WHERE THE CURTAIN IS YET TO FALL
Communist Albania After the Death of Enver Hoxha 1985-2012
© Oxford University Press, 2012
Communist Albania After the Death of Enver Hoxha 1985-2012
© Oxford University Press, 2012
Communism, in the 21st century, is all but dead. The plethora of states that once declared it their aspirant state of being have on the whole either faded into the pages of history or renounced it altogether. The handful that still cling to it largely do so in pretence—China has embraced capitalism to a level where many Americans find it to be somewhat repulsive, and most of the others are in their own way on the road to the blisteringly oxymoronic “socialist market economy”.
Albania, on the other hand, did something remarkable. Rather than turn away from its own idiosyncratic brand of Hoxhaism, it entrenched itself, doubled down. With Hoxha’s death in 1985, it seemed it was the beginning of the end for that way of life. Instead, it was a new beginning, a new dawn for communism in that country—and the death for so much else.
The survival of Communism is Albania is remarkable for the fact that it lacked both a benefactor and protector. North Korea can rely on China for protection in the north and the world’s most militarized border in the south, while Cuba enjoys the distinct benefit of being an island. China, to a degree, props up both regimes with aid, while Cuba in recent years has benefited from trade with friendly nations in Latin America. Vietnam, in a great twist of irony, finds itself increasingly in the sphere of the United States, while Laos in all honesty is too minor, too small, and too isolated for the powers that be to consider it much of a threat worth addressing. Albania, on the other hand, finds itself bordering NATO member Greece to its south and the shifting states of the former Yugoslavia on the north. With first its taking the side of Mao Zedong in the Sino-Soviet split, then repudiating the PRC after Deng Xiaoping launched his “opening-up”, Albania found itself truly isolated both diplomatically and economically. It had one choice but to turn inwards, which it did, stressing autarky and orthodox anti-revisionism.
Hoxha’s envisioned successor had been Ramiz Alia, but in what today remains a little-understood turn of events, Alia was purged in 1983, two years before Hoxha’s death and his presumed succession to the Party Chairmanship. It had been suggested that Alia had fallen out of favour with Hoxha’s influential wife, Nexhmije. It was a foreshadowing of the immense influence she would wield in the decades to come. Alia’s replacement was the shocking choice of Hysni Milloshi, a little-known poet, who was quickly appointed to Politburo and then the Chairmanship in 1985. Thus began the period of the entrenchment of Communist rule, what is known today as the Përforcim.
The Përforcim involved the amplification of the idiosyncratic aspects of Hoxhaism; where Hoxha had used the secret police, Milloshi set up prison camps. Whereas Hoxha had renounced religion and shut down temples, Milloshi had them demolished—at first. This was concealed with what the intelligentsia and exiles have deemed shtirje i ndershmërisë – the pretence of honesty. Gone in the press, for example, were the exultations of greatness, the shameless propaganda, replaced with more objectively written (but no less false) stories. An increasing amount of space was given over to generally true stories from abroad—the Albanian state media eagerly reported the antics of the Republican Party primaries in 2012, for example. The ideology of lufta përparimtare, or progressive struggle, allowed the reporting of downturns and reversals, to a point—all in the service of encouraging the populace to work against the problems they saw as being very real.
A more repressive state and the illusory reforms of the media had helped supress most kinds of dissent by the early 1990s, and while its peers collapsed, Albania, despite the odds, held fast to communism, defying the predictions and projections of most Western analysts. In 1993, the Politburo came to two decisions; these choices would shape the course the country’s fate would take. The first was to open up the country to foreign investment, not market reforms, but purely export-centred investment. Several European firms were invited to open factories in Albania, citing the low costs and proximity to local markets. This was, perhaps, the primary factor in keeping the Albanian economy afloat. In time, European firms would be joined by Chinese firms, most famously Foxconn, seeking a foothold on the Continent. The influx of capital would be what financed the massive construction projects embarked upon during that period—the expansion of the Port of Durres, the grandiose reconstruction of Tirana, and the National Railroad, among others. It also facilitated the funding of the Albanian military, allowing it to expand drastically and rearm with modern equipment. Perhaps most effectively, it allowed for steady wages and the funding of agricultural improvements, allowing the country a per capita GDP of $3,500 by 2000. With relative prosperity, it seemed, would follow relative peace.
But the second choice guaranteed that that peace would never come. It was announced that a policy of Pakosmanizimit, or De-Ottomanization, would be launched. Albania was the country perhaps most affected by Ottoman rule, its people converting en masse to Islam and adopting Turkish customs. In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Party of Labour had declared Albania to be the “vanguard state” for communism, responsible for the dissemination and preservation of the ideology throughout the world. Up until 1993, this mainly manifested itself in a series of lavish and grandiose anti-revisionist conferences. But the Politburo had declared that cultural impurity was inconsistent with the vanguard state, and that “Ottoman influences” would have to be purged. Pakosmanizimit began innocuously enough, with a handful of linguistic changes and a wave of renamings. But then then things began to turn violent. It was decreed that all mosques and Ottoman heritage sites were to be demolished, and the priests arrested, sparking the first serious wave of violence since the handover of power in 1985. Milloshi cracked down, ordering that all Muslim clerics be put to death, along with resistors. This eventually grew to entail surrounding villages and virtually slaughtering their populations. The word “genocide” began to be uttered in reference to the Pakosmanizimit.
But the powers that were had no desire to intervene in closed-off, militarized Albania. In a remarkable turn of events (many would say betrayal), Tirana had largely reconciled with Russian and China, and most shockingly, Serbia, supporting the latter’s efforts to supress Bosnians and ethnic Albanians in exchange for arms and keeping the border closed. Domestically, this was publicised as part of the Pakosmanizimit. The world was already focused upon events to Albania’s north, and with two strong voices on the UN Security Council against intervention, the government was given free hand. Joining the choir of voices against action were several corporations and multinationals, which feared an end to their profitable Albanian operations. Perhaps most notable amongst those speaking against Albanian intervention was Heinrich von Pierer, the CEO of the German conglomerate, Siemens, who once remarked that, “to equate Albania’s cultural efforts with genocide is to insult the memories of all those killed in the Holocaust.” By 1999, the Party declared that Islam had been “completely liquidated in Albania,” formally ending the Pakosmanizimit. Up to a tenth of the country was said to have been killed.
The communist government of Albania entered the twenty-first century stronger than it ever been, with internal threats either killed or otherwise silenced, and external threats kept at bay. It has much stayed that way. The Party of Labour remains as central as ever to daily life, but it covers itself with the tangible record of economic growth. A personality cult exists, but not that of Hysni Milloshi—but rather that of the deceased Enver Hoxha. Even Nexhmije Hoxha is said to be exulted more often than the sitting President, and she too holds a great degree of power in the nation’s governance, sitting as the Chairwoman of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly. Now, more than ever, Albania seems to be entrenched in its communist state, full of its own peculiarities. It embraces the equality of the sexes and freethought- famously issuing translated (and censored) copies of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great as mandatory reading in schools. Yet it is the only country in the world to have banned both alcohol and tobacco. It is open to business, yet it is said to be closer to the world envisioned in Orwell's 1984 than any other state in history. This is the story of how Albania came to be.
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