by Douglas Boyd
After the First World War, attempts by its immediate neighbours Yugoslavia and Greece to bite off respectively the northern and southern provinces were frustrated by US President Wilson’s policy of national independence. National integrity notwithstanding, Albania was the most backward and undeveloped country in Europe. Its mountainous terrain made the construction of a modern infrastructure of roads and railways virtually impossible, given the resources available at the time. Outside the capital, Tirana, and the main port, Durrës, much of the land remained the legendary ‘land of eagles’, where peasants laboured in medieval serfdom on estates owned by local lordlings, who pursued blood feuds known as gjakmarrja through the generations. Although a superficial semblance of parliamentary democracy existed in the main cities, even in the corridors of government buildings assassins lurked and claimed their victims. A member of a wealthy land-owning family, educated in Istanbul, Ahmet Muhtar Bej Zogolli was elected prime minister in 1922. In 1923 he was shot and wounded in the parliament building by a man whose death he arranged shortly afterwards. After another enemy was assassinated, Zogu – the prime minister had modified his name to make it sound more Albanian – and his followers were forced to leave the country by a leftist uprising. They returned to grab power with help from White Russian troops of General Pyotr Wrangel and the government of neighbouring Yugoslavia, which was rewarded for its help with some frontier adjustments. Surviving some fifty assassination attempts, Zogu was understandably paranoid and never seen in public unless surrounded by bodyguards. Preparation of all his food was in the hands of his mother, the only cook he trusted.
On 1 February 1925 Zogu’s political astuteness and ruthlessness saw him installed as Albania’s first president. Three years after that he was named King Zog I – modifying his name again to the Albanian for ‘bird’, so that his full title read ‘Bird I, King of the Sons of the Eagle’. As king, he reigned for eleven years, until driven out by Mussolini’s invasion of 1939. Having stashed at least $2 million in accounts at Chase Manhattan Bank, Zog and his Hungarian-American consort left the country, taking care to remove a disputed amount of portable valuables from the royal palace and bullion from the state treasury. Probably no one except their immediate household mourned their departure. In keeping with the prevailing political climate, on arrival in Britain they and their infant son – they had left within hours of his birth – were hailed as victims of fascism, which, in the commentary of a contemporary newsreel, was ‘defiling civilisation’.
However, during Zog’s presidency and reign some attempts at modernisation had taken place with the aid of Italian loans; serfdom was eliminated and Albanians began to think of themselves as citizens of a nation, rather than as subjects of a local lordling. To force these measures through against the resistance of landlords, Zog did not need to suspend civil liberties, because they had never existed in Albania, so there was nothing to stop him installing a nationwide secret police. With himself as supreme commander of the armed forces, his country was a military dictatorship, with all political opponents driven abroad, incarcerated or executed. So the scene was set for what happened after the Second World War, during which there was internecine fighting between the communist and other resistance organisations fighting at first the Italian occupation and then the Germans, who were finally driven out in November 1944.
The seed was sown in November 1941 when Yugoslav Communist partisan chief Josip Broz Tito was ordered by Moscow to send two party commissars into occupied Albania, where they formally established Partia Komuniste e Shqipërisë (PKSh) – the Albanian Communist Party – under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, a teacher from Korçë in the south-east of the country, near the Yugoslav border. He, ironically, had become a Communist when sent by his wealthy father to study in France in 1930, at the age of 18. Literally from the last day of the German occupation, Albania had its new dictator.
Albania after 1945.
The title of PKSh was changed in 1948 to Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë (PPSh) or Albanian Workers’ Party, but the name was unimportant since all other parties were swiftly banned. Unlike in the Central European satellite states, which had enjoyed strong commercial and cultural links with Western Europe before the war, there was no need to pretend democracy in a country that had never known it, but Hoxha took the title of prime minister, later adding those of foreign minister and defence minister – and governed what vaguely resembled a coalition until only the PPSh was left.
Until his death in 1985, Hoxha controlled his police state on Stalinist lines, breaking with Moscow and leaving the Warsaw Pact to espouse ‘the Chinese way to Communism’ when Khrushchev denounced Stalinism; Hoxha later broke away from China when Mao’s successors ‘went soft’ after his death. Like Stalin, Hoxha governed by controlling a Politburo, which controlled the Central Committee, theoretically elected by the Party Congress, which assembled for a few days every five years. This is not to belittle Hoxha’s achievements: he took power in a country ruined by the dual occupations, where all the port installations, mines and power stations had been destroyed. He built the country’s first railway line, opened its first university, imposed a single dialect – his own – as the official language and introduced mass education that brought adult illiteracy down close to the levels in Western Europe. The former near-endemic scourge of malaria was eradicated by medicine, the spraying of DDT and draining of swampland. Life expectancy doubled, tripling the population during his four decades of rule. For the first time in this formerly Muslim country, women were given legal rights, and the Lekë Dukagjini, which had made every woman the chattel of her male relatives, to do with as they wished, was abolished.
The dark side of Hoxha’s rule was internal repression of thought or action that was perceived as threatening the Party. In the first purges of 1944 and 1945 official records showed that 2,000 ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘war criminals’ – there were hardly any war crimes committed there – were tried and executed.1 Informed estimates are that 15,000–20,000 executions in this period is a more reliable figure. In 1951 and 1952 the small groups of Albanian freedom fighters trained, equipped and infiltrated by CIA and MI6 were wiped out to the last man due to Philby’s treachery, but so also were any in-country Albanians who dared disagree with government policy. Nor was that the only political crime: in his purge of 1981 Hoxha had several of his closest associates executed as ‘traitors to Albania who had been in the service of foreign intelligence agencies’ – a rigmarole familiar from other Communist countries.
In addition to the six main political prisons and fourteen most-infamous labour camps, where political prisoners and common criminals were confined together, with convicted criminals running the camp for the uniformed personnel, the government admitted in 1990 that there had been seventy-one other labour camps, making a total of 30,000–50,000 people imprisoned for political reasons in Albania at any one time. Article 47 of the criminal code stated that attempting to flee the fatherland was a crime punishable by a minimum sentence of ten years or death, as was the failure of any person allowed to travel abroad to return when he or she was ordered to. Material evidence of the regime’s paranoia is everywhere: the countryside is still disfigured by 100,000 concrete pill-boxes and bunkers of all sizes for defence against a foreign invader. To prevent Albanians escaping, the borders were defended by mine fields, electrified fences, trip-flares and guard towers at 1km intervals. Every morning the guards checked the 2m strip of raked soil on either side of the fence for footprints. Religion was banned, with every church and mosque closed or demolished and a list of permitted names drawn up which made it a crime to name an infant after any religious figure. Ironically, Hoxha’s own name – pronounced ‘hodja’ – was cognate with hadji and had been an honorific given to an ancestor who taught the Koran. The dictator himself was often referred to as ‘Dullah’, a shortened form of Abdullah, meaning ‘slave of God’.
The main instrument of internal repression was the Drejtoria e Sigurimit të Shtetit, or Dire
ctorate of State Security, usually abbreviated to ‘Sigurimi’. This organisation was founded in March 1943, before the German forces left Albania, and eventually numbered 30,000 uniformed officers under 800 senior personnel. The Sigurimi had local headquarters in each of the twenty-six administrative districts, as well as an HQ in Tirana opening mail, monitoring telephone conversations, censoring all media and infiltrating every cultural society and educational establishment. Its effectiveness was considerably enhanced by a nationwide network of coerced and unpaid informers that was said to include one person in every four or five citizens, informing on family, friends and neighbours. In addition, 7,500 ‘riot police’ were formed into five regiments of mechanised infantry held ready across the country to quell any civil disturbance. As in the other Eastern-bloc countries during the Cold War, all these personnel were positively vetted as loyal PPSh members, kept under perpetual surveillance and allowed many privileges in accommodation and ration entitlement denied to the rest of the population.
The Sigurimi was also responsible for many functions of a civil service, including the state archives. It provided armed bodyguards for leading political figures, but also spied on them. There were nearly 200 executions of Central Committee and Politburo members. The counter-espionage section was responsible for neutralising foreign intelligence operations in Albania and anti-party activity by Albanians. Of the work of Sigurimi officers abroad, little is definitely known, except that Albanian diplomats exercised the usually tolerated intelligence-gathering functions. Although the Albanian diaspora numbers several millions, in Yugoslavia, the United States and other countries, it would have been difficult to recruit many sleepers because of the expats’ hostility to the Hoxha regime.
Yet, strangely, one of the most famous spies of the twentieth century was Albanian Elyesa Bazna, a locksmith and small-time criminal who was employed as valet by British Ambassador Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Huguesson in Ankara during the Second World War. After making duplicate keys to the ambassador’s safe, he regularly removed and photographed confidential papers, selling the prints to Counsellor Ludwig Moyzisch in the Nazi German embassy. The saying that there is no honour among thieves also covers intelligence officers: Bazna, code-named ‘Cicero’, was paid in forged notes produced by prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. When he tried to cash them, they were revealed as worthless counterfeit and his attempt to sue the post-war German government for their replacement with genuine notes failed.
As when fellow dictator Tito died in neighbouring Yugoslavia, after Hoxha’s death in 1985 his system collapsed. The first free elections were held in April 1991. The Interior Ministry controlled the three branches of state security: the Sigurimi, the frontier guards and the so-called people’s police. Whereas in the Sigurimi all personnel were Party members, in the other two services some of the lower ranks were not. In July of that year the still-Communist-dominated parliament abolished the Sigurimi, replacing it with Shërbimi Informativ Kombëtar (ShIK), or State Intelligence Committee, which was in turn replaced by Shërbimi Informativ Shtetëror (ShISh), or State Intelligence Service, in 1997. In October of that year the CIA sent a management team to set up the staffing of ShISh, with Italian help in training the frontier guards and internal police. In addition to intelligence-gathering abroad, the new service oversees internal security and counter-espionage and is responsible for suppressing organised crime and drug-trafficking and -transiting networks, the last of which particularly affects Italy.
Unprovable allegations were made that many former Sigurimi personnel were employed in its successor agencies – unprovable because all archives were held by them. As to the vexed question of opening those files, which were used to vet all candidates in the 1996 and subsequent elections, it appears that some have already been destroyed. Also, while certain members of parliament, some of whom spent ten years and more in Hoxha’s prisons for a single indiscreet remark, want to reveal everything, others consider that this would lead to revenge and blood feuds in the rural population.
When the author was recovering his Stasi file from the BStU, in the same reading room was a thin elderly man holding his head in his hands and moaning, ‘Wir waren nur arme Menschen.’ We were only poor people. God knows what awful secret he had just learned from his file. The point of stating that here is that the people who suffered under the KGB-clone secret police services in Central and Eastern Europe were not only the intellectuals, educated dissidents and politicians. Many of those locked away from their families for years, even decades, were ordinary men and women whose whole lives were ruined for reasons unknown or so slight that they would not merit even a cautionary warning in any democracy.
When someone is released after a long stay in even the most enlightened form of incarceration, he or she has become institutionalised and may never lead a normal life again for that simple reason. Most of those released after long confinement in a Gulag-type camp have in addition to cope with severe physical and mental health problems. After the initial euphoria of release, many found they could not adjust to the disorientating chaos of the post-Communist era, and committed suicide. In Albania, from a population of only 3 million, an estimated 200,000 people were locked away in Enver Hoxha’s Gulag at one time or another, labouring in mines and construction projects with inadequate food and clothing and no safety precautions. So, almost every family has or had a relative or friend whose life was ruined by Communism in this way. A quarter-century after the end of Hoxha’s 45-year dictatorship, fewer than 3,000 of the former political prisoners are still alive.
Lavdrim Ndreu spent most of his life in a prison camp. For the past twenty years, he has lived in part of a derelict former football stadium with other homeless men he calls ‘my cousins from the camp’. They have been promised compensation for the time spent in labour camps and prisons. A law passed in 2007 entitled former political prisoners to compensation of €14.30 for every day they had spent incarcerated, but even this was to be paid in eight instalments because it amounted to around €400m – a considerable item in the Albanian budget. A cynic might say the delays in payment are deliberate because ex-detainees are dying earlier than the rest of the population, so with every year that passes, the government is saving money. Protests have included ex-prisoners dying on hunger strikes and at least two setting themselves on fire in Tirana. According to a welfare organisation that attempts to rehabilitate the ex-detainees, many of them suffer chronic ill-health. Others, released younger, have married much later than they would have in normal times and are struggling to support their children, who themselves suffer the delayed-action effect of Albania’s Communist era.2
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) learned that, of the hundreds of thousands of files in the Sigurimi archives, only 14,000 have been conserved and many of these show signs of having been crudely sanitised in the last days of the Sigurimi. A few individuals were able to find information about their own cases. Aged 23 in 1974, Fatos Lubonja was locked away for seventeen years – the best part of his adult life – his identity reduced to a number in the notorious prison camp at Spac. After serving five years for having kept a hidden diary which included unwise criticism of the regime, he was informed that his sentence had been extended on the grounds that he had become a dissident in the camp. He was freed when Communism collapsed in 1991.
BIRN was able to trace a thick Sigurimi file dealing with Lubonja’s case that included reports of handwriting experts tying Lubonja to the diaries, statements by friends and family members produced at the trial, photocopies of pages from the diaries and transcripts of his interrogations – all this for keeping a diary! There was, however, no indication of who had betrayed him. After his release, Lubonja was constantly tormented by that question. He eventually managed to find the name of an ex-Sigurimi officer who had signed one paper in his file and traced that man’s telephone number in a local directory. The former secret policeman, named Lambi Kote, at first refused to meet him. By the time they finally met, Lubonja
was in his early sixties and Kote was in his seventies – two old men whose battle was not yet over. Kote refused to answer any questions, except by posing his own, alleging that he had fallen out of favour and also been punished. After they parted, Lubonja said, ‘I was terrified that he [still] had power over me. He knew what had happened, and I didn’t.’3
Knowledge is power. Will the remaining archives, kept in the Interior Ministry building in Tirana, ever be made public? It seems unlikely because both the ruling Democratic party and the opposition Socialists each accuse the other of blocking this, which smells of conspiracy. As BIRN comments, there are former Communists in the leadership of both parties who have personal reasons not to wish their past to be exposed.
And so it is. In Albania, Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland and Romania – different countries with very different people, languages and cultures – Stalin’s and Lenin’s lethal legacies linger on in the unmarked forest graves and the ruined lives of hundreds of thousands of people – and in the ballot boxes too, which is why so many surviving victims are denied the closure that might come from knowing why and by whom a relative was executed or they themselves imprisoned, tortured or deported.
Notes
1. Ibid, pp. 196–7
2. More on www.balkaninsight.com
3. Ibid
AUTHOR NOTE
All translations are by the author, unless otherwise attributed.
All illustrations are from the author’s collection.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright owners. In the event of any infringement, please communicate with the author, care of the publisher.
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