By Piro Misha
Some time ago Blendi Fevziu told me about the surprise he had felt when, while he was interviewing people in order to gather material for a TV program, he found out that a significant part of them (and especially the young) showed a shocking lack of knowledge and indifference vis-ஶis our history, including the communist period. At first sight, this would seem to contradict the impression one gets when one notices how much space our press dedicates to the debates on history, or the so-called “memoirs”. I do not want to rush into drawing conclusions on such a complex phenomenon as this, which requires detailed political, as well as psychological and sociological analyses, but of course, when confronted with such a fact, one cannot help raise a number of questions, starting with: Is this to be blamed on the way history is taught in our schools? Or is this evidence of a deepening gap between the so-called elites and the interests of the ordinary people? Are we dealing with a generation gap? Nevertheless the indifference and skepticism with which most Albanians view history now days cannot be seen as unrelated to the way in which history has been dealt with during the last fifteen years.
During this period of transition, the past/history has occupied a very substantial part of the Albanian public arena. However, the issue should be divided into two parts: on the one hand there is our stand towards the recent communist past and secondly, our attitude towards history in general. As far as the problems of confronting the communist past are concerned, the Albanian experience of these fifteen years, on the whole, does not differ all that much from the experience of other post-communist countries, and perhaps even from that of a series of other countries which have had to confront dramatic and traumatic pasts over the last decades such as Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, Greece after the Colonels, Spain after Franco, and including countries like Ethiopia and Cambodia. Facing up to such pasts has been agonizingly difficult everywhere. It should also be noted, that in almost every case, it is legal experts, human rights activists, political researchers, and, most certainly, politicians who have been involved in this issue to a much greater extent than historians. In fact, this problem has generally been treated as if it had been part of the so-called political “transition” from dictatorship to democracy. In the course of the broad debate that has accompanied this process almost everywhere, at times it has been the moral arguments that have been stressed; at other times psychological, or political arguments have come to the fore and even more commonly there has been a combination of all of them. When I speak of political arguments, I am not referring to the use of the past by the politics for its immediate interests, but to the idea articulated in the well known expression of George Santayana, that has been repeated so often as to seem stale, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
However, if one looks at this issue from a broader historical point of view, then one can understand that the dilemma which accompany this process, are not really all that new. During the whole of known history, there have been just as many advocates of memory, in other words, people who have believed that the truth about the past must be confronted irrespective of the price paid, as there have been others who have defended the opinion that there are moments when it is better for society to forget. One can quote many examples from history, beginning with Cicero, who, only two days after the slaying of Caesar, declared before the Roman Senate: “Oblivione sempiterna delendum,” in other words, “let every memory of mortal dissension be cast into eternal oblivion”. Moving forward in time one can mention the French Constitutions of the years 1814 and 1830 or the multitude of examples following 1945. Thus in the aftermath of the initial onslaught of purges of Nazi collaborators, the post-war Republic of France, was, in fact, built, to a certain degree, on the basis of a conscious substitution of the painful memory of collaborationism of the Vichy Government, with the unifying Gaullist myth of a France that had come together around an anti-Nazi resistance. The truth of the matter is that a large part of the Western democracies, after the War, were constructed on similar foundations: recall Christian Democrat Italy or the Austria of Kurt Valdheim, that, with the help of the allies successfully managed to present itself as an innocent victim of Nazi aggression. Likewise, one might recall Adenaur’s Germany of the 50s, or post 1975 Spain, when there was what Jorge Semprun calls, “a voluntary and collective amnesia”, in short a conscious strategy of no looking back, which is now known as the Spanish approach towards a difficult past.
However, there are, without a doubt, innumerable examples to the contrary too. Suffice it to mention the example of Germany, which within the last half of the previous century was twice confronted with its own past – the first time during a de-Nazification process, the second time during a de-Communistification process, that was more radical than elsewhere.
As we know, Albania too went through a de- Communistification process, particularly during the first half of the nineties. Over the past decade, there has been a great deal of debate and much has been said on the Communist period, which, in the final account is something that cannot be avoided when you bear in mind not only its all-engulfing brutality, but above all, the dramatic consequences it left behind. But, can one say that the Albanians have managed to liberate themselves from the burden of this period? Have they managed to analyze and grasp the complex reality of the dictatorship, and – even more importantly – of its dramatic consequences for post-Communist Albania?
I believe that the absence of a serious debate on Communism, which has led to the grotesque trials now known as the “coffee cup trials” of the former Political Bureau members, or the “who shot Mehemet Shehu or did he commit suicide” police type scoops, often reduced the de-Communistification process to an outright anti-Communist rhetoric, which the incoming government needed in order to legitimize itself. However, what makes Albania a special case is the decision to seal the archives of the Party of Labor of Albania for twenty five years, thus hampering any serious research, and which in the best of cases leaves everything wide open to subjectivism, or in the worst, to speculation.
Furthermore the process of de-Communistification was complicated even further by the shifting of a good part of this debate away from the period of Communism to that of World War Two, which has the side effect of creating a non-critical glorification of the non-Communist past. The Right, now back in office, (under the influence of the anti-communist Diaspora, in search of its legitimacy and position in the Albanian political life), frequently moves the political debate back by half a century to the point where it seems as if the Albanians, (fortunately, this time only in the world of imagination and politics), must fight this war once again, divided in two camps, in order to produce new victors, who after having regained their moral legitimacy, can then take the fate of the nation in their hands. The consequence of this conditioning and linking of the confrontation with the communist past with the efforts of moving the search for political legitimacy or illegitimacy as far back as the times of the War, was not merely an unnecessary shifting of attention away from the forty five year period of Communist rule, but sometimes this compromised the de-Communistification process itself, because of the open proclamation of the aim to rehabilitate movements and elements which had been genuinely anti-Communist and nationalist, but who were at the same time collaborationists. This brought about the disenchantment of a large part of the population, who, while seeking a clean break with the Communist past, were not willing to replace it with these musty old remnants that belonged to a period of the distant past and with whom people have no real links. We only need to recall here for example, the heated debates in Romania aimed at rehabilitating the figure of Antonescu. But, going back to our case, it must be stressed that this insistence on the discussions about the war period, actually gave a rather trivial character to the debate, which, moved ever further from the real interests and concerns majority of the population. One of the best known examples of this triviality are undoubtedly the drawn out parliamentary debates aimed at establishing the date of the country’s liberation.
The Result: Whereas during the first part of this fifteen year period there has been a revision of history aimed at the rehabilitation of debatable figures of the anti-Communist nationalist Right, during a second period, – partly as a result of the abuses and arrogance manifested in the beginning of the nineties – in the Albanian media there has gradually emerged a tendency (which is becoming prevalent) to rehabilitate and legitimize the figures of Communism. This is also where what one could call daily revisionism, enters the game – daily revisionism meaning those cases which have now become quite common, where certain individuals fight hard to re-write their biographies and those of their parents or relatives, by concealing, forgetting, changing or re-writing the past, or parts of the past, in search of a new biography or a newly found protagonism. Newspapers are full of such memoirs, in which, former Interior Ministers are presented as dissidents, or even victims. Subsequently, the complex experience of Communism, starts to be reduced and simplified bit by bit, thus laying the blame for Communism and for everything else on one individual, Enver Hoxha, the dictator, and forgetting the very important truth that Vaclav Havel speaks of when he says that a very large mass of people, at various levels, contribute to propping up a dictatorial regime, both through their compromises and through their every day conformism.
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Like everywhere else, the revisionism of history did not stop with the period of Communism. By casting a shadow of doubt on the official version of history believed up to that time, the collapse of Communism naturally produced a general trend towards the revision of history on the whole. It brought about a debate on many of the pages of history on which total silence had been maintained before. The sole possible discourse of the time of Communism – when all dissent was prohibited – now is multiplied, fragmented, and contested by a series of other discourses, by spokesmen of various interests, and by different visions and memories which sometimes go against each other. As a result we have at the same time a crisis of memory and of the pluralism of memories.
In fact, we are dealing with the phenomenon explained by Ernest Gellner: continuity and change are components of the same process. Because, whilst it is true that during these years there have been a series of interesting debates, which express a natural trend towards investigating into the darkest corners of history, attempting to establish new relations with the past, and building a national memory which is free of the old taboos and myths, on the other hand, one has but to read the history schoolbooks to see just how little things have changed. If we exclude the removal of some parts that were purely ideological; and if we exclude the artificial balancing – in other words where five partisans are mentioned, two or three more nationalist forces are added (or, the opposite, depending on who is in office) – in essence the approach towards history is the same as in the period of Communism: simplified to the level of naivety. It is selective and manipulative. Entire chapters of history are minimized, or are even cast into oblivion, at a time when – in a typical Balkan’s fashion – many of the myths, the clich고and the simplified, romantic images of the 19th Century, continue to exist, in one form or another.
The so-called nationalization of history or in other words, the perception of history as a part of the so-called national propaganda continues. The Albanians remain a people who have “blazed their trail through history, sword in hand.” The stereotype image of Albania as a fortress encircled by enemies continues to exist. This syndrome, according to which we were always the victims of others and never responsible for our own deeds, that was inherited from the XIX Century, was strengthened even further following the events of 1913, when delayed independence, combined with the arbitrary division of territories, left almost half of the Albanians outside Albania’s borders at a time when the neighboring countries continued to have territorial claims towards Albania too. Nevertheless, regardless of the historical reasons that account for such a pre-modern mentality that would explain many pages of our modern history – including a few pages of the Albanian autarchic version of communism – the fact remains that their persistent continuity in school text books, is unacceptable. History continues to be treated from an ethnocentric point of view. And if we look somewhat beyond the textbooks themselves, history continues to be exploited in favor of the so-called functionalism of history (or pseudo-history), which in the majority of cases is fuelled by the given political interests of the day.
This situation has produced an extreme and irresponsible confusion, an example of which is the naming and re-naming of the streets of Tirana. The streets are full of names that no one recognizes. And do not think for a moment that there is some special mechanism at work recreating memory. The truth is ordinary. I will never forget one day towards the end of the nineties, when quite accidentally I found myself in a meeting organized by the Municipality of Tirana, where for hours on end I witnessed history being remade with the greatest ease possible; where all kinds of names were extracted from the moldy old trunks of native Tirana families and which were then sanctioned on the spot by the then Mayor as a part of history. No more than 150 meters away from the statue of Scanderbeg, there appeared – where one would have least expected it – the statue of a Turkish Commander, that up to then no one had ever heard off. Apparently, sometime during the 17th Century he was given Plain of Tirana as his feud by the sultan, as a reward for having fought in faraway Persia! Is this history?
In fact the official national ideology, is now subjected to a series of competing influences, because, now days the fragmentation of the discourse and the functionalizing of history is not only done in order to be of service to the immediate interests of political legitimacy, but also in order to build up the image of friend or foe and to legitimize various different projects and interests that aim towards determining the geo-political orientation of the country. Albania is in the epoch of globalization. Whence from here: Europe, West or East? Different projects seek their legitimacy in history. History is being placed at the service of legitimizing the visions and various interests that exist currently in the Albanian arena, for the present and the future.
Recall the debates of the recent weeks and months. On the one hand, emphasis continues to be placed on the fact that we are an organic part of the European civilization, regardless of the very long period of time that divided us from it. On the other hand, there is a demand for the complete revision of history, by rejecting many of the myths, symbols and policies on which previous structures were built, as well as the very symbol of our national existence – Scanderbeg.
In conclusion: Our return to the flows of history without doubt calls for a critical re-reading of history, finally freeing it not only from superfluous clich고and myths of the past, but also from the manipulations of the present. Establishing new relations with the past is part of the process of European integration. Naturally, many things require time. Take the example of France. It took thirty years for the new generation of the elite to become capable of seriously coping with the clich고and taboos of the past. But, in the meantime, we don’t have the time. The huge backwardness we continue to have in relation to the other peoples of Europe, should be inciting us to make haste. Whereas, on the other hand, the inflation, confusion, banality, manipulation, folklore-isation of history in the eyes of the young, also risks in making them even more disinterested in history. And this does not at all mean that a generation is forming, freed from the past. Something like that would be nothing but an illusion.
