Albania honors protestors against late communist dictator

TIRANA, Feb 21 – Eighteen years ago, on February 20, one could see the whole of Tirana’s main Skanderbeg Square filled with about 100,000 people protesting against the falling communist regime and toppling the eight-meter statue of the late communist dictator Enver Hoxha.
After 18 years Albania honored more than a dozen men and women who were at the head of the protest to topple the communist regime, the final country to do so in Eastern Europe, other than former Yugoslavia.
Around 100,000 Albanians rallied in Tirana’s student dormitories district on February 20, 1991 to support a hunger strike by students demanding Hoxha’s name be removed from their university.
One of the protest’s heads, Saimir Maloku said that after the rally broke up he and others steered a small crowd to the main square and away from the heavily guarded Politburo compound to avoid a clash that could have ended in violence.
“We called on the people 18 years ago to head to the square, not to the communist villa compound. We avoided bloodshed and managed to topple his statue,” said Maloku.
Maloku had been jailed for eight years under Hoxha for producing a converter that helped Albanians, isolated from the outside world for more than four decades, watch forbidden foreign television stations.
Hoxha died April 11, 1985, but it was not until December 1990 that Albania’s then-Communist Party, which had ruled the Balkan state for 46 years since the end of World War II in 1944, accepted multi-party rule.
The toppling of Hoxha’s eight-ton bronze statue in Tirana’s main square marked the real end of communism. Following that there were early elections again won by the former communist party but a year later fresh polls brought the Democratic party to power.