By BESNIK MUSTAFAJ
The toppling of Enver Hoxha’s statue at the Skanderbeg Square accompanied by a huge national manifestation twenty-five years ago constitutes one of the most important events in the new history of Albania. Through this action, the citizens of Tirana openly showed that they would not accept to coexist even in a symbolic way, with their communist past.
This had an immediate impact in speeding up democratic processes, in which Albania was involved just two months earlier. The wave for erasing in a similar way, with broad national manifestations, countless statues and memorials of Enver Hoxha rapidly swept across the country. It is worth noticing that Tirana’s example did not come spontaneously. A large number of students had entered a week ago a hunger strike, because they did not manage to force Ramiz Alia and his government to remove the name “Enver Hoxha” from the university with other softer forms.
Large crowds of Tirana citizens joining the student’s requests marked a new escalation of dissatisfaction. The spread within a few hours of Tirana’s example across the country, from north to south, served as a public act to show that disagreement with the legacy of Enver Hoxha was a popular reaction and not simply the work of a group of intellectuals, including here a group of “manipulated” students, as the official propaganda of the Stalinist regime attempted to portray them as.
The toppling of statues and memorials of Enver Hoxha had a special impact directly on Ramiz Alia and his collaborators. They realized that any further persistence to keep the shadow of the past alive, constituted a serious and unacceptable provocation to the resentful people. In the days that followed, Ramiz Alia decreed the removal and de jure of Enver Hoxha’s name and other symbols of his regime from all public institutions, roads, and squares of Albania.
In February 1991, the old regime still had under its rule the police, the army, the prosecution office, and courts. The retreat of regime leaders in the face of people opposing the regime was understood as an expression of the ultimate loss of power of the communist state to keep its rule through violence and repression. In the context of the coming developments that were expected, the opposition had reached a crucial victory.
The first multiparty elections were held only a few weeks later. People’s inherited fear had taken a heavy blow. People would go to the polls more liberated. This psychological liberation would be visible especially in cities where information circulated better, and as it would come out from the elections, the opposition would win broadly. Ramiz Alia himself, the embodiment of the system, would lose in his constituency in Tirana, where Enver Hoxha was a MP until his death in 1985. After the founding of the Democratic Party, with the collapse of Enver Hoxha’s statues, began the irreversible separation from the past.
