Forsaken Albania

By Artan Lame
Tirana, 29 November 1979. There are many aspects of Albanian life that failed to survive the epoch of democracy, but we would be hard pressed to find an aspect that disintegrated like the Albanian Armed Forces did. Initially created according to the Soviet model and later on to the Chinese model, by the mid-60-ties, the Albanian Armed Forces had assumed alarming proportions for Albania’s neighbours as well. More than a thousand tanks, hundreds of fighter planes, dozens of warships, endless parks full of artillery, incredible depots of ammunition and light weapons, and many more resources, all constituted a crushing burden, which was in top shape for as long as it was maintained and very generously supplied by the communist giants of Moscow and Beijing, but which immediately began to weigh very heavily on the economy after relations were severed with those powers. This colossal juggernaut reeled from the first blow in 1966, when the system of army ranks was removed. This resulted in the collapse of military discipline throughout the ranks of the armed forces at a mind boggling pace. Then came a series of steps, which although on paper appeared to strengthen the ranks, in fact, they only eroded the power of the army from within. By the end of the nineties’, discipline in the Albanian Armed Forces had completely unraveled; it had ended up with a class of officers who were entirely out of touch with the times and deeply politically orientated, with a colossal amount of military hardware, but which was obsolete and for which there were no longer any spare parts. The threat of destruction which first became obvious in the sixties’ became lethal with the transition to the post-communist epoch. The bulk of the immense military hardware was left to rust, entire mechanical workshops were dismantled, thousands and thousands of officers were made redundant, the ones who managed to remain in the ranks were completely unmotivated and lived in constant panic of every whim of politics. 1997 with all its devastation did nothing other than drive the nails on this coffin in deeper. From that year onwards, the only merit of every Defence Minister was the number of weapons destroyed, or sold for scrap, which has become a kind of macabre race to obliterate this heritage.
The photographs show a shot of a military parade, one of the biggest ever to be organized in Albania on 29 November 1979, on the occasion of the thirty fifth anniversary jubilee of Albania’s liberation. The shot had captured a moment when tanks are rumbling along the main boulevard of the city, on parade. These are T-59 Soviet Tanks but manufactured in China. The tank commander stands to attention atop of the machine, saluting, with bunched fist at the temples, according to the style of the partisans, re-introduced into the forces in 1974. Note the tracks the tank leaves in its wake. The boulevard, laid in asphalt stones was always seriously damaged after a military parade. The very next day work would begin on replacing the uprooted stones. The old stone layers of the time remember that days before the parade took part; piles of stones would be brought in and stashed away in corners to be used the day after. In the distance you can see the main building of the University of Tirana. In the inset is one of the scrap yards where most of the tanks ended up from all over Albania. They were dismantled and sold for scrap.