Discover

(Redirected from Hoxhaist)

, (IPA , 16 October 1908 – 11 April 1985) was the leader of Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Communist Albanian Party of Labour. He was also Prime Minister of Albania from 1944 to 1954 and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1946 to 1953. Hoxha's rule was characterized by isolation from the rest of Europe and his proclaimed firm adherence to Anti-Revisionism, which has been dubbed "Hoxhaism". ^[1] Albania's government of the time projected the image that it had emerged from semi-feudalism to become an industrialized state.

Contents

Biography

Leadership

Kosovo and Albanian nationalism

Trivia

References

See also

External links

Biography

Hoxha was born in Gjirokastër, a city in southern Albania that has been home to many prominent families. He was the son of a Muslim Tosk cloth merchant who traveled widely across Europe during his childhood, and the major influence on Enver during these years was his uncle, Hysen Hoxha (). Hysen Hoxha was a militant who campaigned vigorously for the independence of Albania, which occurred when Enver was four years old. Enver took to these ideas very strongly, especially after King Zog came to power in 1928. Whether his uncle was indeed among independence proclaimers and subscribers is disputed. He is present in a photo of the celebration of the independence of Albania, but many think that it is a retouch, a common practice during Hoxha's years.
In 1930, Hoxha went to study at the University of Montpellier in France on a state scholarship given to him by the Queen Mother, but he soon dropped out. From 1934 to 1936 he was a secretary at the Albanian consulate in Brussels, attached to the personnel office of Queen Mother Sadia. He returned to Albania in 1936 and became a teacher in Korçë.
Hoxha was dismissed from his teaching post following the 1939 Italian invasion for refusing to join the Albanian Fascist Party. He opened a tobacco shop in Tirana where soon a small communist group started gathering. Yugoslav communists helped him found and become leader of the Albanian Communist Party (called Party of Labour afterwards) in November 1941. They also helped him start the resistance movement (National Liberation Army), which took power on 28 November or 29 November 1944. Strong disagreement exists among leftist and rightist Albanian political factions with respect to the precise date of the day of liberation.
After the liberation from the German occupation on 28 November or 29 November 1944, several Albanian partisan divisions crossed the border into the German occupied Yugoslavia and there contributed to the chasing out of the last pockets of German resistance alongside Tito's partisans and the Soviet Red Army. This was during the last months of the German occupation of Yugoslavia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito, during a Yugoslavian conference in his latter years thanked Hoxha for the assistance the Albanian partisans gave during the War for National Liberation (Lufta Nacionalçlirimtare). The terms National Liberation Army or National Liberation War were used in both Albania and Yugoslavia. Albanians celebrate their independence day on November 28, while the National Liberation festivity date is 29 November in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Leadership

Hoxha declared himself an orthodox Marxist-Leninist and strongly admired Joseph Stalin. He adopted the model of the Soviet Union and severed relations with his former Yugoslav communist allies following their ideological breach with Moscow in 1948. Defence minister Koçi Xoxe () was executed a year later for alleged pro-Yugoslav activities. By 1949 the United States and British intelligence organizations were working with King Zog and the mountainmen of his personal guard. They recruited Albanian refugees and émigrés from Egypt, Italy, and Greece; trained them in Cyprus, Malta, and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany); and infiltrated them into Albania. Guerrilla units entered Albania in 1950 and 1952, but Albanian security forces killed or captured all of them. Kim Philby, a Soviet double agent working as a liaison officer between the British intelligence service and the United States Central Intelligence Agency, had leaked details of the infiltration plan to Moscow, and the security breach claimed the lives of about 300 infiltrators.
By 1950, many reforms were instituted. Illiteracy gradually dropped from around 80-85% to 31%. The regime confiscated farmland from wealthy landowners and consolidated it into collective farms, imprisoning and executing thousands in the process, though also averting famine and greatly improving the quality of agriculture, making Albania nearly self-sufficient. The practice of blood feud was made illegal and by 1970, women, who previously were not allowed to hold paying jobs, were given equality and were encouraged to take up jobs in order to help the economy. Industry, almost non-existent in 1944, contributed over 50% of the GDP by the 1980s. Malaria-infested swamplands were drained, and life expectancy rose from 38 to around 60-70 by 1980. The nation's first university, the University of Tirana, was founded in 1957.

However, the opening of Albania's borders to the outside world following the collapse of the communist regime revealed exaggerated claims. Telephone communication, long established in every household in Albania's neighboring countries, was rare in most areas. In fact, very few Albanians other than higher-echelon party apparatchiks had access to such services despite Communist party claims that telephones were present across Albania. Worker wages and living standards were also remarkably low by European standards, a fact that led to a massive exodus of Albanian workers into neighbouring Greece and Italy, where they could attain better standards of living as illegal immigrants than they did in their country as nationals.
Despite his grandstanding, it appeared that Hoxha's major legacy was a complex of over 600,000 one-man concrete bunkers across a country of 3 million inhabitants, to act as look-outs and gun emplacements, pointed towards towns and villages just as often as away from them. The bunkers were built strong, and most easy to move, all there is to do is dig a hole and drop the bunker in with a crane or a helicopter. The types of bunkers vary from machine gun pillboxes, beach bunkers, to naval underground facilities, and even Air Force Mountain and underground bunkers. There were over 700,000 pillboxes built and around 500,000 pillboxes were reported to still be in good condition and ready to serve in case of war.
=== Relations with China ===
Hoxha had remained a firm Stalinist despite new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin's excesses in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and this meant Albania's isolation from the rest of communist Eastern Europe. In 1960, Hoxha aligned Albania with the People's Republic of China, which also continued to uphold Stalin's legacy, in the Sino-Soviet split, severing relations with Moscow the following year. In 1968, Albania withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in response to the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Hoxha's internal policies were true to the Stalinist paradigm he admired, and the personality cult organized around him bore a striking resemblance to that of Stalin. Internally, the "Sigurimi" Albanian secret police made sure to replicate the repressive methods of the NKVD, MGB, KGB, and Stasi. Its activities permeated Albanian society to the extent that every third citizen had either served time in labor camps or been interrogated by Sigurimi officers. To eliminate dissent, the government resorted systematically to purges, in which opponents were dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned in forced-labour camps, and often executed. Travel abroad was forbidden to all but those on official business, in order to sustain the myth of an advanced Albania. Western-style dancing was banned, and art was made to reflect the styles of socialist realism.
In 1967, following two decades of progressively harsher persecution of religion under his rule, Hoxha triumphantly declared his nation to be the first and only officially atheist state in history. Partly inspired by China's Cultural Revolution, he proceeded to confiscate mosques, churches, monasteries, and shrines. Many were immediately razed, others turned into machine shops, warehouses, stables, and movie theaters. Parents were forbidden to give their children religious names. Anyone caught with the Qu'ran, Bibles, icons, or religious objects faced long prison sentences.
According to a landmark Amnesty International report published in 1984, Albania's human rights record was dismal under Hoxha. The regime denied its citizens freedom of expression, religion, movement, and association although the constitution of 1976 ostensibly guaranteed each of these rights. In fact, certain clauses in the constitution effectively circumscribed the exercise of political liberties that the regime interpreted as contrary to the established order. In addition, the regime denied the population access to information other than that disseminated by the government-controlled media. The Sigurimi routinely violated the privacy of persons, homes, and communications and made arbitrary arrests. The courts ensured that verdicts were rendered from the party's political perspective instead of affording due process to the accused, who were often sentenced without even the formality of a trial.
Hoxha was unhappy with China's rapprochement with the United States in the early seventies. He had himself normalized relations with Albania's neighbors immediately before Mao's death in 1976. The defeat of the Gang of Four in China's subsequent inner-party struggle in 1977 and 1978 led to the Sino-Albanian split and Albania's retreat into political isolation, with Hoxha claiming the anti-revisionist mantle to criticize both Moscow and Beijing. Deprived of its last main trading partner, Hoxha's Albania became a near-autarky from 1976 onwards. It was not until economic growth stopped in the mid-1970's that he began to normalize relations with Yugoslavia and attempted to increase relations with Western Europe.

In 1981, Hoxha ordered the execution of several party and government officials in a new purge. Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu was reported to have committed suicide following a further dispute within the Albanian leadership in December 1981, but it is widely believed that he was killed.
Later, Hoxha withdrew into semi-retirement due to failing mental and physical health and turned most state functions over to Ramiz Alia. He suffered from continuous dreams about the return of the Monarchy and King Zog. In his final years, he was confined to a wheelchair and was suffering from diabetes.
Hoxha's death on 11 April 1985 left Albania with a legacy of isolation, and fear of the outside world, despite progress made by Hoxha. As communist party rule weakened throughout Eastern Europe, his succession by Ramiz Alia led to some relaxation in internal and foreign policies, culminating in Albania's abandonment of one-party rule in 1990 and the reformed Socialist Party's defeat in the 1992 elections.

Kosovo and Albanian nationalism

Enver Hoxha, a communist, embraced ideas of internationalism and brotherhood among different peoples. This point of view made Hoxha very close to Yugoslavian communists during World War II and afterwards until the break-up of 1948. Such ideals are thought to be the reason why Hoxha decided to fight against Albanian nationalists who sought unification of Albanian-inhabited land. However, especially in the 1980s, Hoxha used several speeches to gain popularity among Albanians in Yugoslavia. During the demonstrations in Kosovo in 1981, ethnic Albanians of Yugoslavia largely identified with Enver Hoxha as a symbol of nationalism, and regarded Albania, which they had no opportunity to visit, as a very prosperous country where human rights and equality were widely respected.

Trivia

★ The movie ''Inside Man'' features a tape of Hoxha played to a "bug" via an iPod with a portable speaker system.

★ In the ''Simpsons'' episode, The Crepes of Wrath, the Albanian exchange student (and spy) was named Adil Hoxha, presumably binding the first name of Prime Minister Adil Çarçani with the last name of Enver Hoxha.

References

1. Hoxhaism - Red Wiki



★ ''Albania in Occupation and War'', Owen S. Pearson, I.B. Tauris, London 2006, ISBN 1-84511-104-4

★ ''Albanian Stalinism'', Pipa, Arshi, Boulder: East European Monographs, 1990, ISBN 0-88033-184-4

See also

★ History of Albania

★ Religious persecution

External links

★ Enver Hoxha tungjatjeta

★ Enver Hoxha Reference Archive at marxists.org

★ ''Comrade Loulou and the Fun Factory'' - A critical and satirical view of Hoxha

★ Albanian.com article on Hoxha

★ A site dedicated to Enver Hoxha, has video and footage

★ "Albania: Stalin's heir", ''Time'', December 22, 1961