties with all of its patrons—Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China in succession. He used each break to justify a domestic purge, eliminating those with doubtful devotion to his despotic rule.

When relations between the Soviet Union and China soured in 1960, Hoxha sided with the Chinese. Moscow responded by cutting aid and supporting pro-Soviet elements within the Party of Labor. Hoxha ordered a group of Moscow sympathizers, labeled “pro-Soviet revisionists,” arrested and shot.

China came to the rescue with large-scale aid, which helped build a hydroelectric plant in the north and the Enver Hoxha Metallurgical Plant, known as the “Steel of the Party,” in the central town of Elbasan. Hoxha introduced reform based on Mao’s Cultural Revolution, sending bureaucrats and government officials to work the rural fields. He revised the education system to filter outside ideas. Independent-minded writers and artists lost their jobs or went to jail.

In 1967 Hoxha banned religion, as if he were jealous that someone had faith in a force higher than him. He ordered the destruction of mosques, churches, and cloisters and their conversion into sports halls or warehouses. The Catholic cathedral in Shkoder became a basketball arena with “Glory Marxism-Leninism” inscribed on the court in large red letters. Albania was never a religious country, but Hoxha officially declared it the world’s first atheist state. Albanians buried sacred relics or hid them in their homes, where they stayed until freedom of religion returned in 1990.

After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hoxha withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, although Albania had not attended a meeting for years. The Ministry of Defense began a colossal project to build an estimated seven hundred thousand concrete, steel-reinforced bunkers. The military put the concrete mushrooms along the coast and borders, on mountain tops, farms, and even city streets. Arrow tips were mounted atop fence posts to thwart parachutists. Too expensive to remove, the bunkers dotted the country years after communism’s fall. Lovers visited them for trysts and poor families used them as homes. Farmers who got back nationalized property spoke of how many bunkers they had received.

Engineers who worked on the bunker project told me they developed different designs, with protection from Russian tank shells most in mind. An engineer, topographer, and infantry specialist planned the bunkers’ strategic placement, putting goats and dogs inside for weapon tests. At the time, the government boasted the bunkers could withstand four nuclear blasts. That claim was shattered in 1999, during the Kosovo war, when NATO jets attacking Yugoslav forces mistakenly bombed and destroyed bunkers on the Albanian side. Albanian soldiers positioned nearby ran from their posts. “Damn Enver,” a person who saw the bombing told me they yelled. “He said these things were safe!”

The beginning of the 1970s saw a degree of cultural liberalization, inspired by Italian television, as young people tried to dress and dance like their contemporaries across the Adriatic Sea. Tirana women wore makeup and men grew sideb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue: On the Boulevard
• Part I. Out of the Dark: The Leader’s Demise, 1985–1990
• Part II. Blinded by Light: The Democratic Movement, 1990–1992
• Part III. Red to Blue: Democratic Party Rules, 1992–1996
• Part IV. Blinded by Gold: Crash of the Pyramids, 1997
• Part V. Return to Red: Ex-Communists Rule, 1998
• Part VI. Red and Black: The Kosovo War, 1998–1999
• Part VII. Black and Blue: Battered Politics of Transition, 2000–2014
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• About the Author