Hoxha's Holocaust

 

Albanian-American immigrant Nosh Mernacaj has written a mediocre but not entirely uninteresting memoir of rustic life with Growing Up in Communist Albania, self-published by the author this summer. He starts off on a bad footing with me when, in opening his book, he describes the ghoulish elation he felt in waking up in a fancy American hotel suite and hearing the US media report the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (whose name he renders “Ill”) in 2011. His mother’s family were shabby Albanian gentry who cherished “imaginary titles from the highlands” and “had enjoyed living in riches for decades” prior to the ascendancy of Hoxha’s Party of Labor of Albania, and his father and uncles were part of the underground resistance to regime. Consequently, his family was “from a class of people called ‘Të Prekun’. The direct translation to English is ‘the touched’, which has a connotation similar to ‘the possessed’, as in being controlled by daemons. This was a label used to identify people who dared stand up to the regime in any way,” he explains.

Mernacaj’s accounts of his persecuted relatives’ ordeals tend toward hagiography and are therefore far less intriguing than the mundane grotesqueries with which Growing Up in Communist Albania is partially concerned. The author’s incomplete mastery of the English language does, however, furnish occasional humor, as in this telling of his Uncle Gjergj’s escape to Yugoslavia: “Once at the riverbanks, having past all the military and police checkpoints undetected, they made the sign of the cross and said a short prayer, then removed all their clothes and tied them around their wastes [sic] in small plastic bags.”

“Albanian people were never happy during the reign of Communism,” Mernacaj insists with brutalist hyperbole: “Nothing was pleasurable or enjoyable. People were work machines and nothing else.” Communists, he writes, were “the barbarians of Albania”, and he is naturally at pains to establish a parallel between Hoxha and Hitler. “We had been put in a ghetto but without the Star of David on our arms,” he laments, also noting that Tepelenë, the internment camp to which some of his family members were sent, goes by the nickname “the Albanian Auschwitz”. Albania’s bureaucrats likewise “resembled the SS guards of Auschwitz”.

“The so-called judges were bureaucrats without any education of any sort, let alone legal,” he claims in a characteristically partisan and nuance-free description. “It didn’t really matter, because all they had to do is punish. The only question they had to answer was, how hard?” Unwittingly, Mernacaj makes me feel a twinge of sympathy for the brutal bureaucrats whose lack of sophistication clearly gives the author a sense of superiority over them:

Yet these uneducated people, who blindly took anything the Marxist doctrine had professed and implemented, had the power to sign orders they couldn’t even read or understand. Some of these people were pure illiterates who couldn’t even sign their names and instead simply dipped their thumb in paint and signed using their thumb prints (Albania seems to have been the pioneer of biometrics before anyone was even talking about it).

If the state of the Albanian people’s attainments was really so atrocious, then maybe a degree of authoritarianism was warranted. Mernacaj neglects to mention that the eradication of illiteracy was a top priority for the Party of Labor of Albania and that the public schools made impressive strides in this regard, the Stalinist indoctrination notwithstanding. Discipline was enforced on students, as well, and young men’s hair had to be kept at a reasonable length: “Of course, disobeying meant trouble and I’m not talking about a slap in the wrist. I’m talking about beatings, public humiliation, torture, and death.”

My favorite sections of Growing Up in Communist Albania are those relating the everyday frustrations of country life. Even if only half of the things Mernacaj writes are true, the standard of living outside the cities seems to have been almost unimaginably primitive, particularly for those who disadvantaged themselves by opposing the government. Albania’s infrastructure, for example, “was still 1950 technology with one telephone available for the whole town. The telephone was broken most of the time.” A bar of soap, unappetizingly, “was this block of greasy matter that smelled horrible and looked nasty. Even that was in short supply,” he gripes.

Then, too, there was the food. The author claims “a young guy was sentenced to fifteen years for saying the bread was awful” – a sentiment with which he fully agrees:

[…] eating Albanian corn bread was like eating yellow rubber. The bread was so hard to chew and often the corn seeds were not even ground. Mice and other non-edible items were routinely found inside the bread. By the time it reached our table, it had been through all the stages of refining to make it inedible, [so] that you had to develop special skills to be able to eat it. People got sick constantly and some died from dysentery and other diseases, some maybe even unknown to modern medicine since they only happened in this time and place.

The reader will want to wash down that bread with some milk:

My family of ten was entitled to about a liter of milk per day. […] Not only was the amount so little, it wasn’t even milk. By the time it reached my cup, it was less than half milk and the rest was mostly water. Before consuming the milk, my mother had to filter it through a fine net to keep the flies and other non-edible items out. That process of course reduced the size considerably and the more stuff was filtered, the more I grew anxious of having less milk left for me. I looked at the net getting fuller and the milk container getting smaller with anxiety. I wanted to stop my mother from letting certain items get away from the milk, so not to lose my ration. I stared at that milk with such admiration as if it were my first time seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Of course, the net kept large items out, but the dust and other small particles that were constantly part of the milk made it in anyway.

“The house was cold in the winter and hot in the summer,” Mernacaj continues to kvetch. “There were lots of mosquitos and no way of keeping them out of the house, so they bit us all night.” This, too, is presumably to be laid at the feet of Enver Hoxha, whose power to inflict even miniature miseries on his slaves was unbounded. “We did all we could to destroy the regime even if our actions did little to weaken it,” Mernacaj confesses. “I am proud to say that I took anything I could from the government property: lucerne, corn, cabbage, and whatever I could get my hands on.”

The author’s account of the unrest that marked the last years of Communist rule in Albania is expectedly one-sided, although he unconsciously drops indications that the sources of the anti-state agitation were not homegrown, conceding that he and his friends and countrymen who participated in protests “gathered around the radio and listened to Voice of America and Vatican Radio broadcasting in Albanian to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” The following incidents are particularly suspect, coming just a few months after similar happenings attending the Romanian “Revolution” of December 1989:

Kavajë on March 26, 1990. Fueled by the events of other Eastern European countries and protests in Shkodër, Albanians finally took to the streets in other cities, in particular Kavajë in central Albania. It all started during a soccer game at the stadium where people began chanting anti-communist slurs and calling for freedom and democracy. Many people were arrested. Demonstrations continued on the streets demanding the release of the ones arrested in the stadium. The situation escalated and a major protest quickly spread in the whole city. The chronological events of this major uprising were hidden to public by the regime, but we knew at the time that there were several dead and wounded by the bullets of secret police, national guard, sniper fire, and God knows what else that was deployed in secrecy by the regime.

In Romania, “terrorist” snipers putatively loyal to the Communist Party of Romania were similarly reported to have started massacring civilians to protect the government of Nicolae Ceausescu. “In Susanne Brandstätter’s documentary Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution aired on [the Franco-German] Arte television station some years ago, Western intelligence officials revealed how death squads were used to destabilize Romania and turn its people against the head of state Nicolai Ceaucescu,” points out Gearoid O Colmain:

Brandstätter’s film is a must see for anyone interested in how Western intelligence agencies, human rights groups and the corporate press collude in the systematic destruction of countries whose leadership conflicts with the interests of big capital and empire.

Former secret agent with the French secret service, the DGSE (La Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) Dominique Fonvielle, spoke candidly about the role of Western intelligence operatives in destabilizing the Romanian population.

CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy lists in its 1991 annual report, for example, $80,000 distributed for the use of a “Free Trade Union Institute” in Albania. “The first elections were held on March 31, 1991,” Mernacaj continues:

The elections were clearly and unequivocally manipulated and stolen and people were not having it. No one in their right mind believed this to be the will of the people. Demonstrations erupted again and this time with more fury. Several people were killed from sniper fire and their killers have yet to face the justice. Most notably, in Shkodër, three prominent Democratic leaders were shot dead in broad daylight at a peaceful demonstration.

William Blum, however, in his book Killing Hope, offers this very different picture of the situation in the region:

But for Washington policy makers, the important thing, the ideological bottom line, was that the Bulgarian Socialist Party could not, and would not, be given the chance to prove that a democratic, socialist-oriented mixed economy could succeed in Eastern Europe while the capitalist model was failing all around it.

Nor, apparently, would it be allowed in nearby Albania. On 31 March 1991, a Communist government won overwhelming endorsement in elections there. This was followed immediately by two months of widespread unrest, including street demonstrations and a general strike lasting three weeks, which finally led to the collapse of the new regime by June.   The National Endowment for Democracy had been there also, providing $80,000 to the labor movement and $23,000 “to support party training and civic education programs”.

“The transition to democracy in the southern tier of Eastern Europe – Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, the republics of the former Yugoslavia – has been slower, more arduous and unsteady” than in other European countries, the NED noted in its report for 1992, which also showed that the allotment for the “Free Trade Union Institute” had been increased to $100,500.

“For forty-eight years, the same tune played over and over again,” wails Mernacaj, whose beloved homeland is now so prosperous that he has no interest in living there:

Enver Hoxha, Party-Enver, Communism, Communist Party, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, War of Classes, Proletarian, Death to America, Death to Capitalism, etc.: these were the most commonly pronounced words everyone had to hear over and over again day and night at home, school, work, street, city, town, and every billboard on the side of the road. All music, arts, and literature were about the Party and its leaders. The Socialist Realism, as it was called, was the new and only genre in fine arts. Busts of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, Hoxha, even Mao Tse-tung of China, occupied the squares of cities and towns.

The Party of Labor of Albania “revered Stalin so much that his name, portrait, or statue were found everywhere: in government offices, classrooms, engraved in the valleys, on the side of the main roads, and billboards across cities and towns.” Meanwhile, I see a dystopian bus whoosh by with “DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION” emblazoned on its side in imposing script and find myself feeling almost sentimental to think that there was a time and place where a man could walk through the streets of his town and see nothing but “Death to America”, “Death to Capitalism”, and images of Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha. The irony never seems to occur to Mernacaj, however, that in moving to the United States he only traded one form of totalitarian ideology for another one ten times as dumb, but with, admittedly, more enticing food choices on the menu.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.