A quarter of a century later, witnesses recall July 2, 1990
The place was the West German embassy in Tirana. The date was July 2, 1990. The people in the truck were among the first in a human wave that would see thousands of Albanians storm foreign embassies in Tirana looking for freedom from Europe’s most oppressive communist regime.
By ANDI BALLA
On a hot and sticky summer day, Lothar Parzeller and his friends were cooling down with a backyard barbeque and a few beers on a manicured lawn in their walled compound made up of neatly packed residence villas and a large office building with an ornate fountain.
Parzeller had a personal camera and was taking snapshots of his friends enjoying the barbeque — smoke rising from the sizzling meat on the grill.
It could have been a friendly gathering anywhere in the free world that day — were it not for the fact that the party would soon be abruptly interrupted by a truck ramming through a wall to get into the courtyard.
Within moments, the same camera taking friendly snapshots would be used to take pictures of history in the making as more than thirty people inside the truck rushed inside with screams of joy, waving their hands in triumph.
The place was the West German embassy in Tirana. The date was July 2, 1990. The people in the truck were among the first in a human wave that would see thousands of Albanians storm foreign embassies in Tirana looking for freedom from Europe’s most oppressive communist regime.
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Parzeller, a junior official at the embassy, had managed to capture the very moments two very different worlds collided – his free West German life and that of desperate Albanians looking for freedom, seeking refuge from Europe’s most repressive communist regime and economic hardship.
These were people like Gëzim Peshkëpia, the heir of a typical intellectual and patriotic Albanian family from southern Albania that had all but been wiped out for their anti-communist views. Peshkëpia’s father had been murdered by the regime in a purge in the early 1950s. His family was then interned and Gëzim himself was imprisoned in 1975 for “agitation and propaganda” against the communist government, serving eight years. It is no surprise then that Peshkëpia — with his wife and two children — became part of the more than 5,000 Albanians who sought refuge in Western embassies in July 1990.
Even-though he had made it into the safety of the German embassy, Peshkëpia still had a strong fear that he would be killed by the regime if somehow the refugees could not be led out the country safely.
One of the very few people among the more than 3,000 refugees who spoke German. Peshkëpia sought assurances from the top diplomat diplomat in Tirana at the time
The diplomat told him it was a done deal. “If a German diplomat was saying it, I believed it,” Peshkëpia said.
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Parzeller’s photos and Peshkëpia’s testimony of the events were part of a panel hosted by German Ambassador Hellmut Hoffmann on July 2, 2015, as the embassy marked a quarter of a century since that fateful day with a series of testimonies and by giving a tour of the very places the events unfolded in 1990.
But the man in charge inside the same walls 25 years ago and the one offering assurances to Peshkëpia back then was Werner Daum, the acting ambassador in the West German mission in 1990. Daum had travelled once more to Albania in early July 2015 to recall “the opening of the embassies,” as the 1990 events are collectively known in Albania.
Daum, who had opened the German diplomatic mission to Albania just a few years earlier after the countries restored diplomatic ties, had quickly shifted his impressions of the country from feeling it was a sort of idyllic medieval paradise in the early days to understanding the hell Albania had become under communism.
Daum said he wanted Albanians to defect in large numbers, hoping that it would speed up the fall of the communist regime in the country. But, he added, he acted on his own accord to encourage them. There was no official policy to do so, and he was taking a personal risk in his career.
He knew Albanians were already jumping the walls of the Greek and Italian embassies, he said, and wanted the country’s citizens to know the German embassy could also offer refuge. He told his staff to turn all the embassy lights on at night, including a large flood light on top of the building.
It worked. Soon refugees started to trickle in, getting past the Albanian guards outside. Then the truck rammed the wall and opened the floodgates and hundreds entered the embassy to seek refuge.
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What unfolded next were several days of thousands of refugees living in dire conditions at the embassy as the regime cut off the water supply and made it difficult for food to get in.
Refugees would sleep wherever they could, on the floors, on the stairwells — even the ornate fountain — emptied of water — became a preferred sleeping space, a cool outdoor space offering a reprieve from the July heat, the pictures show.
One teenager died trying to cross the wall, shot by the Albanian guards outside. His place in the line to freedom was taken by a baby girl born inside the embassy – aptly christened Germana.
Those inside the embassy managed to deal with the dire humanitarian situation any way they could, hoping the refugees would soon be allowed to leave the country.
The major fear was that conservative elements in the communist regime would storm the embassy, disregarding international law.
The only thing that lessened that possibility as well as made collective punishment less likely than in the past was the large number of people involved. “They couldn’t punish them all,” said Afrim Krasniqi, a university professor and an expert on communist crimes.
He said the regime was more likely to let the refugees go because it was also getting weaker.
But, Krasniqi said, the regime was still dangerous, adding 77 people were murdered by border guards, as they were trying to escape Albania, just between the embassy storming and the ultimate fall of the regime in Albania a year later.
But in the embassy refugees case, there was a lot of international attention combined with the large numbers and the deteriorating strength of the regime, whose leaders had been scared off by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s execution in Romania just six months earlier.
Ultimately, on July 12, the refugees would be ferried out to safety through a UN-brokered deal with Albania’s communist regime.
At 4 a.m., the refugees were herded onto buses to the port of Durres, where the UN and the Red Cross had charted ferries to take them across the Adriatic to Italy, from where they would then move to other countries, based on the embassies where they had sought refuge, including Germany.
For many people, including Peshkëpia, and new life followed. Because he already knew German he skipped the language learning phase most of his peers went through and would get a civil administration job until his retirement and then move to lead an official group studying the crimes of the communist regime in Albania.
For Albania itself the events of July 1990 marked the first big blow to the communist regime, which was by then headed for an inevitable fall.
As communism fell elsewhere in Europe, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall, for Albania, in away, July 2, 1990, marked the fall of the regime-imposed wall with the world as Albanians turned to the West to aspire to freedom from political oppression.
Photos below are courtesy of Lothar Parzeller and Peter Gebert and gathered by the Modern Albania page on Facebook:
