Eurasia Press & News
During the turbulent 20th Century, many Kosovo Albanians looked at Albania as a land of hope and promise. Then they visited.
In the summer of 1991, just as Yugoslavia was beginning to unravel, 13-year-old Albian Ismaili travelled with his family from their home in Kosovo to Albania to visit his mother’s aunt in the port city of Durres, where she had moved in the wake of World War Two.
Albania was just emerging from four decades of Stalinist rule under Enver Hoxha, while Kosovo was the poorest part of socialist Yugoslavia, a mainly ethnic Albanian province that just a few years earlier had seen its autonomy revoked by Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic at the start of a decade of repression that would culminate in war.
To many Kosovo Albanians, Albania was their promised land.
“Our expectations were very high,” Ismaili, now 46, recalled. “In our Kosovar culture, whenever Albania was mentioned it was in the superlative”.
The reality, however, could not have been more different. Entering Albania via Greece, Ismaili remembered seeing dilapidated buildings and public officials in “tattered” uniforms.
“The Albanian flag was so old that its colour had faded, making it unclear whether it was brown or orange,” Ismaili told BIRN, while the roads were so bad that the drive from the border town of Kapshtica to Durres, now a journey of three and a half hours, took all day. On the way, Ismaili saw “suffering people, women working with primitive tools in the fields, and men sitting in the shade of cafes”.
“From the dream of a beautiful, advanced Albania, I, as a 13-year-old, saw an Albania crippled by communist dictatorship. I saw that everything was a façade; even the paved roads were not asphalt but tar, and walking on them in the heat your shoes left footprints.”
“I felt like we had travelled back in time.”
He was not the only one.
Albania’s powerful pull
Beginning in 1944, Hoxha’s paranoid rule was one of the most repressive in Eastern Europe, characterised by state control of almost every aspect of life. Religion was banned, dissidents tortured or exiled and thousands of Albanians killed or arrested trying to flee across the country’s closed borders. Many of those caught spent the rest of their lives in forced labour camps or prison.
By 1985, when Hoxha died, much of the country was starving and had only limited access to essentials such as electricity, heating and healthcare.
Many harboured dreams of leaving, while some of their ethnic kin in Kosovo – oblivious to the hardship in Albania – planned to go the other way.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kosovo Albanians were doggedly pursuing a policy of passive resistance to Milosevic’s repressive measures, which included the shutdown of Albanian-language media, an end to Albanian-language education and a purge of Albanian public-sector employees.
Promising democracy, Albania looked like a way out. Some even held out hope of unification.
So powerful was the pull of Albania that Minire Shala moved there with her husband and children from the Swiss city of Bern in the late 1990s, just as the violence unleashed by the collapse of pyramid schemes threatened the country with civil war.
Shala’s husband had been politically persecuted in Kosovo so he had moved with his family to Bern. When Albania opened up and embarked on a breakneck transition to capitalism, her husband decided they should move to Tirana.
“Imagine what kind of impression a person would have coming from Bern in Switzerland to Tirana,” Shala recalled. “It was a shock for me and the children. Total disappointment. We had no right to return to Switzerland or enter Kosovo.”
“That country I had dreamed of, flowing with milk and honey, was nowhere to be seen. It smelled of kerosene and dirt. My first impression was that I had gone back in time to about 50 years before I was born in 1962.”
Unification was an illusion, Shala said.
“I don’t believe anyone from Albania back then thought about ‘Greater Albania’. They were focused on making money by any means, even illegal means.”
Hope and reality
One Kosovo Albanian, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described a very different experience on visiting Albania with her father in 1993, when she was 24 years old.
The woman said she spent her childhood reading books written by Albanian authors, listening to Radio Tirana and watching communist-era films.
“In the 1980s, all these were banned in the former Yugoslavia, but I watched the films at the house of a friend whose father was in prison for eight years just because he had erected an antenna to watch Albanian Radio Television. This was prohibited in Kosovo.”
“You can imagine just how much I loved Albania.”
When she finally saw the country with her own eyes, she found it beautiful. Her memories are filled with orange groves, offerings of local brandy and the warmth of Albanian hospitality.
The homes were modestly furnished and the bread tasted sour, the woman said, but she was taken by the sophistication of her conversations and by one friend’s surprising command of English and impressive collection of English books.
It was only later, she said, when working with colleagues from Albania, that the woman saw the difficulty they had in “understandings our sufferings and the discrimination in the former Yugoslavia”.
“They also did not understand why we Kosovars loved Albania while they wanted to get out of the country at all cost.”
She also came to understand the psychological toll of Hoxha’s brand of communism.
“People were very isolated and had trouble adapting to the changes that the free world offered,” she said. “In comparison, we in Kosovo were extremely creative in our actions even under conditions of slavery and Serbian occupation because, as you know, when we were expelled from schools, faculties, hospitals, and jobs in the 90s, we found ways to reorganise and never accepted defeat, despite the high price of freedom.”
‘A highway will be built’
Few Kosovo Albanians were ever able to compare communist and post-communist Albania given the restrictive border policies in place.
One of them is 61-year-old Violeta Pirana, from the southern Kosovo city of Prizren, who visited her uncle, Osman Perolli, in Durres in 1974 as an 11-year-old.
Perolli had fought with the Yugoslav partisans in WWII and later served with a Yugoslav delegation to Ankara, Turkey, but he resigned over the expulsion of Kosovo Albanians to Turkey and sought exile in Albania.
So rare was it that a Kosovo Albanian could visit Albania that “the whole of Kosovo came to wish us a good trip, to send regards to my uncle and gifts, even gifts for their own relatives”, Pirana recalled.
Given the lack of connecting roads between Yugoslavia and Albania, Pirana’s family went by bus early in the morning to Podgorica – then called Titograd – in Montenegro and by taxi over the border into Albania, arriving in Durres at near midnight. The city looked “devastated and deserted”, Pirana told BIRN.
“The next day, guests started flooding in to wish us a warm welcome,” Pirana said. One day, a tall man arrived and greeted her mother, kissing her on both cheeks.
“I remember my mother was taken aback because, in our culture, it was not customary for a man to kiss a woman on both cheeks,” she said.
The trip marked the first time Pirana encountered Chinese people, a result of the strong ties at the time between China and Hoxha’s Albania. She remembered being particularly struck by the level of education among the people she met. After 40 days, the family returned to Kosovo, but the consequences of their trip were dire.
“When the time to return approached, many people came to wish us a safe journey, naturally sending regards and sometimes small gifts to their relatives in Kosovo. My parents faced consequences after this visit. My mother was suspended from work, my father was demobilised as a reservist, and my brother was not accepted into the faculty because he had an uncle in Albania.”
Pirana returned to Albania in the 1990s, during the hectic transition from communism to capitalism. When the pyramid schemes collapsed, rioters looted army weapons depots and there was a period of total chaos.
Pirana said she was “very happy” to return to Albania, “thinking that they were now free from Enver Hoxha’s prison”. But she soon noticed the shortages, particularly of sugar, and was perturbed when her driver indicated she should not stay longer than two days. “The whole situation I saw was even more disappointing,” Pirana said.
Nevertheless, Pirana’s abiding memory from her first trip was her uncle’s words of hope for the future:
“Violeta,” she recalled him saying, “the time will come very soon when there will be no obstacles to go to Albania, and even a highway will be built. I may not be alive, but you will have the chance.”
It took a few more decades, but his prophecy came true.
