Land of Uncle Enver
Fegley, Randall
Report from Albania LAND OF UNCLE ENVER KEEPING ALBANIA BACKWARD BOUNDED BY Greece, Yugoslavia and the Adriatic Sea, Maryland-sized Albania is Europe's poorest nation. In spite of a blessing of...
...was changed to the Albanian Worker's Party and pro-Tito officers and members were purged...
...Hoxha accused them of complicity in a coup attempt...
...Disguised pilgrimages, religious weddings, and strikes during religious holidays are commonplace...
...Hoxha, now 70 years old, is plagued by diabetes and heart disease...
...His country has not become more accepted by the world community, unlike Tito's Yugoslavia...
...In spite of a blessing of chromium, copper, petroleum, and timber, Albanians are the poorest ($500 per capita per annum income) and least literate (25 percent illiteracy) national group in Europe...
...The religious are not the only oppressed in Albania...
...He has stated a desire to come to the aid of Yugoslavia if that country is invaded, but Hoxha's real enemy lies within Albania...
...Before these purges the official Albanian news agency published figures showing that the police had "exterminated" 550 armed gangs and 4,000 revisionist criminals and had repulsed over 3,000 frontier incursions...
...Each purge had its own rash of executions...
...That same year the National Liberation Movement was founded by several Albanian leftists including a Frencheducated teacher named Enver Hoxha...
...The Communist government's general policies on minorities can be summed up in Hoxha's own words, "The religion of Albania remains Albanianism...
...RANDALL FEGLEY (Randall Fegley, a previous contributor, is a free-lance writer who deals solely with human rights and minority problem cases...
...In 1974 and 1975, the ministers of Defense, Finance, Communications, Industry, and Mining and two other portfolios were ousted, as well as the Deputy Premier and Chairman of the State Planning Commission...
...King Zog's heir, Leka I, is actively seeking the overthrow of the Communists, and several organizations, such as the Paris-based Legitimacy Movement and the Bostonbased Free Albania Committee, are waiting in the wings...
...Traditionally the population was 70 percent Moslem, 20 percent Greek and Albanian Orthodox and 10 percent Catholic, but religious statistics have not been available for Commonweal: 452 decades...
...Tirana Mosque remains padlocked...
...In the immediate postwar period, Albania became a satellite of Yugoslavia, but when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Comintern in 1948, Albania took advantage of the situation and allied with the Soviets...
...Fishing is restricted to avoid potential migration...
...In one episode four elderly Franciscans were burned to death in their church...
...All religions can claim hundreds of Albanian martyrs...
...The ministers of Education and Agriculture were expelled in 1976...
...Their social structure is that of the early medieval clan rather than that of a modern nation-state...
...All clergymen were imprisoned and most were executed...
...Criticism of government policy has also brought purges and executions, and Hoxha frequently accuses those in his government of coup attempts...
...In 1976 the Hoxha regime demanded changes of personal names not conforming to the nation's "political, ideological, and moral standards...
...Today Hoxha remains in power drawing support from a variety of sources and conducting business with Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and a dozen other Western, Communist, and Third World countries...
...In spite of mineral wealth, forests, and strategic location, Albania's economy is getting worse, and there is a direct relation between Albania's economic performance and its human rights situation...
...Blood feuds, xenophobia, and stubbornness have been the norm in rural Albania...
...Allegedly at the request of the youth of Albania, all 2,169 churches and mosques were either closed or converted to other uses...
...Eventually, the Sovietbacked N.L.M...
...Commonweal: 454...
...Shkoder Cathedral is now a sports complex and swimming pool...
...The Italians invaded Greece from Albania, only to be thrown back towards the Adriatic...
...Such activities have had a great cost...
...The government and "Uncle Enver," as the press calls Hoxha, watches overall...
...The Second World War marked the beginning of a new era in Albanian politics, an era of Communist domination and oppression...
...Thus a potentially rich source of foreign exchange is left untapped...
...The Catholic community has been a particularly frequent victim...
...In addition five percent of Albania's citizens are of nationalities other than Albanian...
...Nicholas church has been converted to workers' apartments and a convent church to secret police headquarters...
...The N.L.M...
...In fact, Communist Albania has a retarded agriculture, a limited industrial structure, and a backward and ineffective service sector...
...An anti-religious museum was founded in Shkoder...
...There are between 10,000 and 50,000 political prisoners...
...was established as an' 'antifascist'' resistance group, but their definition of "fascist" soon grew to include the other resistance organizations particularly the democratic Balli Kombeti and the royalist Legitimacy Movement...
...First, the Albanians themselves are divided into Geg and Tosk dialects...
...The Hoxha regime publicly claims Albania to be "the most successful country in Europe...
...Despite Roman ruins, Byzantine churches, wellpreserved folklore and beautiful beaches, tourism remains minimal to avoid foreign contact...
...In November 1973 Albania's Orthodox Archbishop Damnian died in prison at age 80...
...First Titoists were purged, then Soviet supporters, and now Chinese supporters...
...With the death of Tito, politics in the Balkans have entered an era of uncertainty...
...Albanian children are being indoctrinated in atheism and Communism and used to spy on their parents, particularly in matters of religion and foreign influence...
...The massacre of Christianity and Islam continues to this day and although religious belief is far from being wiped out, organized religious bodies are all but destroyed...
...After the archbishops of Shkoder and Durres refused to form a national Catholic church in the late 1940s, Hoxha began a campaign against the Catholic church, which had been Albania's main source of literary talent and education standards...
...Shtefen Kurti, who fought militants destroying his church with his bare hands and was imprisoned, was finally shot in 1972 at age 74 for baptizing a fellow-prisoner's baby...
...The, two larger religious bodies in Albania, the Orthodox and Islamic organizations, also suffered under the Hoxha regime...
...Although claiming Albania to be the world's first atheist state, both Hoxha and Radio Tirana warn of continued religious practices, underground clergymen, and lack of anti-religious measures in some districts...
...Dress, hairstyles, and "unworthy" behavior are criticized and mail is censored...
...With Mao's death and subsequent changes in China, Chinese aid was cut and Hoxha chose to lead Albania on a new path once again...
...Hoxha spurns the great powers in favor of relations with smaller nations...
...The final act came in 1967 when all belief in God was outlawed...
...was victorious with Yugoslav assistance...
...There are Serbs, Vlachs, Bulgarians, Gypsies and Montenegrins, all of whom have seen 29 August 1980: 453 the destruction of their cultures by Albanian chauvinism...
...By 1961 and Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" program, the Albanian government, now firmly in the hands of Hoxha, rebelled against Soviet-style Communism and became China's voice in Europe and the United Nations...
...Several million Albanians live in Italy, Greece, France, Yugoslavia, and the United States...
...Like other Balkan countries, Albania has its minority problems...
...Although Europe's only Moslem nation and the site of early Christian cultural expansion, Albanians retain a good deal of pagan theology...
...To great losses in human and economic resources suffered during'the Second World War, the Communist government added purges, forced migration, minority and religious oppression, and the general restriction of the freedoms of all Albanians...
...Albania's forty years of rapid political, economic, and social changes have taken their toll in human life and personal freedom...
...With every change in policy come purges not only in government but in the professions, education, and military...
...Yet Hoxha's own name means "religious teacher" and there is no word of changing it...
...Priests were deprived of ration cards and some died of starvation...
...The Russians withdrew leaving four submarines and vast naval facilities on the Adriatic island of Sazan...
...The main Orthodox church in Durres is a cafe and beer hall...
...During the 1960s, troublesome mountain villagers were forced to move into the coastal valleys where for some time collective farms were little more than slave labor camps...
...With German assistance, the Italians finally forced the Greeks to surrender in April 1941...
...The N.L.M...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
