Albania’s Bit of Democracy Sheds Light on Brutal Past : Dictator: Stories are finally told of maniacal extremes of Enver Hoxha, who demanded strict conformity.

In the infamous “Case of the Engineers,” the crime of Enrik Veizi and three other oil exploration experts was having the cheek to tell the government that it was drilling for oil in an area where it was known there was none.

For challenging the leadership’s wisdom, they were tortured into confessing to sabotage and spying. A court condemned them to 25 years in prison, extolling the leniency that let them escape with their lives. Their wives were exiled to backbreaking labor, their children barred from higher education. Their grandchildren were branded for life with a “bad biography.”

The fate of the four engineers, freed only last month in Albania’s latest release of political prisoners, testifies to the maniacal extremes of the late dictator Enver Hoxha to ensure his society’s strict conformity at any cost.

Hoxha’s 40-year tyranny has emerged as one of the most depraved in modern history. The atrocities committed against his perceived enemies are rivaled only by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Hoxha sought to stamp out individualism and the human spirit in a determined drive to create “The New Man,” an unquestioning soldier in the march for Albanian socialism and defender of truth as defined by the regime.

Scientists and intellectuals were favorite targets, because those who were educated were feared the most. Anything foreign was denounced as a danger. Hoxha jailed painters for liking Picasso. Writers were banned for having read Sartre. Musicians were banished to re-education camps for playing Mozart or, worse, the Beatles.

Six years after Hoxha’s death, his country is still too traumatized to question the correctness of the path of total isolation he commanded it to follow.

But the first chinks in Hoxha’s armor have been inflicted by the fledgling forces for democracy and by the nearly 1,000 political prisoners who, like the freed engineers, are telling their compatriots staggering tales of a savage system.

“They are now openly telling very bitter, dramatic stories of what happened to their families, of torture and beatings, of being left for hours in dark cells in subzero temperatures,” said Arben Puto, head of the Forum for the Defense of Human Rights, Albania’s first independent movement. “Many people knew what was happening before but not the extent.”

He contends that prison conditions and official interrogations are vastly improved since Hoxha’s handpicked successor, President Ramiz Alia, began cautious moves in 1990 to liberalize Europe’s last bastion of totalitarian rule.

“The process of democratization has begun as a result of pressure from both inside and outside,” Puto said. “Events in Eastern Europe played an important role in this process. Albania is part of Eastern Europe and can no longer be an isolated island of Stalinism. The authorities themselves realized there was no way to continue.”

Prisoners were released as a show of good faith to an increasingly demanding opposition--and for the benefit of foreign observers who flocked to Albania to judge its March 31 election and weigh prospects for aid.

Despite the modest reforms that allowed Albania’s first steps toward building a multi-party democracy, many fear that a conservative backlash is brewing, because the most liberal Communists lost the vote to rural reactionaries. Alia and other moderates lost their seats in the People’s Assembly when indoctrinated voters in the countryside leaped to the side of Hoxha loyalists.

The election provides strong evidence that many Albanians are not yet ready to exorcise Hoxha’s ghost from their troubled society.

Hoxha, a Communist partisan who led this tiny Balkan state to independence from fascist Italy in 1944, remains a father figure to many of Albania’s 3.3 million people. Hard-line candidates swept the south, partly due to the spirited campaigning of Hoxha’s widow, Nexhmije, and the diligent work of groups such as the Society of Enverists, devoted to preserving the legacy of their longtime leader.

Yet time and history have conspired to mar his once untouchable image. Inspired by their East European brethren who threw off communism in 1989, a small group of demonstrators tore Hoxha’s three-story-high statue from its Tirana pedestal in February. They dismembered the gilded likeness, attached the severed head to a truck with steel cables and dragged it through the capital in a ritual “execution.”

In the northern city of Shkoder, angry activists urinated on Hoxha’s toppled image to underscore their hatred of the man they blame for Albania’s current desolation.

But a prominent historian and former Communist, who remains fearful of the current regime, said the violence against Hoxha’s image remains limited and symbolic, and the emotional outbursts are actually strengthening the hand of those seeking to protect the late dictator as a means of preserving their own privileges and security.

“The person of Enver Hoxha left a lamentable heritage, but for some he was a person who did good things, especially for the peasants who were ignorant. But people who were well-educated were treated like slaves,” the historian said. “For the first group, Enver Hoxha was a great man. For the second, he was a dictator without principle who brought formidable evil to Albania.”

No documents have been obtained to construe a correct version of postwar history, he said, adding that no one may ever know the number of victims summarily executed.

Yet, in the hope that democratic change will eventually allow the truth to be told, a group of historians is already at work chronicling Albania’s suffering.

Some of the bloodiest pages of recent history cover the repression of clergy and the cultural elite. The regime brutally snuffed out religion, closing all churches and heralding Albania in 1967 as the first fully atheist state. A favorite torture by sadistic jailers was to lash a priest to a wooden cross, then push him face forward to the ground.

In the early 1970s, after Albania broke with China, its last ideological ally, Hoxha’s henchmen began the systematic destruction of creativity. Ali Oseku was a respected set designer for the Tirana Opera before Albania’s Cultural Revolution. He had won state prizes for his “high revolutionary spirit.”

Oseku came to official attention as part of the so-called liberal movement of 1972. His incorporation of symbolism in a backdrop for “La Traviata” drew Hoxha’s ire and set him square in the path of the cultural witch hunt that swept hundreds of artists into the Albanian gulag. He was deemed to have been corrupted by foreign influences, primarily Picasso, and ordered “to get to know the reality of the worker” by carrying bricks for a construction brigade in the industrial town of Elbasan.

“My hands were ruined,” Oseku said, showing his gnarled fingers during a talk in his studio in the cellar of a Tirana tenement. “I did what I could to convince the party that I had returned to socialist realism in my painting. I did paintings for labor exhibitions--a landscape with a factory.”

But once marked as an enemy of the people, an intellectual was unlikely to escape. Oseku served four years in prison after two years with the construction team, then another four years breaking rock at a quarry.

Today, he remains excluded from the Union of Artists, a ready critic of Hoxha and his successors.

“He thought he was a very educated man, a great philosopher and thinker,” Oseku said of Hoxha. “But he programmed our people for destruction.”

The dictator’s propaganda machine denounced every foreign influence, labeling Coca-Cola a drink of the degenerate and even outlawing the works of William Shakespeare.

Most insidious was Hoxha’s widely invoked theory of “objective responsibility.” It held that the family of a transgressor should also suffer for his errant ways.

Dallandyshe Peshkepia, now a 23-year-old law student, was barred from attending university until last year because her grandfather escaped Albania at the end of World War II.

“Because I had a ‘bad biography,’ I had to work two years carrying wood on my back,” said the young woman who calls herself Dolly. “We are the poorest country in Eastern Europe--not just by the economy but our mentality and culture as well.”

Puto, the human rights champion whose uncle was executed in 1947, said the fear of tainting a family for generations prevented the emergence of a dissident movement in Albania.

“Enver Hoxha’s greatest hatred was against intellectuals,” said poet Rudolf Marku, who was forbidden to publish for more than a decade after vague denunciations of his verse as modernist. “The only way to keep power was to destroy the brain of the nation.”

He said that Hoxha applied the twin tenets of dehumanization and raw terror to prevent the rise of any force that could challenge the supremacy of Communist rule. “Corpses of the executed were dumped into the open sewers. Political prisoners were torn apart by having their limbs tied to vehicles that sped off in opposite directions. A family’s livestock was taken away so survivors (of the convicted) would starve,” Marku recalled. “What can be said of a state that was afraid of chickens?”

Marku said Hoxha was as diabolically intent on creating a new strain of human being as Hitler was on purifying his race.

“The government still controls the list of names that can be given to newborn children. There are only 30 or 40 to choose from. This is aimed at the destruction of individuality,” he said. “The New Man would live within specific confines. He would have an approved name, a state-owned brain, designed and issued by the party. He could be controlled completely. It would have been a ‘1984’ society.”

Albania’s traumatized intelligentsia says Hoxha failed because he misjudged the human spirit, the irrepressible strength of individuality in man. While many fear a regression under Hoxha’s hard-line successors, they claim that recognition of his crimes is historically inevitable.

“The new authorities can’t be as bad as those before them, because fear is dead,” Marku said. “I have absolutely no fear. I’ve been afraid before--to fear is to be human. But now I have no right to be frightened. Courage is what is most needed now.”

A DICTATOR’S LIFE

Enver Hoxha, born in 1908, was educated in France. He taught French in Albania until criticisms of the government led to his dismissal from the job in 1934. Hoxha led the underground resistance after the 1939 Italian invasion and occupation. In 1941, he established the National Liberation Front. He became premier in 1946 when Albania became a Communist “people’s republic.” He resigned as premier in 1954 to be first secretary of the party’s Central Committee. At various times, Hoxha broke off relations with the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece. He died in April, 1985.