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"The New York Times" in 1984: Albania opens a hole in the door

"The New York Times" in 1984: Albania opens a hole in the door
David Binder

By: David Binder (article published in "The New York Times", November 11, 1984)
Translation: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com    

On June 18, 1984, the Albanian coast guards shot three French divers in broad daylight from Mediterranean Club – killing one of them. On September 16, other border guards killed a Greek forester at the border. Such news reports about Albania do not seem at all unusual in a country with stone domes and concrete bunkers marking the countryside, a strict foreign policy, a national anthem that includes the line "with pickaxe and rifle", and the history of internal oppression.

The surprise, despite such incidents, is that Albania, a lonely country which until recently was always a client of a great communist power, seems to be gradually coming out of the shell of isolation and that it is seeking new relations in the West and in the East. . More surprising is the fact that this is happening while Enver Hoxha, the Albanian communist leader for the last 43 years, is still alive. He is widely regarded as brutal and paranoid and, surprisingly, as a brilliant survivor. Thus, the Albanian enigma appears again: Is this enigmatic country, with its old communist leadership, on the verge of another surprising change?


Few would deny that Albania is an enigma, since for the last four decades it has been one of the least accessible countries in the world, turning politically into enmity with its successive patrons during this period: Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China.

The Albanians are descendants of one of the oldest known peoples of Europe, the Illyrians, and yet their national state, formed by the decrees of the great powers in 1912, is one of the youngest in Europe. It is a relatively small country, mostly mountainous, slightly larger than the state of Maryland, with a population the size of the metropolis of Boston - about three million. It is certainly the poorest country in Europe. It is hailed as a bastion of Stalinist communism, disinterested in developing relations with major Western countries, has discouraged contacts, and has a reprehensible record of executing people considered rivals within the leadership. But its location, strange politics and disagreements over ethnic problems with its near neighbors – Greece and Yugoslavia – make it crucial to the delicate political balance on the Balkan peninsula.

It is now a new dynamic in Albania, as a result of the rapid population growth. (Demographic studies show that the birth rate is roughly three to four times higher than that of the rest of Europe. The average age of the population is 26.) Authorities in Tirana, Albania's capital, estimate that the population will reach four million in 15 years. This has a nationalist meaning, because Mr. Hoxha in 1981 declared that "we are six million", a calculation that also included Albanians living in Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece.

Over the past year, Albania has cautiously reopened some of its long-closed gates to the West. At the same time, a change of functionaries seems to be happening in Tirana, with the people who entered the communist leadership 40 years ago as wartime revolutionaries, gradually being replaced by young men and women.

These trends, combined with the rare public appearances of Mr. Hoxha, and his obviously ill health, have increased interest in Albanian developments.

For almost three decades, Albania has not allowed American journalists to enter the country. Twenty-one years ago, I started applying for a visa to visit Albania from Yugoslavia. The Albanian consul in Belgrade was warm, but he was persistent in refusing the request. Letters addressed to Tirana over the years remained unanswered, although eventually my name was placed on the official list of Albanian propaganda. Recently, a telephone request to the Albanian Mission to the United Nations, for a meeting with a diplomatic representative, brought this answer: "You can't talk - to anyone, at any time."

What follows, then, is piecing together the pieces of what is known and not known about Albania - from the official reports of the Tirana government, from the reports of several Western researchers and correspondents who have visited Albania, as well as from Albanians who escaped in the years last. Mr. Hoxha, the leader of the Communist Party who turned 76 on October 16, is reported to be so ill that in his last public appearance, at a sports rally in Tirana on October 20, he needed help to walk. Apparently, he has not spoken in public since the beginning of the year. Often he had to avoid important tasks and only sent "hello messages". Therefore, questions arise as to what can happen in Albania after the death of Mr. Hoxha. The Communist Party of Albania was formed in Tirana in 1941, with two Yugoslav communist emissaries who served as midwives of Mr. Hoxha, a former school teacher, who was elected as its first secretary. He has held that post ever since – a record unique in European communism.

In Yugoslavia, there is almost palpable nervousness, if post-Hoxha Albania can somehow return to the orbit of the Soviet Union - the state that played a dominant role in Albanian affairs in the years 1948-1961. Yugoslavs see any move by Tirana to improve relations with Soviet allies - such as Hungary or Bulgaria - as a warning. However, for years, Hoxha's leadership has equally criticized the Soviet Union and the United States, as "imperialist" superpowers whose policies threaten world peace in general and which directly affect smaller nations.

The most interesting change in Tirana's foreign policies in almost a decade has been Albania's recent opening to the West – mainly to Italy, which occupied Albania in World War II.

A new and broader trade agreement was reached last March in Tirana, by Nicola Capria, the Italian Minister of Foreign Trade, and Shane Korbeci, his Albanian counterpart. Also, the two governments signed a cultural agreement that calls for the establishment of a chair for the Italian language at the University of Tirana, as well as the teaching of Italian in Albanian secondary schools. At the same time, the cooperation agreement was signed between ATSh, the Albanian Telegraphic Agency, and ANSA - the Italian News Agency. On this occasion, ANSA had the opportunity of a rare high-level interview with Deputy Prime Minister Manush Myftiu. Last November, Albania opened a commercial ferry service between the port of Durrës and Trieste. Ferry service across the Strait of Otranto to Brindisi is also provided. The Albanians also expressed interest in Italian concerns building new telecommunication facilities, a hydroelectric project and many factories in exchange for Albanian goods.

However, there are major obstacles to furthering such contacts, including Tirana's refusal in recent years to accept foreign loans, credits or financial aid in any form, as well as its insistence on contracts with a maximum duration of one year. As a result, most of its foreign trade has taken the form of barter, with Albanians offering trading partners chrome and oil in exchange for manufactured goods. Few Western countries are used to doing business in this way, and Italians are very skeptical of larger and long-term projects in Albania.

Albania's policy with our forces was rumored to be at the center of the deepening rift between Mr. Hoxha and his close associate, the late former prime minister Mehmet Shehu, who was either killed or committed suicide during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Party of Albania in December 1981. The death of the 73-year-old prime minister it was followed by the fourth major purge, since 1948, of the inner circle of the leadership. The main associates and relatives of Mr. Shehu was immediately arrested as "enemies of the people". At least four of them - including the Minister of Defence, the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Health, as well as the chief of the secret police of the city of Vlora - were executed in September 1983 by firing squads, according to Albanians who fled to the West.

The successor of Mr. Shehu as prime minister, Adil Çarçani, is 62 years old. At the age of 59, Ramiz Alia, the head of state and presumed successor to Mr. Hoxha is 11 years younger than his predecessor. (He can be counted as a member of the wartime revolutionaries, having joined the Seventh Assault Brigade when he was 19. Mr. Alia has also served as a Party ideologue.)

The changing of the guard is more visible in the next levels of party and government leaders, with recent arrivals such as Lenka Čuko, member of the Politburo; Deputy Prime Minister Besnik Bekteshi; as well as the secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, Vangjel Çerrava. All are in their forties.

Nikolaos A. Stavrou, a professor of political science at Harvard University who wrote his master's thesis on Albania's power elite, says his research shows that the Central Committee of Albania's Labor Party has the youngest average age of any other communist party, and that it has the highest percentage of women in high positions. In addition to Lenka Čukos in the Politburo, there are the Minister of Agriculture, Themie Thomai; the Minister of Education and Culture, Tefta Cami; as well as the Minister of Light Industry and Food, Vito Kapo. The wife of Mr. Hoxha, Nexhmija, has held key positions for years, including the leadership of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism - the higher school of the party. While it is almost impossible to learn anything about the inner workings of the leadership, it is also difficult to get first-hand information about everyday life in Albania. Tourists – about three thousand a year – see only carefully supervised fragments. Visitors looking for relatives must take an oath of silence. The stories of the fugitives cannot be easily verified.

The majestic Dinaric mountains dominate Albania, with fully two-thirds of the country above 914 meters. Only about 13 percent of the land is cultivated, although gradually more is being taken from the swampy—formerly malarial—fringes of the coastal plains. In the highlands, oak, walnut, beech, pine and fir trees abound, while fig, olive and citrus fruits are cultivated in the lowlands that are blessed with a mild climate.

Life is difficult, as it has been for most Albanians over the centuries. The mandatory work week is 48 hours. Nothing is known about privately owned automobiles. The number of televisions (in 1981 there were 45 thousand) is gradually increasing. But for a country that had only two radio transmitters in 1945, the improvements in communications are huge. Radio-Tirana's powerful shortwave broadcasts of its English-language program are perfectly audible in this country.

A recent edition of the English-language government magazine, "New Albania", at the entrance of the University of Tirana shows a group of stylishly dressed female students in floral dresses and blouses and below-the-knee skirts. Their younger sisters appear in other pictures wearing lace collars, black aprons, white stockings and sandals with red straps. At a gathering of war veterans, the youngest girls appeared in white dresses with large red stars. Hartmut Albert, the German scholar who recently spent four weeks in Albania, noted in an essay: “The style of dress is relatively modest, simple, without proper fashion accessories – even for women. The length of the skirts is determined by a pretty strict norm, but recently there is a little tolerance."

Unlike in the past, men rarely wear beards. Male visitors from the West who have long hair are likely to undergo a barber on arrival at the border or at Tirana Airport.

With all the severity, what should be said about the comic and rhymeless poem of Dritëro Agolli, the chairman of the League of Writers and Artists of Albania, published in the magazine "Light"! The poem entitled "Anti-bourgeoisies" says:

Nihilistic laments,
how much i hate them!
Lament: Ah! Why them
they don't do decorated panties
with silk lace;
Lament: Ah! Our backs
are bent on thrift,
saving and more saving;
Lament: Ah! For a duck
baked in a microwave oven.

Mr. Agolli continues talking about traveling abroad, "no matter where", about villas and beauties by the sea, while he then denounces hedonists who covet as "Cretan creatures". Apparently, there is a new small class of bureaucrats who have managed to secure a relative luxury.

Professor Albert, during his stay, was impressed by what he called "expressions of almost euphoric pride in technical progress".

"The evidence for this", he continued, "includes the importance of the permanent Exhibition on Albanian Industrial Production and Technology in Tirana, pride in several manufacturing centers, success in exporting oil and electricity". Oil production now amounts to about three and a half million tons per year.

Private enterprise is extremely limited. Homeowners may cultivate a small area around their homes or keep animals for domestic purposes. Any small surplus can be sold in the local market, but "only at the mandatory prices set by the state", reports Dr. Albert. In the cities, there are many bazaars, as everywhere in the Balkans where the Turks once ruled.

Until now, as a country with small cities, Albania is developing urban centers. The capital, which had about 25 inhabitants in 1939, now has 200 inhabitants. Shkodra, the second city, is going to 100 thousand inhabitants.

In 1967, the Albanian leadership began a campaign to eliminate churches from public life - in a country that before World War II was 70 percent Muslim, 20 percent Orthodox, and 10 percent Catholic - with the stated goal of creating " the first atheist state" in the world. Four Franciscan priests were burned to death in the first year and, in 1972, a Shkodran priest was executed for baptizing a child. Mosques and churches, for the most part, were turned into secular buildings.

Professor Alberti writes that in the Shkodra Atheist Museum, he saw a graphic exhibition that showed 150 mosques in the Shkodra region alone – before the secularization campaign began. But he counted only 10 mosques during the month of traveling around the country. Organized religion has, in fact, gone underground in Albania, although visitors report seeing Muslims kneeling in the countryside praying at sunset.

Judging from the reports of the refugees, the Greek minority in Albania has been hit particularly hard by the push for secularization. But it is Pope John Paul II who has made the strongest statement about the state of religion in recent years. Speaking on February 26 in Bari, Italy, on the other side of the Adriatic, the Pope expressed concern about religious freedoms in Albania and said: "My thoughts go to our brothers in Albania, who cannot openly demonstrate their religious faith." .

In recent months, the Albanian government has taken steps to improve relations with its two closest neighbors, Greece and Yugoslavia, relations which were in a very bad state due to the problems of minorities on both sides of the borders.

Since 1981, a large number of Albanians in Yugoslavia - there are about 1.7 million - have demanded a separate republic. Hoxha's regime has expressed warm sympathy, adding to Belgrade's nervousness. There is an additional irritation that about 40 Slavo-Macedonians live in eastern Albania, where their rights as a minority are barely recognized. However, the Yugoslavs, concerned about the direction Albania may take when the Hoxha era ends, have committed to investments that could create greater space for interests between the two countries. They include the opening of a railway line. Yugoslavia remains Albania's largest trading partner, with a two-way volume of approximately $112 million projected for 1984.

In an effort to improve the climate, a delegation from Tirana went to Belgrade at the end of June, to draft a cooperation agreement in science, education and technology. A Yugoslav commentary in the daily "Delo" noted that the talks began at a time when "Albania has again become more aware of its isolation and is trying to establish ties with some carefully chosen foreign partners (for example, Italy)". However, talks in Belgrade broke down last month, in part because of a dispute over the status of Albania's Yugoslav minority.

In the case of Greece, there are also disagreements about the minorities on both sides. Athens deplores the persecution, especially for religious reasons, of the ethnic Greeks in Albania who number at least 40 thousand and maybe two or three times more. For its part, Albania claims that Greece discriminates against several thousand ethnic Albanians living in northern Greece. The two countries are still technically at war, as a result of border disputes at the end of World War II. When the Prime Minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou, declared in February that the ethnic Greeks of Albania were in a "serious situation", the Albanians responded that this was "interference in internal affairs".

Again, in the last week of June, Tirana sent a delegation to Athens, with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Muhamet Kapllani, for talks that ended with the initiation of the agreement on the opening of two border points, the establishment of a chair of Greek studies at the college of Gjirokastra ( the birthplace of Mr. Hoxha) and the promotion of trade. Greek officials say the state of war between the two countries could end in the coming months.

There is another dimension in Albania's relations with its neighbors - the flow of refugees. In the wake of the unrest of the Albanian minority in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, some young ethnic Albanians crossed the border to seek asylum in their homeland. With very few exceptions, they came back telling the Yugoslav authorities - upon return - that they were again kept isolated inside Albania, almost as if they could contaminate the people with Western ideas. Of course, the standard of living in Kosovo, although the lowest in Yugoslavia, is still higher than in Albania, in a country with an income of about 550 dollars per year per capita. Yugoslavia's ethnic Albanians also enjoy far greater freedom than their Albanian cousins.

In recent months, the number of Albanians fleeing to Yugoslavia and Greece has increased greatly. According to a Belgrade official, the number arriving in Yugoslavia since the beginning of the year is "in the hundreds." Considering how tightly Albania's Sigurimi - the secret police - guards the borders and controls the interior, this number is almost unbelievable. Greece has also reported an increasing number of escapees from Albania – most recently when two sisters swam six miles to the island of Corfu on July 29. Some of these refugees are ethnic Greeks.

Many of the fugitives indicate that they have served sentences, based on political charges, in Albanian prisons. Professor Stavrou, himself a fugitive and an ethnic Greek, in a well-documented 1983 essay, concludes that Hoxha's regime held "a total of 40 political prisoners"—about two thousand five hundred of them former members of regime, suspected of being "pro-Soviet" or, in smaller numbers, "pro-Chinese".

In recent years, only 35 percent of Albania's annual volume—of more than $600 million in foreign trade—has been with Soviet bloc countries. But Tirana has selectively sought to expand its exchanges with some, including Romania, whose foreign policy – ​​somewhat independent – ​​is sympathetic to Albania's, as well as Hungary. The highest Eastern European official who was received in Tirana in recent times, last November, was the Minister of Foreign Trade of Romania, Vasile Pungan. Researchers like Dr. Albert and Millutin Garashanin from the University of Belgrade, report on a greatly increased sense of national identity in Albania. West Germany notes the increased effort to remove evidence of Turkish rule, including replacing Turkish words with "pure" Albanian words. Dr. Garashanini, professor of archeology at the University of Belgrade, who specializes in the pre-Christian Illyrian period, noted: “Every nationalism has its romantic phase and its aggressive and explosive phase. For now, these are the Albanians".

The emphasis on nationalist themes is quite new. Only in 1968 was a statue erected in Tirana to commemorate Skanderbeg, the XNUMXth century prince who fought the Turks and almost liberated the country, becoming the indisputable hero of all Albanians. And, just last year the National Historical Museum was opened. However, national costumes are rapidly disappearing from everyday life and can be seen mainly in the performances of folk dance troupes or on ceremonial occasions – such as funerals. In contrast, members of the Albanian minority in neighboring Yugoslavia use national costumes as common elements of dress.

Visitors, including Dr. Albertin, say they were amazed by the level of teamwork under the communist system in Albania. But the power of the tribe, the most prominent tradition of Albania, remains strong.

The United States government, which once thought it knew enough to overthrow Mr. Hoxha – between 1947 and 1952, the United States and Britain sent a series of agents to Albania who unsuccessfully tried to organize an uprising – remained profoundly ignorant of Albanian affairs. In April 1973, for example, Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Rush was authorized to make an overture from Washington to Tirana, saying that the United States was prepared to discuss opening relations. Months later, Washington learned that at the time of the offer Mr. Hoxha was carrying out another purge of pro-Western and pro-Soviet elements.

From the more than 40 books of his speeches and memoirs published, it appears that Mr. Hoxha is particularly bitter about American and British support for his immediate predecessor, King Zog I. Born in 1895, Ahmed Bey Zogu took power in 1925 as president, crowned himself king three years later, and fled to at the time of the Italian occupation in 1939. It was declared overthrown by the communists under Mr. Hoxha, in 1946, and died in exile - in France in 1961.

Two years ago, Mr. Hoxha wrote: "There are some, imperialists and their lackeys, who say that we are isolated from the 'civilized world'. These gentlemen are wrong. Both the bitter history of our country in the past and the reality of the 'world' they advertise have convinced us that it is not a 'civilized world' at all, but a world in which the biggest and the strongest oppress and hits the smallest and the weakest, a world in which money and corruption make the law, while injustice, betrayal and backstabbing triumph". However, under the iron rule of Mr. Hoxha, Albania has started an attempt to reach out, sending students to France, Austria, Sweden, while Italy is looking for new trade partners. After his death, another type of Albania may emerge.

For at least a thousand years and perhaps three thousand years, this remarkable people has managed to maintain a sense of identity rooted in epic poetry and folk customs. In the last century, it began to recover - no doubt with the help of foreigners, German albanologists, the great powers of the time for their citizenship, but finally with the will of the Albanians themselves.

Mr. Hoxha has instilled in the Albanians the idea that their isolation from the world and especially from the great powers is their main form of national security. The fact that the leadership of Tirana has begun to demand more involvement from neighbors and other foreign powers, even when Mr. Hoxha is still in power, he seems to predict a different type of Albania in the coming decades. /Telegraph/