I was interested to read in The Times yesterday the obituary of Ramiz Alia, who was Albania's first president and who appeared in God’s Secret Listener.
Alia (pictured below), who died this week aged 85, became Albania’s Secretary-General of Labour in 1985 after the death of dictator Enver Hoxha.
He was born in the northern town of Shkodra on October 18, 1925, to Muslim parents fleeing from Kosovo.
As a teenager he joined the Albanian Communist Youth Organisation in 1941, then the Albanian Communist Party and at the age of only 23 was promoted to the central committee of the Albanian Party of Labour where he became a close supporter of Enver Hoxha.
When Alia came to power in 1985 he promised to remain true to his country’s Marxist principles at the same time as trying reluctantly to reform his country’s extremely repressive system.
He introduced a programme of cautious liberalisation, freeing the press, allowing opposition newspapers and opposition political parties.
But these changes had to be accelerated with the collapse of Communism in the rest of Eastern Europe in 1989 and because the Albanian people were impatient for more radical moves.
When rioting broke out all over Albania Alia ordered the military to draw up a Rapid Defence Force to quell the riots and to protect public buildings from the mobs.
One of those the Defence Ministry called up first was Berti Dosti, who was sent to a special base at Kavaja at the end of 1989, ironically the scene of his greatest military achievement where he had been presented with his top medal.
While the units were in training, the political situation deteriorated further. In January 1990, thousands of Albanians fled to Greece and crowds, mainly young people, seized many of the foreign embassies. Then there was the first students’ protest on December 8, 1990, which started in Kavaja.
Tanks were stationed on the Albanian streets and Berti’s job, as communications chief at Kavaja, was to be the link between the soldiers in the tanks and his Commandant.
Berti admitted the soldiers were unhappy to be deployed against their own people, but they were told not to confront the protesters who wanted democracy, and to avoid trouble if possible.
The protests on the streets continued throughout 1990 and into 1991, when on February 21, crowds pulled down the large statue of Enver Hoxha in the central square of Tirana.
“That was the day Communism in Albania ended,” said Berti.
The political situation was defused in the short term in March 1991 when the first democratic elections in Albania were held, which the partially reformed Party of Labour won, mainly because many of the rural people didn’t want change and couldn’t see on television what was happening in the rest of Europe.
The elected Parliament then voted Alia into the new post of president on April 29, 1991.
However, the new government lasted only two months when a three-week general strike in May forced its resignation and led to a national unity coalition government, including non-Communists.
With food riots and troubles everywhere, the new government put the country on the highest military alert. Reserves were called up and the Rapid Defence Forces, including Berti, was redeployed on the streets again.
Eventually a third election was held in March 1992 and the Democrats swept to power with more than 60 per cent of the vote.
It was the beginning of a new era as Albania came in from the cold after nearly 50 years of Stalinist isolation. The new president and first post-war non-Communist was 48-year-old cardiologist, Sali Berisha.
He symbolised the new era by refusing to move into the Presidential Palace, deciding to stay instead with his family in their two-bedroomed flat on a rundown Tirana housing estate.
Alia was placed under house arrest in his modest flat in Tirana where after a trial accusing him of corruption he was jailed for nine years in 1994.
But he was released after only a year as his incarceration became an embarrassment to an Albania eager to be seen to be moving towards the European norms on human rights.
He was detained again in 1996 after being found guilty of charges against humanity, but he escaped from prison during the chaos after the collapse of the pyramid investment scheme in 1997 when the prison guards deserted their posts.
He fled the country but when the charges were later dropped he returned to Tirana, where he died on October 7 aged 85.
More about this troubled chapter in Albania’s history is told in God’s Secret Listener. To buy a signed copy email John@jbutterworth.plus.com
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