Albania’s Troubled Road to Democracy

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

In 1985, Europe’s last surviving war-time leader, Enver Hoxha of Albania, died after 40 years of iron rule over the small Communist Balkan state which he had turned into one of the world’s most isolated and secretive countries.

The prison system was one tool of repression. Another was the secret police, the Sigurimi I Shtetit. It was the main institution in charge of verifying the ideological correctness of party members and ordinary citizens.

There were perhaps as many as 40,000 political prisoners among Albania’s three million people. It is estimated that about a quarter of the entire population was either imprisoned or murdered during Hoxha’s killer regime.

In 1967, the Communist Party banned all religious activity in the country and declared itself the world’s first atheist state. Communist tyranny left Albania among the world’s poorest countries.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin exerted an exceptional influence on Communist Albania both before and after his death. In 1948, when the Soviet Union expelled neighbouring Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, Hoxha had to choose between the two.

His decision to back the Soviet Union led to Albania’s geographical isolation, as the country’s overland trading routes now crossed enemy states.

Every year on May1, portraits of Stalin, were carried by workers through the streets of Tirana to celebrate the advance towards communism. The cult of personality around Stalin survived longer in Albania than anywhere else in the world.

But Tirana’s relationship with Moscow began to sour in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor’s crimes. Hoxha refused to break with his late mentor’s legacy, in part because destalinization in the Soviet Union had been accompanied by the reestablishment of relations between Moscow and Belgrade.

By 1961, when Albania formally broke relations with Moscow and Soviet ships and submarines left their Albanian bases, the state became yet more isolated.

Mao’s China had also rejected the new policies emanating from the USSR and offered some help to Albania, but the two countries lay far apart, and China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, could do little for Tirana.

When that relationship, too, dried up in the wake of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, Albania, which denounced the Sino-American rapprochement, was left on its own. It would remain stuck in a time warp for the next three decades.

Albania continued to be governed by Hoxha’s successors even after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and other east European nations emerged from under Communist domination. But protests, small at first, escalated, and in December 1990 Albania became a multiparty state.

Albanians, used to a top-down rigid command economy, found themselves struggling. At one point, two-thirds of the population had invested in pyramid schemes and lost what little savings they had.

The country faced civil unrest. It experienced emigration, dislocation, anarchy on the streets, and gangsterism. UN peacekeeping troops were brought in to quell the disorder.

Albania’s experience with democracy started slowly. The former Communist Party, which was renamed the Socialist Party (SP), won the 1991 election and ran the country until 1992.

That year, a decisive electoral victory was won by the anti-Communist opposition, led by the newly formed Democratic Party (DP). Albania began integrating its politics and institutions with the West. In 2009 Albania became a member of NATO.

In 2014 Albania was granted candidate status for accession to the European Union, but progress depends on the enactment of significant political and economic reforms. In 2020, the EU finally opened accession negotiations but there’s little enthusiasm for enlarging the bloc, which is itself in trouble.

In any case, corruption remains pervasive: The U.S. State Department on May 19 designated former Albanian prime minister Sali Berisha of the DP “persona non grata “for involvement in corrupt acts.” The former chief prosecutor of Albania, Adriatik Llalla, on Nov. 10 was sentenced to two years in prison for hiding money involved in illegally owned properties.

So the former Communists still remain a force. The current prime minister, Edi Rama, leader of the SP, won the April 25 election, defeating the DP’s candidate, Lulzim Basha. The SP, which has been in power since 2013, won 74 seats in the 140-seat parliament.