The New Albania
Editor's Note
In presenting this historical document on my blog, I wish to emphasize that the information and references contained herein reflect the context and knowledge available at the time of their original writing. As the curator of this space, my goal is to preserve the historical and cultural authenticity of the texts, while acknowledging that some perspectives and interpretations may have evolved or differ over time. This publication aims to offer readers an immersion into the era described, maintaining a faithful respect for its historical reality.
The New Albania
Lovett F. Edwards
The following article was written in December 1945[1], but conditions in Albania have not changed materially enough since then to diminish its value as a description of the background against which events, not only in Albania but over a great part of the Balkans, are to be viewed.
POST-WAR Europe is still filled with hatreds and suspicions, but behind all these lies a desire for better conditions and for a system of government in which the people, in the widest sense of the word, are to play a part. At the moment, there are two principal theories whereby this result is to be attained: the Anglo-American and the Soviet. They have not inaptly been named political democracy and economic democracy. Each pays lip service to the ideals of the other. They are not incompatible, but twenty years of embittered propaganda before the war have made them appear so.
The Dajti mountain near Tirana, the capital of Albania.
Between the geographical limits of these two conceptions of a new world order lie the Balkan countries, which have accepted the ideals inherent in both these systems. They are now trying to work out a democracy of their own, not modeled slavishly either on Anglo-Saxon or on Soviet forms but containing many features common to both and adapted to the needs of peoples who, though brave, intelligent, and hard-working, are still politically immature and to a considerable extent illiterate. Their governments are in the hands of men who have personally fought for the liberty they are now trying to mold into a political shape, men of goodwill and driving power, though often of little experience. Of this vast experiment, what is to be born?
Amongst the Balkan peoples who have fought bravely and successfully for their national liberty, perhaps the least known and the most interesting are the Albanians. For Albania has, so to speak, changed overnight from a picturesque country of rich landlords, backward peasantry, and feudal customs, to a political entity of quite another type.
In fact, the Albanians are trying to create in a few months or years a new state of society. The result is bound to be interesting.
To understand it, one must know something of the most recent history of Albania. This history is very little known to us, but I may assume that its main outlines are sufficiently familiar up to the Italian invasion of 1939, the flight of King Zog, and the consequent attempts of the Italians to bend the Albanian people to the Fascist system of government. Thenceforward the story is obscure. The world canvas was too overcharged for any save a few experts to interest themselves in what was happening in this mountainous and distant corner of the Balkans.
In July and August 1943, German troops began to arrive in Albania. Formerly, they had only passed to and fro on their way between Greece and Yugoslavia, where the Partisan armies were already in operation. Neubacher, the stormy petrel of South-East Europe, arrived in Tirana to take over control in the name of the Führer, first by underground methods and later, after the Italian armistice of September 1943, more or less openly. On September 9, the German army, forestalling any effective action by the Italian 9th Army then in occupation, took practical control of the country.
Technically, Albania was in a curious position. As a part of the Italian Empire, the puppet government then in control had declared war on the Allies and, later, was not specifically included in the September armistice. From the German point of view, Albania might have been regarded as a friendly and Allied state. At any rate, the Germans were content with a de facto occupation and set up an Albanian National Committee which, in the words of the official German news bureau, "was to assume responsibility for the Albanian nation on the basis of independence of the Albanian state". One of the first acts of this Committee was to revoke the decision of 1939 by which Albania was included in the Italian Empire and the throne offered to the House of Savoy, and also all decrees and laws passed since that date which were considered to endanger the interests of the state. These included the decree of June 1940 whereby Albania had declared war on the Allies. Thus, Albania, from a strictly legal point of view, became a neutral and independent state. To those unable to see the hollowness of these pretensions, the Germans could, and did, pose as the liberators of the Albanians and succeeded in inveigling many Albanians of good reputation to join them. It seemed that the Germans had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire and created another satellite state of the New Order in Europe.
But there was another side to the story. Ever since the Italian occupation, there had been Albanian Resistance movements of one kind or another, some of them mere sporadic bandit outbreaks, some of them sufficiently organized and protracted to be considered serious opponents of the local Fascist régime. It was a time of obscure struggle, out of which the leading parties and figures of the war of national liberation were to be born.
Albania's capital, Tirana, has a normal population of only 30,000; but its modern quarter compares favourably with other Balkan capitals. This it owes to the Italians, and most of their well-constructed buildings have survived the hard fighting that took place when the Germans were driven out in November 1944. Many of the smaller, older houses are, however, in ruins.
A bridge near Tirana wrecked by the Germans in their retreat
An Albanian sniper in the battle of Tirana, November 1944
Members of the Youth Labour Brigade cleaning up war damage.
Soon after the last German had been driven from the capital, the Provisional Government held a parade of all those elements of the nation which had contributed to the success of their Resistance. The Partisan army took pride of place, saluting war-widows on the reviewing stand. Festivities brought out treasured heirlooms in the shape of national costumes.
The National Liberation Army marches past: note the woman soldier.
A group of girls in national costume, with richly ornamented jackets.
Mothers and relatives of fallen Partisans join in the procession.
As in Yugoslavia, the Partisan movement was originally created and organized by the Communist party, but it cannot be too often pointed out that the Balkan Communists were, and are, also ardent patriots with a clear-cut scheme not only of Partisan warfare but also of eventual social and political reform which they are now putting into practice. This programme, if carefully considered with a view to local conditions, would win the support of any fair-minded Englishman, and if their methods have sometimes been a trifle violent, it cannot be expected of a Balkan people that they will deal temperately with persons whom they consider less as political enemies than as collaborators with the enemy and therefore traitors both to their party and to their country. In fact, both in Yugoslavia and Albania, the Partisan movement has rallied to its cause many of the finest elements, irrespective of their party.
Amongst other powerful forces operating for the Partisan movement was the Bektashi Moslem sect, a sort of Protestant Islam, which has very great influence in Albania.
Without going too deeply into the events of the War of National Liberation, I will attempt to outline its main course.
A few miles from Tirana is the village of Petrella, where the author was interned by the Italians in 1941. The castle of Petrella, dating from 1443, was a stronghold of Skanderbeg (1405-68), Albania's national hero. Baptized George Castriota, he was renamed Skanderbeg (Alexander Bey) at the Turkish court and became a general. In 1443, he led an Albanian revolt and for 25 years kept powerful Turkish forces at bay.
The valley of the Erzen seen from Petrella Castle.
That is a very bald account of the struggle carried out by a small people for its liberty and independence, and it is the men who organized and carried out that struggle who rule Albania today. They are fighters and generally look it; and they are not always tender to those whom they consider their enemies. But they are at least manly in their treatment of their prisoners, and there is little or none of that revolting cruelty which has stained the reputation during this war of many peoples whom we are wont to consider far more civilized. In the summer of 1941, I was myself captured in Montenegro by the Italians and confined for some months in the political prison at Tirana. This winter, I again visited the place of my imprisonment and, though any prison looks about the same, I found the present occupants less crowded, cleaner, and treated far more humanely than were myself and my companions, several of whom now hold high positions in the Albanian state.
Another point cannot be too strongly emphasized when speaking of the Partisan struggle in the Balkans: however fanatic and well-organized, no Partisan army could have resisted the long campaigns, especially in the bitter Balkan winter, without the active help of the mass of the people, the peasants. In the long hours when the Partisans were resting in the peasant houses, waiting for the German columns, they not only prepared their order of battle, but also discussed their political ideals with the peasants who fed and supported them. That is the strength of the new Albania. The peasants supported the fighters, most of whom were themselves peasants. They got to know and to approve the Partisan programme of Enver Hoxha, and today the peasants, more than 90 per cent of the population, support the Partisan reforms. As long as this spiritual bond lasts, the Partisan movement will be strong in the Balkans. If it is weakened by political experiment, then almost anything may happen. At present, save for a certain amount of inevitable post-war reaction, the bond is still strong.
I was talking with the director of the national finances of Albania and he said that the thing that struck him most in this new Albania that has arisen, was the altered bearing of the peasants who came to pay their taxes. In former days the peasant was more or less a serf in the districts where the rich begs held their lands—a good part of the country. He was servile, suspicious, and obviously hostile. Today he walks as a free man, the owner of his land, and conscious that he is a participant in his own state. Incidentally, he pays far less taxes. In old days the condition of the tenant farmers was feudal in the worst sense of the word. The peasant farmed the land and kept the flocks and herds. For the mere fact of ownership, the landlord took from him a third of his field produce and what he pleased of his animals. Further, the peasant had to provide free transport for the beg when and where required. There were also other charges. To find a parallel to such conditions in English history one must go back to the days of Stephen or John. For the real basis of the Partisan states is the agrarian reform, which is in fact no more than the age-old cry of all peasant social reformers: 'The land to him who works it'. But in Albania, it is a new cry and has created a new class of peasant farmers who are the ardent supporters of the New Order. At Lushnja, for example, I have seen peasants come to the central committee office of the Albanian National Front to ask, 'When shall I be able to vote? I want to thank the government for the land that it has given me.' Whatever may be said of the parades and processions in the capital, this sort of thing is not faked, and it is this, rather than the shouting and the reiterated inscriptions, that makes the strength of the movement.
So far, the reform has been applied mainly in the rich lands of the Musikaja and Korça plains, where it is a comparatively easy matter to allot the farming lands. It will be more difficult in the mountains where fields are small and the land infertile, as critics have quite rightly pointed out. But I can hardly think that the government will try to scamp a reform so essential both to the people and to themselves, and if a certain exchange of population from the arid mountains to the rich plains is involved, it will probably not be a bad thing. At the time of writing, I have just come back from a longish tour of southern Albania. This part of the country I had not known before the war, but had heard much of it from the enthusiastic reports of many friends. They would be sorely grieved to see it now. In the larger towns—Korça, Argyrokastro, Elbasan, Tirana—only a certain number of damaged buildings tell of the passage of war, though nearly a quarter of picturesque Berat has been burnt. But visit the smaller towns, once so beautiful. Kelcyre is a cluster of makeshift huts and a dirty market-place above a ruined bridge; Permet is so battered that it is doubtful if it will be possible to rebuild it on the same site, and it is hard to tell the houses from the roughly cobbled winding streets; in Leskovik, once a popular health resort famous for its wines, only four houses remain habitable. The lovely villages along the road to Korça—Barmash, Borova, Vithkuq, and many others—are now merely formless heaps of stone. But there is little use making a disquisition on modern ruins now; most of us have seen far too many of them. The point here is that for miles and miles there is nothing else.
In mitigation of this desolate story, it is pleasant to know that the relief programme of the United Nations is becoming very effective.
Albania has no railways, no navigable rivers, and the road shown above is no worse than many. Despite these very poor communications, UNRRA distributed over 600,000 tons of supplies, which included 50,000 tons of foodstuffs, in the nine months since relief operations began in Albania in August 1945, providing 520 vehicles for their conveyance.
UNRRA flour being landed at Durazzo.
Although work only commenced in August this year, much has already been done, and the warehouses of Durazzo (Durrës) and Valona (Vlone) are full of goods, food, medical requirements, and clothes. Here, however, as throughout the Balkans, the real trouble is, and for some time will be, that of transport. Albania has no railways and no navigable rivers; therefore, all goods must be transported by road. However much there may be in the port warehouses, this is of little good to the mountain villages until some means of transport is available. Shipping difficulties – the Germans destroyed the port installations – held this up for some little time. But on the day I left Tirana, UNRRA[3] officials had arranged for the delivery of lorries through the Yugoslav port of Gruž, and a first large convoy arrived at Tirana. It was in itself an impressive sight. But it became more impressive when one recalled that food distribution by lorry in these southern areas of devastation is a race against death. For the upland villages, when once snowbound, are cut off from the world for months at a time, and without an adequate supply of food, the people living in them are almost certainly condemned to death by slow starvation.
Many thousands of young people helped the Partisan army during the years of resistance. The Youth Movement even had its own 'underground' newspaper, regularly published despite enemy occupation. This boy is speaking at a Youth Congress.
Agriculture, the staple of the Albanian people, has suffered very severely during the war. Not only have farms and villages been destroyed and the flocks and herds reduced to a fraction of their pre-war strength, but the fields themselves have been left untilled for many years, and agricultural production has consequently dropped. One of the effects of the agrarian reform has been a threefold increase in the area sown in 1945, but it will be some time before this advance is evident in production. In the agricultural field, the work of UNRRA has been of inestimable value. It has imported quantities of seed wheat and also forage crop seeds, fertilizers, and machinery. A number of tractors have been imported, and the Albanians taught how to use them. At first suspicious, the peasants have now begun to realize their value. UNRRA, however, is trying to introduce even more far-reaching improvements in agricultural production. It is not its job to regenerate Albanian agriculture, but it is its job to see that the masses get enough food, and an extensive scheme of irrigation will do much to help this. In some fields near Shkodra, production would increase from four to forty quintals of wheat with more adequate irrigation. UNRRA is also importing up to 5000 head of cattle, a number of selected animals for breeding, and about two million vines to help in the recovery of the wine trade.
Those who criticize UNRRA's operations those in the more accessible parts of Europe may have good reasons; but the aid it provides is a necessity for these out-of-the-way Balkan lands, and no considerations of policy or personal pique should be allowed to hinder the valuable work it is doing.
What, you may ask, remains of Albania as a land? Is it still the old picturesque, mediaeval land that has so often been described? It is not. Of course, no one can change the shapes of the mountains and the river gorges. The natural beauty and grandeur of the land cannot be diminished. But the human genius for destruction has certainly done its best to remove all the handiwork of man. And the new Albania that will be, and is being, rebuilt will not be the same as the old.
Besides the material destruction, there have been other changes that the tourist may regret since he only looks at the country and does not have to live in it but which the people themselves have accepted. We may regret the picturesque crowd of gaily dressed semi-savages who lent such colour to the landscape. But no one of goodwill can regret anything else. Probably for the first time, townspeople and peasants have become inextricably intermingled. Survivors from the devastated villages have found shelter in the larger towns. In the Partisan battles, the townsmen have fought beside, or been commanded by, peasants. On the other hand, the peasants have seen the townsmen doing work for which they know they themselves have neither the education nor the experience. The tendency towards a false sophistication which the Italians had begun to import into Tirana society - the Albanians describe them as masters in corruption - has been ruthlessly checked, and few traces remain. Thanks to these same Italians, who are excellent builders, the modern quarter of Tirana is probably the most comfortable and luxurious of all Balkan capitals, though still on a small scale. But the citizens of Tirana have not thereby become separated from the mass of the people whom they must organize and control.
There are two other results of the war which are of first-rate importance in the development of the Albanian people - the emancipation of women and the struggle against illiteracy. Before the war, the Albanian woman, save for a few beautiful and well-educated leaders in Tirana and perhaps Korça, was a byword. A proverb of the Dalmatian coast puts the situation very well: 'There are three things that get no rest; a Dalmatian donkey, a Catholic church-bell, and an Albanian wife.' In the Partisan
struggle, women took a leading part. Many actually fought in the ranks or even became officers. They did well. As an Albanian officer put it to me, 'Some of them did extraordinary deeds of bravery, and we too fought better and harder. We could not let it be seen that a woman was a better soldier than we were.' Others nursed, did necessary secretarial or propaganda work behind the lines. Many suffered for their actions. In the market-place of Argyrokastro, two young girl Partisans were hanged in sight of the people by men of the Balli Kombëtar only just over a year ago. It is true that the pre-war Albanian worked his women hard and regarded them as of far lesser importance than his sons or brothers. But he honoured them within the home, and this action horrified and disgusted him. Telling me the story, a simple peasant said bitterly, 'This sort of thing has never happened amongst us before.'
The low status of Albanian women was for long proverbial: it was part of the general backwardness in a country where nearly three-quarters of the people are Moslems. Their activity as Partisans has earned them political emancipation.
Well, they probably did not die in vain. For now, the Albanian woman has equal rights in the state and in the administration. It may be some time before old prejudice entirely dies—one old peasant told me he would never allow his wife to vote: 'It is the first step towards infidelity'—but it is dying. Amongst many others, one of the poet-composers of the Partisan movement is a woman working at the Tirana Radio station. Illiteracy is still a problem. But the Partisans claim that it has been reduced by 20 per cent, and it is certainly true that this people has now a lust for learning. I visited many schools and was impressed by the eagerness and diligence of the pupils, both young and old. Also, the army has done much. It is rare today to find a soldier who cannot read. It may be a slow and tortoise-like proceeding, but he understands in the end. When I visited the criminal prison in Tirana, I found an illiterates' class with eager pupils hoping for better things on their release.
Another thing is worth bearing in mind. Now that the war is over, most Englishmen want to get out of the army and forget the war as soon as possible. Therefore, we look with considerable misgiving on the continual parades of the states of South-East Europe and the martial fervour of their songs and emblems. But it must be remembered that these people look on their armies with different eyes. To them, they are the visible sign of their liberation and a source of pride and, in a lesser way, of education for the young men. There is a bad side to all this—for one thing, it is a little too reminiscent of the early days of Fascism. But on the other side there is a genuine love and admiration for the soldiers who freed the country and the taint of professionalism is not yet. The national revolution was largely the work of the men of the south. Enver Hoxha, Myslim Peza, Kochi Xoxe and the other leaders and generals are all southerners. So are almost all the members of the government.
Enver Hoxha, ex-schoolmaster and leader of the Democratic Front, addresses his followers, who comprise the only recognized party in Albania today. It has grown from the Partisan movement which, sporadically at first but from 1942 with growing coherence, harassed the Italians and, later, the Germans. The peasantry 90% of the population-strongly supports it.
Naturally, therefore, the men of the mountains in the north have taken less kindly to the new reforms. For one thing the reconquest of these areas was accomplished far more quickly and there was less time for the Partisans to explain their actions. Tribal custom and costume was much more firmly established here, and the rule of the local bayraktars was more local and personal and less oppressive than that of the begs and aghas in the centre and south. Also the northern tribes are Catholic and the priesthood was suspicious and hostile to the flavour of Communism in the Partisan movement. They are loyal to the old ideals which had much of greatness and nobility in them, to the ancient Kanun of Lek Dukagjini with its strict rules of hospitality and blood vengeance. Also their minds move slowly. But they too are gradually realizing the value to themselves of the new reforms.
For the south has always been the more progressive part of the country. Here, for the most part, the people are Orthodox and there is a strong flavour of Greek culture and, indeed, a considerable Greek minority. But as we know from our own history after the Norman Conquest, a foreign cultural infusion may often intensify and stimulate a national movement. Greece has been a foster-mother, but she is not Shqiptar, not a Son of the Eagle. What most intrudes itself upon the observer of Albania now is the contrast with the past. Probably, after some years, the essential resemblances of old and new and the sense of continuity between past and present will become more apparent. But that time is not now. Those who only knew Albania before the war will be today the worst guides to her development. For the new spirit that is abroad in Central and South-Eastern Europe is stirring very deeply in the hearts of the Albanian people. I will be no prophet. Perhaps when the Partisan genera- tion grows older there may be a slowing-up of the process, of the current of reform; there may even be, though that is less likely, a certain amount of reaction towards old ideas and old customs. But it is sure that what has been gained will not be lost; and for those who love and respect the Albanian people and who do not look upon the land merely as a conglomeration of picturesque feudal castles, customs and ceremonies, that is a great thing.
[1] This article is a direct
reproduction of the original material from "THE GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE,
JULY 1946
[2] "Balli Kombëtar," the
Albanian term for "National Front," was a political and military
organization active in Albania during the Second World War. To preserve
historical accuracy, the original name "Balli Kombëtar" is typically
retained unchanged in texts, regardless of the document's language.
[3] The UNRRA (United Nations Relief
and Rehabilitation Administration) was an international organization
established during World War II to assist countries affected by the war,
providing humanitarian aid and support in reconstruction.
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