Aggression in Albania IX: Economic development…

In part IX of the anonymous 17-year old’s essay on Albania, we learn more historical background that helps to understand what happened in 1997.

It is true that after the liberation of Albania from the Nazi occupation, the development was somehow rapid. All people were involved in the refurbishment of Albania, and more than this. Till after the war, the infrastructure has been very rural. Cities looked like destroyed villages. The new infrastructure was a typical eastern architecture. Grey buildings with small apartments to live in. The private property was no longer permitted. All properties were fused into collective properties such as cooperatives and other structures. There was no more private investment or initiative. Previous tradesmen or businessmen were considered as enemies and micro burgesses. All their wealth and richness was confiscated and was transformed into collective property. We were being told that Albania was an oasis among the desert of capitalism. The welfare and well-being of the Albanian people was the highest. But the truth was different. People used to wait in long lines and long hours for milk and bread. Everything was sold with ratios. Milk, oil, wheat, coffee, sugar, everything was with ratios. The basic work and constructions in Albania were based on voluntary work. Massive voluntary actions were undertaken, and workers were obliged to participate “voluntarily”. Everything was productive including wilderness, but the economic level of an average family was still very low. The demagogy of a highly egalitarian and democratic state, was feeding the people more than the fruits of their own work and struggle.

Though everything was household produced: mines and minerals, power, oils and fuels, vegetables, fruits, corns and crops, industrial consumables etc., the Albanian families still lived in poverty. It was as if the Buddhist, Christian and eremites’ philosophy of neglecting and denying the luxuries of this world, would lead to a higher level of emotional, physical and interpersonal well-being. But this new philosophy was the philosophy of applied communism, which had nothing to do with the utopia of the communism itself. It had nothing to do with promised richness and equality of all social classes. In deed, social and political classes were deepened by the abysses of distinction, prejudices and discrimination. Prosecution of an individual was far beyond the individual himself. The whole family and relatives were prosecuted. They were sent into camps of forced labor, into deep areas of the state, and they were forced to lose contact with all their relatives. It did not matter if the prosecuted one was a professor, a doctor, a musician, a high-ranking officer; they were all politically, socially and morally degraded and put to forced labor.