For four decades after World War Two, tiny Albania was hermetically sealed. The Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, banned religion, private property, and “decadent” music such as the Beatles’. Secret police arrested critics and border guards shot people who tried to flee. But as communism crumbled across the Eastern Bloc, the regime loosened its grip.
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Pressed by demonstrations and poverty, in late 1990 the communists allowed other parties to exist. In early 1992, more than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a democratically elected government came to power and started to bring Albania in from the cold.Albania. The dry, rocky mountains of Montenegro drew near as the plane decended from the north.
Abdelmadjid Tebboune became Algeria’s president last week. The vote was marred by a record high abstention rate of nearly 60%, forcing Tebboune to deal with concerns over his legitimacy, while seeking political consensus and containing the army’s influence. Former Prime Minister Abdelmadjid. And he also lost his fear of individuals and of his superiors. He presented his ideas to them, and soon he had been advanced into the sales department. He had become a valued and much liked member of his company. This night, in the Hotel Pennsylvania, Patrick O'Haire stood in front of twenty-five hundred people and told a gay, rollicking story.
The high peaks of Albania rose to the left, flashing their fangs to the sky. The jagged teeth settled into deep valleys and dense forests that held the highlanders I had read about and would soon meet for myself.The mountains got shorter and rounder as the plane slid south. The gray rock ran down the country’s eastern length like a spine. Albania is a small country, a saying goes, but it would grow ten times if it were ironed flat.
On the western side. A balding head and soft face gave Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, a gentle look. His speech and manners were calm and measured, not the attributes of a forceful man. But dark eyes and a sly smile betrayed a clever and ambitious operator with a skill for working his way up the communist elite. A young Partisan during World War Two, Alia survived forty years of purges and sweeps.In some ways, Hoxha’s attempt to protect his legacy might have aided Albania. True to form, Alia was a less dogmatic character who dealt with changes in Eastern Europe and Albania as.
Bujar Alikaj was a jovial street guy, a thirty-year-old bus driver from the Kombinati neighborhood of Tirana—the workers’ area named for the textile mill Kombinati Stalin. Throughout Albania, Bujar’s generation of young men, most of them unemployed, all of them gazing west, was making the regime nervous. They had rioted in Kavaja and were restless in other towns. They were not overtly political but they wanted the system to change. They saw how a clique of elites was carousing in the Block at their expense.Bujar had known he wanted to leave Albania since 1979, when he started teaching. The student quarter of Tirana, called Student City, sits atop a low hill in the southeast of the capital. In 1990, the squat beige-and-gray dormitories surrounded an open area consisting of concrete and trampled grass.
The communist elite controlled most aspects of Albania’s political shift, but that autumn the students took charge of that drab hilltop and rattled the regime.Ramiz Alia and the party leadership grasped the regime’s precarious state. They postponed the start of classes for two weeks, claiming that some university buildings needed repair.
When classes began, party functionaries condemned “the vagabonds” who had stormed the embassies. Student City rejoiced. The last communist party of Eastern Europe had succumbed. Students, professors, and workers hugged, sang, and cheered. They also began to plan.
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The students wanted to form a party of students and young intellectuals, as they had told Alia, but some professors and Tirana intellectuals proposed an organization with broader scope. While jubilant crowds cheered in Student City, a small group discussed what they called a “real party”—a party that went beyond the confines of student life.The people involved gave different versions of the discussions and debates, but all agreed that approximately twenty people made. Albania’s first day without Enver Hoxha had bright sun. Tirana residents strolled outside, gawking at the empty pedestal in Skanderbeg Square. But the monument’s fall sent tremors from Shkoder to Gjirokaster. As the students had intended, their actions pierced the regime.The government warned against anarchy and accused the Democratic Party of inciting the attack.
The Central Committee called on citizens to restore order. “No honest and patriotic person should stand by with arms crossed,” a statement said.
“They should organize on the basis of neighborhood, quarter, street, shift, enterprise or institution in order that, together with the communists, they. Early in the morning of April 10, 1994, around 2:00 a.m., a small group of armed men crept towards an Albanian army outpost near the southern village of Peshkopia, not far from the border with Greece. It was the last night of a three-month training course for Albanian border guards, and the soldiers slept in the simple barracks. The intruders approached silently and opened fire without warning, killing two soldiers and seriously wounding three, before slipping into the dark.The Albanian government quickly blamed a “Greek terrorist commando” and demanded the Greek government take responsibility.
One of the attackers spoke.
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March 2023
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