By Virgjil Mu詍
In reading, “Dictators of the Balkans,” a book written by a group of authors, compiled and furnished with an eloquent foreword by a historian of renown among Albanians, Bernd J. Fischer, your thoughts immediately go to the museums of wax figures of celebrities, and you cannot help but think that a similar museum set up in the Balkans, no matter where, in Tirana, Belgrade, Sophia, Zagreb or anywhere else, would be a target of excitement for tourists, young and old – and perhaps not just tourists. This would be a history book, opened at the one page, the same chapter: that on Balkan dictators.(It could just so happen that for the entire 20th Century, from the point of view of numbers and cruelty, the Balkan dictators were probably only second to none to their South American counterparts). The effect these scarecrows of history were to create was two fold: hilarity and despair; a result that would arouse nothing but grave awareness and deliberation.
“Dictators of the Balkans,” is a gallery of portraits, probably the first and only one of its kind, for the time being anyway, of a handful of men, who, in the framework of complex, historical events, within and outside of the countries they resided in and conducted their political careers, wielded their personal power, frequently with a great deal of violence and bloodshed, a personal power which, apart from the atrocities and brutality, also spawned a specific kind of corruption, dishonesty, violation of the law, with the ultimate result of subjugating everything and everyone to this personal power and well being, hence serving the creation of a type of Homos Balcanicus of Western anthropology, who continues to cast his shadow over these lands to this day.
The truth is that the symptoms of this anti-culture are present and can be felt today too in a series of countries of the region, although it is twenty years since the collapse of the last dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to a system of party pluralism and of the market economy.
Freudian psycho-analytical methods would most likely help us to comprehend that the roots of the evil should not only be sought in recent historical past, but also by digging and prodding deeper into the murky mists of history, to the starting point of a way of thinking, which in historical and published documents is known as byzantine. It is interesting to discover that several of the authors of such monographic materials, whether Eastern or Western, have turned to the same method to search for and discover the darker sides of the character and personality of dictators they have written about. From this angle, the portraits of this book constitute a sound methodology basis for current day and future researchers.
The types of the portraits of the dictators of this anthology could be divided into three groups: the first group includes the monarchs of the period between two world wars, from Zog to Czar Boris III of Bulgaria; the second group include the Post World War Two dictators from Enver Hoxha to Todor Zhivkov; while the third group, and ironically we only have the one individual, Slobodan Milosevic, the the last of his kind, (or at least we hope so), of the tyrannosaurus who caused mayhem across the Balkans at the end of the 20th Century. But let us return to the problems closer to home. As I touched upon above, in this anthology of dictators, we are represented, more or less in the same manner as our neighbours, with two historical figures: the first was Ahmet Zog, whom Fischer ranks in the group of authoritarian rulers. The historian follows all the phases of the life span of this self proclaimed monarch of the Albanians, and, what is even more important, he hones in on all the key moments of the political career, which, in one way or another, coincide with culminating moments of the history of Albania. In this manner, he does not, for a single moment recognise Zog as being divorced from the fate of the country, on the contrary, he strives, quite correctly, to delve into and reveal the impact this had on the fate of the individual, and vice versa, the role Zog played and the influence exerted on the flow of historical events. The second is Enver Hoxha, who, like many of his counterparts in the Balkans within the geo-political context and time frame, our author of renown, Mr. Fischer, includes in the bigger group of dictators, without a shadow of a doubt on his part. This minature sketch-portrait of Hoxha leads us to believe that perhaps Fischer has begun working on a monograph, or perhaps something broader, on the complex figure of the post World War Two Albanian leader, one of the leaders who lived the longest in the entire former communist East. From this angle, we need to be somewhat indulgent with the author for perhaps the occasional slip, especially in relation to references and sources of information.
According to Balkan tradition, this article is served for ‘starters’, a little something to wet the appetites of the guests and to fuel the conversation of the men, before the food is placed on the table in front of them. So therefore, the only word left for me to say is “Bon appetit”!
