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Albanian Heritage: From Uncle Enver to Uncle Sam
Posted on Friday, September 08 @ 10:14:12 UTC by acl
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Albania : a Model-Story of (Post)Communism
By Ivaylo Ditchev - Associate professor at the chair of History and Theory of Culture, at the University of Sofia "St. Kliment Ohridski", as well as associate professor at the chair of European Studies at the same University, and at the chair of Sociology at Paris-10, Nanterre. This article was first published in 2001
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Communist Propaganda on millions of Slogans on every streets of Albania claiming "The Victory of Socialism over Capitalism"
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If one wants to understand what the East Europe went through, he should study the laboratory case of Albania. For less than half a century this small country experimented not only the hard variant of Stalinism, but, after the divorce with Moscow in 1961, the Chinese cultural revolution and finaly, after the break with Pekin, a sort of isolationist national communism. The show of Causescu’s death on TV is said to have been the turning point for this last fortress of communism : after students protest actions, a first pro-communist vote in 1991 due to fear, in mars 1992 the new-formed Democratic party wins a conciderable majority. Changes seem the most radical of all East-european countries : the country passes almost with no transition from outright dictature to a sort of Balkan ultraliberalism, ressembling the dissolution of the state. There is no age-long tradition to go back to ; communist regime takes more of the half of the 81 year’s independant existence of the country.
The ruins of modernity
The first impression of travellers to Albania is inevitably that a sort of desastre has taken place, an earthquake, a war. The port of Durrës welcomes you with the picture of sunk ships, overthrown trains and policemen wearing machineguns. The funny one-man hemispherical bunkers will certainly remain the main monument of the regime, testimony of a great paranoid passion of a Leader, that dreamt of a people dying for him up to the last man. There are several hunderds of thousand thoughout the countryside : bunkers in yards or cornfield, bunkers on beaches, gazing thoughtfully at the sea, bunkers on public squares used as WC.
Most of the trees in the towns or around the roads are cut for heating during the last two years af crisis. At a temperature that approaches 40° C this gives the country a toutch of desert. Not only the prefabricated dull monuments of communist exploits have been under assault. All that was public (“collective”) property is broken or stolen. One may wonder at a factory with hunderds of window panes out of which no single one is spared. Schools cannot function for lack of doors and desks. Age-old Parisian buses drive around Tirana without headlights. There are no dustbins in the street since the fall of the regime, rubbish piles up in front of blocks. The attempt of the new govenrment to try to reinstore medical control on the meat, sold in the market place, has been criticised as restauration of communism. Who can tell where dicature finishes and where legal power begins ?
A strange feeling : there are no tourists anywhere, not one single German did I see for one whole month. There is nothing to spend money for, no souvenirs ; waste seashores, kilometres of road in the mountains without one single car. The pre-dilapidated (to use the Champseix’s expression) blocs of flats, symbol of modernity, contrast sadly with the marvelous landscapes. These blocs are ruins from the very beginning not only because of bad materials and technologies ; what strikes, just like in the other (post)communist countries, is the complete negligence of the inhabitants about all that is outside their own flat. In Tirana an average inhabitant will never paint but the space surrounding his balcony, leaving the rest of the bloc at the mercy of the natural element. But once you cross the doorstep of someone’s flat, you will be shocked by the contrast to the scenery outside. Although there is water for less than three hours a day, appartments are proper and cosy, often decorated with porcelain deers, plastic flowers and copper Skanderbeys (the national hero), as well as coloured photographs of foreign advertisements depicting, say, Japanese girls in bathing suits. Under the bloc where I stayed there was a big anti-atomic shelter, used as a dustbin ; no one thought of transforming it into something useful ; burying the past seemed to be more important than living space.
The two fetishes of the new capitalist utopia are the car and the TV set. Like all human dreams, these are the result of an interdiction. In fact, until 1991 it was not allowed to own a private car in Albania. Today a car is the symbol of absolute social success. Transportation is the least of its functions. You can see two guys in an old Audi, decorated with innumerable aerials, stickers and coloured headlights making the “giro” , talking to friends through the window without getting off. Cars come from abroad and their happy owners always keep the plate indicating the country of origin ; for some this seems not enough and they add a second or third plate, so that you see cars indicating Italy, Germany and Swizerland at the same time. The car is a piece of foreign soil of which you dispose ; it poses problems of soverenty, not of utility. That explains the general obsession with its protection. In a country where gazoline is sold in bottles by men sitting on the sidewalks, in every town there are several guarded parking places surrownded by high fences and this seems to be one of the most profitable businesses.
The TV set has a longer history.
As it was the case in East Garmany, the capturing of foreign programs (Italian, Yougoslav, Greek) was the main alternative of the communist propaganda. Watching foreign TV was punished by prison or camp until the mid-eighties ; vigilant neighbours could burst into your flat to make sure you’re on the official channel. Few people could afford to by a TV set, even fewer could find one in the state owned shops and still fewer managed to accomodate secretly their aerials in order to catch the RAI. One can imagine the atmosphere of conspiracy reigning around the blue screen, that often gathered together a whole street. Even now, there seems to be some surrealist aspect in the watching a serial like “Dallas” in a country where a chinese bicycle is luxury. In the absolute absence of basis for comparison, TV reality creates a fantastic paradise-like world, where everything is taken for granted. No surprise that the emigrants of the embassies-squat after arriving in the West, claimed the immediate distribution of cars and appartments thinking that westerners are given such things by the state. America is largely preferred to Europe for the simple fact that American serials show more richness than European ones (film-makers should think about this unexpected responsability, layed on their shoulders). TV was constantly on whereever I went, since early morning. Not that they look at it ; it has a symbolic function to exhibit wealth as grand mothers do with their silver and porcelaine in the sideboard. The precious “abroad” is appropriated and captured in the box of the Sanyo like in a vase ; at the difference of cars, that are under the unique control of men, the TV set seems a more feminine attribute.
The ambivalences of communism
The absence of shades and nuances in this culture brings out the major axes of ambiguity on which the communist regimes were built. There was, first of all, the wish to make a “clean sweep of the past”. In this respect communists radicalized a policy begun aready by the king Zog, that aimed at overcoming the unritten law of the Kanun , implying vendetta and sovereignty of the family’s patriarch. They certainly succeded better than him : powerful means of “persuasion” were at their disposal. About the beginning of the 70s women wore no longer the weil and marriages by love were preferred to those by arrangement (the former were praised as the best guarantee for demographic growth). A shy emancipation of the woman was under way so that today some say that during communism it was women who goverened (in a sort of Aristophanian travesissement) and that’s why all went wrong.
The party introduced itself actively into the fortress of the family ; it had far better chances to do so than any legal or democratic institution as, in itself, it was something like a family. It happened that young people, wishing to marry against the will of their parents, saught protection at the local party headquarters.
What is more, the party monopolized a powerful instrument of modernity, that was hardly known before : divorce. It had to permit a divorce, but it could also provoke it as in the case of the so called political divorces where pressure was exercised on one of the partners to divorce if some relative of the other side had been declared “ennemy of the people”. In the beginning of the 60s hundreds of russian women, married to albanians, were thoughn out of the country ; nowadays there are fathers who see their children for the first time at the age of 30. To refuse divorcing in such a case signified not only to share the fate of your partner’s family which were entirely repressed (up to cousins or nieces), but also to expose to persecutions your own blood relatives. Let us precise that in this culture, obsessed with virginity, where even king Zog had to show the chairman of Parliament the nightdress of queen Geraldine after the wedding night, a divorced woman can rarely find another husband ; neither is it possible for her to live on her own.
The wish for liberation from the oppressive family of the young, who wanted to get away, live in towns, study, escape from the fatality of the patriarch’s will and from neighbours’ opinion, supplied steam for the engine of communism. But at the same time - a culture cannot make to big a jump - the place of the “Earth”, as a village assembly of family patriarches was called, was taken by “uncle Enver” whose photograph hung in every single home. There is a paradox in the fact that the party fought against its main rival, the family by using the notion of collective guilt making the individual had to suffer for the “crimes” of any of his parents - in clan-structured Albania this practice was carried to the extreme. And then, wasn’t the anonymous denounciation a bureaucratic metamorphosis of vendetta ?
The party had become a sort of generalised family authority and it was not by chance that mainly young people triggered off the events of 90/91. Leaving the country or at least getting rid of uncle Enver (“1908 - immortal”, as was written under his portraits) : these were the two axes of the revolt. Ramiz Alia, the pseudo-reformer succeding at the head of the party, made appeal to the parents of the revolutionaries - of the squatters in the embassies and later of the hunger-strikers in the campus - in order that they try to bring to reason their children and take them home. Heart-breaking scenes were said to have taken place at both sides of the police-surrounded fences. Wasn’t Albanian communism demographically condemned by the very fact that 65 % of the population is under 30 ?
There is a puritan aspect of a materialistic doctrine like marxism-lelinism that is often neglected. In fact, Albanian communism was fighting on two fronts : a part of tradition, religion and family rule it interdicted bluejeans, black spectacles, women’s handbags and all attributes of fashion, seduction or sexuality. The events of 90/91 played, for the young generation of Tirana the role of sexual revolution. It was, in a way, Tirana’s 1968 : its result is not yet visible on the economic plane, but at least the immediate aims were attained ; western music is everywhere, girls wear make-up (that used to be forbidden before marriage) and coloured fashionable dresses, sometimes quite short, and what’s more, they stay out until ten o’clock. One can see youg couples holding their hands or even kissing in a darker corner. (In this respect the smaller towns lag behind.)
The spirit of fortress
As throughout the rest of Eastern Europe, the central fixation here is the “abroad”. Even more so in Albania where fences often are higther than houses. There is hardly a person that doesn’t want to emigrate and most families have sometone in Grece, America or Italy on whose cheques and presens they rely. The democratic gouvernment, elected in 92 even created a ministry of emigration, counting of the “Gastarbeiter” as on a serious economic ressource. Albanian parents, reputed for not giving away their daughters to foreigners, today dream of marrying them abroad (I heard village-people hoping to get in return a car as dowry).
And still the mistrust towards foreigners remains. Not only that children can through stones at your car, that policemen try to make you pay every hundred meters or that in the restaurant they ask your albanian guide whether it will be he who pays or you before fixing the price. In the absence of techniques of transition from one culture to another (including the general ignorance of foreign languages), the relation to foreigners is stripped of all nuances : it is all or nothing, either you jump on the ship trying to merge with the foreign country, or the you reject the other with a feeling of superiority, founded on high your ignorance.
That seems to explain the 180° turn in the policy of a country, that had banned loans and foreign investments by the article 28 of 1976’s Constitution and that today relies almost exclusively on humanitarian aid. In negating to such a paranoid degree all manifestation of international aid and solidarity, uncle Enver had created an unrealist belief in the dimension of this solidarity ; thus deception seems imminent. The new authorities will certainly learn how to manage the emigration black-mail and the terrorist usage of the images of suffering in order to keep the aid coming. In this respect Albania seems closer to the third world, whare corruption goes often hend in hand with the ambiguous humanitarian policy of the rich counties. A big scandal revealed recently that the ex-chairment of Parliament, member of the socialist (ex-communist) party was embezzling eight millions of dollars providing from humanitarian aid in association with Italian officials.
If the rich West is the object of abmivalent love-hate feelings, the other post-communist countries are simply disdained. That life in Macedonia or Poland might be better, seems difficult to swallow ; Bulgaria seems to be much more distant than, say, France. Such countries remind albanians of their past, and it is precisely this past thet they want to forget. The feeling of exceptionalism does not dissappear : Enver tried to persuade Albanians they were exceptionally happy, what they retained was that they are exceptionnally miserable. It is difficult to convince them that Stalin’s Russa was quite similar to what they had lived through ; a guy, wearing a swastika around the neck, whom I asked whether he knew about the nazy crimes, said that all communists had been telling was anyway false. Some people were really insulted when I tried to explain them that not only the structure of the communist regime, but even its fall was almost identical all over the East : with the assault of statues, the round tables, the convertion of communists into socialists, the problem of police files etc.
There are, so to say, two types of foreigners : the neighbour who resembles me and whom I distrust ; and then the “real” foreignner who is far away (overseas, if possible) and whom I worship. Didn’t the communists rely on the Soviet Union and then on China to support them against their closest neighbours, Yougoslavia ande Greece ? Nowadays you can hear people saying that Albania should become a sort of Israel inside Europe (a pro-american bastion amidst hostile neighbours) ; they calculate what benefit the Vlora base could bring to the country if lent to the US army.
Uncle Sam seems to take the place of uncle Enver. Americans will not oppose an eventual re-islamisation of the country (where religion was forbidden by law since 1967) and the mosques seem to be the price for the islamic humanitarian aid in the same way in which after the war they payed the russiens by statues of Staline. As to the converted communist party (25% of the votes in 1992), it seems to be more Europe and especially Italy-oriented, criticizing the democratic party for inviting the American embassador at their rally ; a geopolitical fluctuation seems to be their only chance to reestablish some sort of legitimity in a country that looks at them as Italians consider the mafia.
Apart of the abroad-neurosis, the most serious problem before Albania is what I will call : work ethics. In 1991 the actual president Sali Berisha had appealed not only for an economic, but also for a psychological Marshall plan for his country. In August a group of voluntary young Italians was digging a ditch and laying waterpipes for a village in the region of Korça ; the local population looked at them with curiosity, children came up to ask for chewing gum… Such a scene is quite discouraging. Albania is the only East-European country of islamic tradition (70 % of the population are moslems) ; you see but women working, men sit in the shade and discuss, sometimes selling odd items or watching after someone’s car. Occupations like cleaning up are simply considered insulting for men and this created problems in refuges’ camps. Everyone is obsessed with easy money, each favour has to be paid. Unemployment in cities, according some sources, reaches half of the population ; this is due to the heavy-industry mania like the one in all other Eastern countries, but also to the Loudite-like machine-breaking revolt of 91, a mighty “act-ing out” of a traumatized nation, that gave the final blow of a dying industry. But there are other reasons as well. In fact, the communist party (called Party of labour) had been trying to impose organised collective work by force ; Enver Hodja was not only the liberator, but also the father of albanian proletariat. Hard labor was the main punishment in camps and prisons though which passed, according to some estimations 300 000 political (in a very large sense) prisoners. As a result the symbolic status of work in culture is even lower. Nowadays, sons have suddenly started winning tens of times more than fathers (the average salary beeing 30$ per month) not only in working abroad, but by being at the disposal of humanitarian and other foreign missions, translating, lenting rooms, reselling presents. On the other hand, in the lack of security and stability, he primitive oriental capitalism priviledges largly commerce to production. How can you expect people to wish to work ?
It seems that a new misunderstanding is spreading throughout one part of the ex-socialist countries and Albania provides the best exemple. Communism had been fueled by the wish of lagging behind countries to catch up with progress without paying the human price for it, paid centuries ago by the industrial countries : it was the wish of an urban life without alienation, of a collectivist industrialization. The anti-communist revolt is but a second step in that direction done by another generation : in Tirana their main slogan was the geographical truism “Albania is in Europe”.
The difference in the two attempts at modenisation - communism and anti-communism - were due the change in Western capitalism as well : the productivist myth has been substituted by the myth of consumation ("Consume more in order to get out of the crisis" experts and politicians are telling us, and not : "Produce more"). This obviously influenced the poor countries at the periphery, that for decades had saught a magic knowledge that could permit them to jump over into modernity. If the fathers had been seduced by the project to work like the westerners (i.e. in factories, in cities, under equal conditions etc.), the sons are beeing captured by the desire to consume like the "normal people". All over the East the first symbol of the post-industrial consumer-utopia seems to have been bananas : you see them everywhere in Tirana at incredible prices - proud firts birds of the consumer-paradise.
I fear that the actual TV-vision of modernity is about to bring new misunderstandings for people that are seduced by images but ignore the price that consumer society requires. My 24 year old friend Arben, who is busy trying to arrange things as to go abroad, confessed to me that he can hardly support not seeing his mummy for more than two days. How can you explain him that in America people see their mum twice a year and that sisters do not make the beds of their brothers ?
Republished by ACL - 08 September 2006
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