The Weird Peking-Tirana Axis
MAYER, P. MOULTON
ALBANIAN IRREDENTISM MAY BE THE KEY The Weird Peking - Tirana Axis By ? Moulton Mayer Belgrade In Titograd the language is Serbian, and it is written in Russianstyle Cyrillic. Then comes...
...As far back as 1959, Ivan Goshnjak, his Defense Minister, branded Tirana's hostility as "bourgeois-nationalist Irredentist aspirations...
...None of this diminishes the rancor felt for Yugoslavia in Tirana...
...The Albanian leaders, he said, "sectarianly, anti-Leninistically defend the cult of personality [and] digress from the principal objectives of Marxism-Leninism, Proletarian Internationalism...
...One reason given for this is the backwardness of their homelands and the backlog of prewar educational neglect, now being remedied by Tito and his Party (there was not a single Albanian teacher in the prewar Kosmet...
...Interest has been focused almost exclusively on the veiled and fascinating attack against China which underlies Khrushchev's lambasting of Albania...
...To make a man give up his country, in other words, the economic advantages have to be substantial...
...Just as Stalin dropped the slogans of Marxism in 1941 and appealed to all Russians to defend the Fatherland, so Hoxha now conjures up joint "plots" by Tito, the Greeks and the U.S...
...Shiptar" is what the Serb or Croat calls his fellow-citizen in a white cap...
...Marry an Albanian...
...Finally, when Peking showed itself as an antagonist of both Moscow and Belgrade, the Albanian Communists found their natural ally...
...The Party has in fact bettered their lot, and they are doubtless happier under Tito than they were in prewar Royal Yugoslavia...
...The Albanian leaders probably hoped that Tito's downfall would bring back the Kosmet-Debar regions...
...Like Negroes in the U.S...
...If few in the West are aware of the nationalist reasons for Tirana's "mysterious" alliance with Peking, Tito himself knows them very well, of course...
...From 1945-48, the governments of Tito and Hoxha protested their "unbreakable and eternal" friendship...
...P. Moulton Mayer, a new contributor to these pages, is currently traveling in Eastern Europe...
...On the Yugoslav side, judging by what I saw from Montenegro to Greece, there are no such impediments...
...Ah," he said, "Nashi Shiptari [our Albanians], they don't have culture, and for this reason they are not allowed in the dining room...
...For Ulan Bator, Moscow is the defender against Peking...
...What can this mean...
...Even on an official constitutional level, Yugoslavia's Albanians get a dirty deal...
...And Albanian nationalism is very helpful to the otherwise unpopular Stalinist regime...
...But Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro were almost as backward as the Kosmet before the last War, and Yugoslavs from these areas have found room at the top in Belgrade...
...As one Yugoslav said, gazing across the frontier, "Who the hell would want to flee to Albania...
...Albanian nationalism has hardly been mentioned in public by the contestants...
...The Chinese would like to gobble up Outer Mongolia (they have done so in the past...
...Despite their lowly status, however, the Shiptari feel no apparent urge to return to their homeland—as long as Stalinism rules it, at any rate...
...or Britain, like Algerians in France or Sicilians in Milan, Albanians are at the bottom of the social heap in Yugoslavia...
...Outside of these limited fields, they take what is open to them—generally the hardest and worst paid jobs...
...All of the satellites followed suit—except Albania...
...The first Albanian opportunity to regain the lost regions occurred during the last War...
...Recently, for instance, across the Gobi desert from Outer Mongolia came a blast by the First Secretary of the Mongolian Peoples' Revolutionary party...
...The anti-Belgrade nationalism in Tirana has had some exotic repercussions in world politics...
...There are six "Peoples' Republics" in Titoland—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and so on each have one—and their local powers and local pride are real, not merely theoretical...
...Mine fields are reported along the water boundary through Lake Scutari, and a primitive but brutal iron curtain has been installed along the frontier by Hoxha's men...
...Coming by car from Montenegro during a recent trip, my first stop was at Pec...
...Tito's bitterest enemy today sits in Peking...
...some Yugoslavs would like to follow Stalin's old advice and gobble up Albania...
...For Tirana's Stalinists, Peking is the only available friend against Belgrade...
...Both in Tirana and in Ulan Bator, powerful friends are needed to bolster a precarious independence—and, if possible, recover the lost territories...
...According to Khrushchev, Stalin planned to "move his little finger" and eliminate Tito...
...True, the Yugoslav Albanians are helped by the Party's investment-boosting of the country's "underdeveloped areas," but less so than their Slavic or Montenegrin fellow citizens...
...One sees Albanian men everywhere in Yugoslavia...
...Sixth Fleet...
...The Albanians' bottom-dog position in Yugoslavia is also reflected in their conspicuous absence from the top reaches of politics, industry, the professions, and the arts...
...The Yugoslav leader and his colleagues, erstwhile "friends and protectors," became "revisionists, tools of American imperialism, Fascists" and, less ideologically, "swine, snakes, hyenas" and so on...
...This fury can hardly have been motivated by the rather obscure theoretical deviations on the "agrarian" and other "questions" for which Tito was drily lambasted in Stalin's Resolution...
...Ironically, in this obscure cranny of Europe only Fascism righted what by our accepted criteria was, and is today, a wrong...
...During this period nationalism proved stronger than mutual Communism, and the dominant Yugoslav nationalism prevented any move to return Tito's Albanians to their motherland...
...Not that Titoism should really be blamed for the situation of the Yugoslav Albanians...
...today, there are over 2,000 Albanian teachers there...
...Inside Albania, though, nationalism is still the strongest of all political motivations...
...Like themselves Mao Tse-tung was now a Stalinist, providing a bond between them...
...To be sure, you would not guess so from following the openly vicious polemic that has been going on between Tirana and Moscow since last October...
...Since Moscow and Peking still choose not to quarrel in the open, they attack one another via Albania...
...About 800,000 of them live in Tito's Federated Peoples' Republic, while within Albania itself the population is only 1.3 million...
...When the Axis dismembered Yugoslavia, they were especially bitter against the (as usual heroic) Serbs, and drew for Mussolinised Albania frontiers that for once included the whole nation...
...Albanais" is his name for a similarly white-capped citizen of Albania...
...Along the Yugoslav-Albanian border, in fact, it is not Tito's Albanians who flee homeward but Albanian Albanians who flee, when they can, into Yugoslavia...
...Nor, for that matter, do Western experts and commentators seem aware of Tirana's Irredentist aspirations...
...Besides its capital in Allied gratitude, Serbia also had a 500-year-old historical claim to the Kosmet area, once peopled by Serbs and later inhabited by the 800,000 Albanians...
...What is more, this fact probably lies at the root of that weirdest of political alliances, the one between Communist China and Stalinist Albania...
...Like Russia's Uzbeks and Tadjiks, the Albanian minority now at least has "full cultural freedom": newspapers, schools, books, local officialese—all in the Albanian language...
...The Allies automatically opposed this, thus alienating those non-Communist, non-Fascist Albanians who would have wished to fight with them...
...This strange language is Albanian and the people, though citizens of Yugoslavia, are Albanians...
...The Montenegrins, for example, supplied so many highechelon politicians and generals to the Federal capital that people in Belgrade jokingly used to call Dedinje (the district of VIP villas) "Cetinje" (the former capital of Montenegro...
...Well, the Outer Mongolians are as nationalistic as anyone else, and their brothers in Inner Mongolia live under a foreign power, China, just as the Kosmet Albanians live under Tito...
...Most of their women, like those of the Algerians in France, have stayed at home in the Kosmet...
...Then Stalin died, and Khrushchev, reversing the dictator's policies, patched things up with Tito...
...I asked him why the hotel's dining room (an incredibly dirty place with a sort of roughplank floor, where the table cloths were clotted rather than spotted with spilt rakija and djuvetch) was tenanted only by Serbs and apparently shunned by the Albanians...
...Yet the letter combinations are so odd and so exotic that one feels no nearer to the familiar than in Titograd...
...Then, in 1948, came the Cominform Resolution by which Stalin expelled Tito from the "camp of peace and Socialism...
...While no promises were made in public, a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia seemed very possible in 1949-51...
...The whole slanging match sounds as though it were concerned only with Marxism...
...Yet the Kosmet's population is twice as large as Montenegro's, and the Albanians have only an "Autonomous Region" inside the "Republic" of Serbia...
...The ideological tie was perhaps less important for Tirana, however, than Mao's virulence against the man occupying Albania's irredenta—Tito...
...No one in Belgrade would joke that way about the Albanians...
...For nationalism is generally stronger than economics, and the latter needs a long start in any race against a man's feelings about his own country...
...But Serbia—newly enlarged into Yugoslavia—was remembered for having made, in death and heroism, proportionately the largest contribution to the Allied victory...
...For the Albanians of Yugoslavia, the economic — and libertarian — advantages apparently are overwhelming...
...From this semantic confusion has come a self-deceiving notion among many Yugoslavs that "our Shiptari" are not at all the same nation as the Albanians...
...But beneath all the Marxism there is a large measure of nationalism, especially at the Albanian end of the Peking-Tirana axis...
...The smallest "Republic" is Montenegro...
...When the comrades next door are acting nationalistically in what you consider the wrong way, that's "bourgeois" — especially if they're threatening your own unacknowledged nationalism...
...Consequently this area, together with its largely foreign population, was handed over to Belgrade in 1918...
...their white skull caps always easily identify them...
...As is true of the Algerians, too, the Albanians have foraged out into regions of higher and richer employment: They have a monopoly on shoe shining and Turkish delight candy shops...
...The truth is that living is very much better under Tito: There is a lot more freedom and a good deal more butter...
...Literally overnight, between June 28-29, the Albanians ripped down Tito's photos...
...When peace returned, the prewar boundary between Albania and Yugoslavia returned with it...
...Even the usually omniscient Time has confessed that "just why tiny Albania should take Red China's part against the Russians is something of a mystery...
...Belgrade might now be Moscow's friend, but it remained Tirana's enemy...
...the real spite words for Premier Khrushchev and for Enver Hoxha, the Albanian Party chief, are "revisionist" and "dogmatist...
...Yet the Yugoslav Albanians still play a disproportionately minor role in their country of citizenship...
...The one I best remember was a tall, thin, enthusiastic Party member with a drooping black mustache...
...It's not surprising, therefore, that Tirana led the chorus against Tito, far surpassing Stalin's other satellites in violence—both verbally and, on the frontiers, militarily...
...In 1960, planned investments in Montenegro amounted to almost 50 per cent more than those in the Kosmet...
...Linguistically, Shiptar is the Albanian name for an Albanian, while Albanais is the Serbo-Croat name for one...
...The present frontiers were finally established just after World War I. To the peacemakers in Paris, Albania was a particularly obscure political entity...
...Life in Albania today must indeed be bitter...
...I spent a DDT'd night at Pec's Hotel Metohija, a fly-spotted caravansary more Middle Eastern than European in its smells and dirt...
...Thus he plays on the Albanians' fear for their country and poses as the guarantor of its existence...
...Nor is the Albanians' disfavored treatment confined to constitutional arrangements...
...The "mystery" probably has a very simple explanation...
...Then comes a wild mountain range and on the other side villages—still in Yugoslavia— where the writing on Peoples' Stores, Peoples' Militia stations and Party Headquarters returns to the Latin alphabet...
...Since the victors in Albania were Communists and the Albanian Party was a satellite of Tito's Party, there were no protests from the new Government in Tirana about the re-exiled Albanians...
...More likely, the Albanians' anger was bubbling beneath the surface while they were being bossed around by Belgrade, and there must also have been considerable resentment at Yugoslavia's occupying one-third of the Albanian nation...
...Unfortunately, the Party's help to the Albanians is marred and perhaps impeded by a traditional Yugoslav hypocrisy toward this minority, which is not even called by its proper name...
...Albania thus has a higher proportion of its people living under a neighbor's rule than any other country in the world...
...Mad dog" and "reptile," of course, are fairly standard epithets when Communists quarrel...
...The street and building signs in the town were in both Serbian and Albanian: I was in Tito's "Autonomous Region of the Kosmet," where two-thirds of the inhabitants are Albanians...
...a young Yugoslav said to me, "why, boga mi, I might as well marry a gypsy...
...The hotel's "executive" functionaries were Serbs...
...Titoism has bettered their status since the War, and one sees an occasional Albanian name on some Central Committee list—unthinkable in Royalist, days...
...And since this lost third of the nation is in Yugoslavia, Tirana must seek alliance with Belgrade's enemies to recover it...
...After the preservation of its own power, the number-one preoccupation of any regime in Tirana, be it Royalist or Communist, has been winning back the lost one-third of all Albanians...
...And since all of the disputants think of themselves as Communists, the quarrel must be expressed in terms of Marxist ideology...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 16
