How to Feed a Dictator by Witold Szablowski

How to Feed a Dictator by Witold Szablowski

Author:Witold Szablowski [Szablowski, Witold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00


5.

To talk about Enver Hoxha, I’ve arranged to meet Erjon Hysaj, a historian from Tirana. We’re sitting in Blloku, once a closed district only for the people in power and now the most fashionable and expensive part of Tirana. We order byrek, which is a flaky pie made of puff pastry with meat and cheese inside, and then Erjon starts his account.

“Hoxha was the son of an imam from Gjirokastër, a city in the north of Albania. When World War II broke out, he joined the communist partisans. He soon began to rise up the ranks. Why? Because he was ruthless. He killed everyone who might stand in his way: comrades from his unit, and people who had supported them. He had his own brother-in-law killed, although he had often protected him and put him up for the night at his house.”

“Why?”

“Because what mattered to him most was power. He killed anyone who might take it away from him. Anyone who was strong or had people’s respect.”

After the war, Hoxha was soon the country’s unchallenged leader. He collectivized the countryside, dried out the marshes, combated illiteracy, and built factories, all with money from his allies—Yugoslavia at first and later, when he quarreled with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union. Later still, when he quarreled with the Soviet Union, the money came from China. He wanted to change Albania from a society that was stuck in the Middle Ages (when he took power, 80 percent of the country’s citizens lived off agricultural labor, and roughly the same percentage were unable to read or write) into a modern one.

He fought effective campaigns against syphilis, malaria, and lack of education. In the 1930s, average male life expectancy had been forty-two, but thirty years later it had risen to sixty-seven. Within two decades almost all children were going to school, and 90 percent of Albanians had learned to read and write.

But at the same time, Hoxha still went on killing, just as during the war.

“Just after the war he had his own schoolmates, who remembered what a poor student he’d been, killed. And the girls from school who had once refused his advances,” says Erjon. “And thousands of others who didn’t agree with his heavy-handed policies. He built a system of labor camps and political prisons. About 200,000 people were sent to them. There they were made to work beyond their strength in mines and on construction sites. Many of them died.”

During Hoxha’s time in office some six thousand people were shot dead.

More and more often, people had nothing to eat. But anyone who publicly stated that there wasn’t any meat would end up in a labor camp. In extreme cases they were executed.



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