Anniversary of Albania's first student protest

Students in the UK and throughout Western Europe have protested on many occasions.

But 21 years ago today there was the first ever student protest in Albania.

The leader of the Party of Labour, the Communist Party, Ramiz Alia, had tried to introduce a programme of cautious liberalisation following the death of Enver Hoxha.

However, the people were impatient for change as they watched the Berlin Wall being torn down and the old governments of Eastern Europe being overthrown, including the Ceausescu regime in nearby Romania.

The authorities became nervous as rioting broke out all over the country and with the first students’ protest on December 8, 1990, which started in Kavaja.

The Government responded by closing the universities and didn’t re-open them until the following April and by ordering the military to draw up a Rapid Defence Force to quell the riots and to protect public buildings from the mobs.

This affected Alma Syla, who was later to become a teacher at Berti Dosti’s Victory School. She had begun a diploma in Albanian language and literature at a university in Tirana in autumn 1990, but the closure of educational buildings meant she had to delay her studies for a term.

One of those the Defence Ministry called up first for the Rapid Defence Force was Berti, who was sent to a special base at Kavaja at the end of 1989.

While the units were in training, the political situation deteriorated further as thousands of Albanians fled to Greece and crowds, mainly young people, seized many of the foreign embassies.

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, pictured below, pulled down the large statue of Enver Hoxha in the central square of Tirana.

It was a symbolic image, which was to be repeated 12 years later when crowds toppled the statue of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in Fardus Square, Baghdad, on April 9, 2003.

“That was the day Communism in Albania ended,” said Berti.

For more about this story read God’s Secret Listener, published by Lion/Hudson/Monarch, which is available for the special Christmas price of £6 including postage within the UK by emailing John@jbutterworth.plus.com