By BESNIK MUSTAFAJ
The toppling of Enver Hoxhaâs 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  Tiranaâs 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 âEnver Hoxhaâ 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 Tiranaâs 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 âmanipulatedâ 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 Hoxhaâs 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. Peopleâs 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.
