Area Handbook for Albania Part 12

Because of the traditionally nationalistic character of the Albanian Orthodox Church, the regime has attempted from the outset to use it as an instrument for mobilizing the Orthodox population behind its policies. Using the church for its own ends, the regime took steps to purge all those elements within it that were considered unreliable.

Clergymen who did not yield to the demands of the regime were purged.

Among the purged Orthodox leaders was the primate of the church, Archbishop Kristofor Kisi, who was deposed in the late 1940s and subsequently died in jail. The regime replaced Kisi with Pashko Vodica, a renegade priest who had joined the ranks of the partisan formations.

On a.s.suming the office of primate, under the name of Archbishop Paisi, he stated that it was the church's duty to be faithful to the People's Republic of Albania and to the people's power and added: "Our Church must be faithful to the camp of Peace, to the great anti-imperialist and democratic camp, to the unique camp of socialism led brilliantly by the glorious Soviet Union and the Great Stalin...."

Archbishop Paisi brought about close ties between the Albanian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate. These ties were further strengthened after a delegation of Soviet religious leaders, headed by Bishop Nikon of Odessa, visited Tirana in the spring of 1951. After the 1960-61 Moscow-Tirana break, however, these ties lapsed.

The Roman Catholic Church, chiefly because it maintained close relations with the Vatican and was more organized than were the Muslim and Eastern Orthodox faiths, became a princ.i.p.al target of persecution as soon as the Communists a.s.sumed power. In May 1945 Monsignor Nigris, the apostolic nuncio in Albania, was arrested on charges of fomenting anti-Communist feelings and deported to Italy. In 1946 a number of Catholic clergymen were arrested and tried on charges of distributing leaflets against the regime; some were executed, others given long prison terms at hard labor.

According to Vatican sources, from 1945 to 1953 the number of Catholic churches and chapels in Albania was reduced from 253 to 100. Both seminaries in the country were closed, and the number of monasteries dropped from ten to two. All twenty convents were closed, as were fifteen orphanages, sixteen church schools, and ten charitable inst.i.tutions. Both Catholic printing presses were confiscated, and the publication of seven religious periodicals ceased.

The ranks of Catholic priests were thinned from ninety-three in 1945 to ten in 1953, twenty-four having been executed, thirty-five imprisoned, ten either missing or dead, eleven drafted into the army, and three having escaped from the country. Secular officials and laymen active in church affairs also suffered execution, imprisonment, and hara.s.sment.

The Catholic school system was completely eliminated. This included five secondary schools with a total enrollment of 570 and ten elementary and vocational schools with 2,750 pupils. All Catholic a.s.sociations were suppressed.

A severe blow against the Catholic church was struck in 1951, when the regime mustered a small group of clergymen to hold a national Catholic a.s.sembly to draw the statute for the church. As approved by the Council of Ministers on July 30 of that year, the statute provided that the "Catholic Church of Albania has a national character ... [and that] it shall no longer have any organizational, political, or economic relations with the Pope." The statute provided further that the church was to be directed both in religious and administrative matters by a new Catholic Episcopate, that relations concerning religious questions could be established only through governmental channels, and that the church would submit to the canon law of the world Catholic church only if the provisions of this law did not contradict the laws of the People's Republic of Albania.

Enver Hoxha himself spearheaded the campaign against the Catholic church. In 1952, for example, he purged Tuk Jakova, the only Catholic member of the Politburo and previously one of Hoxha's closest collaborators, because he had allegedly befriended the Catholic clergy.

In his speech to the Second Party Congress in 1952, in an attempt to justify Jakova's purge, Hoxha said: "Comrade Tuk Jakova, in contradiction to the political line of the Party and of the state concerning religion generally and the Catholic clergy in particular, has not properly understood and has not properly acted against the Catholic clergy. Without seeing the great danger of the reactionary clergy, Comrade Tuk Jakova has not hated them in sufficient measure...."

A new policy aimed at the complete destruction of organized religion was enunciated by Hoxha in a speech to the Party's Central Committee on February 6, 1967. Calling for an intensified cultural-education struggle against religious beliefs and declaring that the only religion for an Albanian should be Albanianism, he a.s.signed the antireligious mission to the youth movement. By May of the same year religious inst.i.tutions were forced to relinquish 2,169 churches, mosques, cloisters, and shrines, most of which were converted into cultural centers for young people. As the literary monthly _Nendori_ (November) in its September 1967 issue reported the event, the youth had thus "created the first atheist nation in the world."

According to Western correspondents in Tirana, the procedure employed in seizing the places of wors.h.i.+p was to a.s.semble the villagers or paris.h.i.+oners in order to discuss Hoxha's speech and to take measures to eliminate what the regime referred to as harmful survivals of religious customs. A decision was then taken to ask the government for permission to close a church, mosque, or monastery. A few days later the government, stating that it was following the will of the people, would issue orders to close the house of wors.h.i.+p.

Drastic measures were reportedly taken in cases where the clergy opposed the government order. The strongest resistance came from the Catholic clergy, resulting in the detention of some twenty priests. The cloister of the Franciscan order in Shkoder was set afire in the spring of 1967, resulting in the death of four monks. The Catholic cathedral in Tirana had its facade removed, and on June 4, 1967, it was taken over by the government and converted into a museum. A similar fate befell the Catholic cathedrals in Shkoder and Durres.

After the seizure of the houses of wors.h.i.+p, the younger clergymen were forced to seek work either in industry or agricultural collectives. The elder clergy were ordered to return to their birthplaces, which they could not leave without permission from the authorities. Monsignor Ernest Coba, bishop of Shkoder and acknowledged head of the Catholic church in Albania, was evicted from the cathedral in April 1967 and was forced to seek work as a gardener on a collective farm. He was still alive but ailing at the end of 1969.

By the beginning of 1970 the provision of the Const.i.tution concerning freedom of religion was ostensibly in effect, but government decrees had made such a provision a dead issue. On November 22, 1967, a significant measure was taken that apparently aimed at delivering the coup de grace to formal religious inst.i.tutions. On that day _Gazeta Zyrtare_, the government's official gazette, published Decree No. 4337 of the Presidium of the People's a.s.sembly ent.i.tled, "On the Abrogation of Certain Decrees." Specifically, the new decree annulled all previous decrees dealing with organized religion, thus removing official sanction from religious bodies and, in effect, placing them outside the law.

The 1949 decree on religion had provided for subsidies from the state to the three religious denominations. These subsidies had become indispensable for their survival because their property and all other material means of subsistence had been confiscated and nationalized in 1945, and without state help the churches could not function. Concurrent with the official moves against religions, a number of antireligious brochures and pamphlets were prepared and distributed by the Democratic Front in an effort to prepare the people for the attacks on their religious inst.i.tutions.

Even though organized religion had been destroyed by the end of 1967, the regime was still struggling as of early 1970 to eradicate religious thought and beliefs. The _Nendori_ article that proclaimed the creation of the first atheist state in the world admitted that "despite the hard blows religion had suffered through the destruction of its material inst.i.tutions, religious ideology is still alive."

Hoxha himself has often admitted that antireligious measures and the closing of places of wors.h.i.+p have not sufficed to eradicate religious beliefs. Thus, addressing the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Front in September 1967, he declared that it was misleading to hold that religion consisted of church, mosque, priests, icons, and the like, and that if all of these disappeared, then automatically religion and its influence on the people would vanish. The struggle against religious beliefs, he added, had not ended because for centuries they had been deeply rooted in the conscience of the people.

Hoxha reverted to the subject again in his speech to the Party's Central Committee plenum in June 1969, devoted to reforming the school system, in which he said that one of the aims of the reorganized schools would be to bring up the new generation imbued with scientific and theoretical knowledge; for, according to Hoxha, religious beliefs could be eradicated only through the elimination of old concepts still prevalent in the minds of the people.

At the beginning of 1970 Party leaders in their speeches and in the press were continuing to call for an intensification of the struggle against religious ideology and especially for the eradication of every religious influence or belief among students, who were still under the influence of parents. The older generation, according to the leaders.h.i.+p, continued to entertain the religious beliefs that everything in nature has been created with a predetermined purpose by G.o.d. The press has also reported on several occasions that there was strong resistance to the closing of places of wors.h.i.+p and that the clergy resorted to all kinds of subterfuge to continue their religious activities.

CHAPTER 6

GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL SYSTEM

Political power in 1970 was solely in the hands of the ruling elite, that is, the leaders.h.i.+p of the Communist Party (officially the Albanian Workers' Party). No political, economic, or social activity occurred without the sanction of the Party. Although the facade of a people's republic under const.i.tutional rule was established in 1946, the reality of a rigid police state was clearly evident from the beginning, and no true democratic processes had been allowed to develop. The greatly heralded People's a.s.sembly, people's councils, and people's courts were elected from a list of Party candidates; only one candidate was presented for each office, and there was no popular selection or popular choice. In effect, the Party was the government and directed all aspects of the lives of the people--from the cradle to the grave.

The governmental structure and political system of the Albanian People's Republic have their roots in the National Liberation Movement, which came into existence during the Italian and German occupations of World War II. Communist Party members dominated the leaders.h.i.+p and, while combating Italian and German occupiers, fought against other national resistance groups for postwar control of the country. Enver Hoxha, first secretary of the Albanian Workers' Party in 1970, and Mehmet Shehu, premier and second ranking Party member, were wartime leaders of the Communist resistance forces. Superior organization and the establishment of crude governing bodies called national liberation councils facilitated the Communist takeover of the country after the cessation of hostilities. These councils later became the basis of the postwar governmental structure.

The Communists moved rapidly after the end of the war to prevent the reestablishment of the monarchy and to secure their own position of power. Operating under the banner of a ma.s.s organization known as the Democratic Front, the Communist Party strengthened its hold on the country and in early 1946 promulgated a Const.i.tution based on Yugoslav and Soviet models. This Const.i.tution provided for a unicameral legislature, a collective executive branch, and an independent judiciary. Actually, the Albanian Workers' Party, formerly the Communist Party, which is mentioned in the Const.i.tution as "the vanguard organization of the working cla.s.s," uses the formal governmental structure as the instrument for governing the nation and for implementing its own policies.

The Albanian People's Republic in its twenty-five years as a Communist nation has remained as rigidly authoritarian and Stalinist in its approach to government as it was at the end of World War II. The Party is all pervasive, the leaders.h.i.+p is glorified to an extreme degree, and Party p.r.o.nouncements are treated as infallible doctrine. The average citizen casts his ballot in periodic elections for local and national offices, but two conditions invariably exist: a candidate for office is a member of the Party, and only one name is listed for any particular office. It has become standard practice for well over 99 percent of the electorate to vote and for over 99 percent of those voting to approve the single candidate. Absolute control of the government, the economy, and the cultural life of the country is a.s.sured by a system that places the leading officers of the Party in the top positions of government.

Albanian history as a Communist state can be divided into three distinct phases based on outside influence: the Yugoslav period, the Soviet period, and the Chinese period. Yugoslav influence began with the founding in 1941 of the Albanian Communist Party, in which some Yugoslav nationals played leading roles, and lasted until Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. From 1948 until 1961 the Albanians looked to the Soviet Union for a.s.sistance and advice, and after 1961 Communist China became the foreign power wielding greatest influence in the country.

In 1970 Albania continued as the only European ally of Communist China.

Hoxha and Shehu continued the harsh polemics with the Soviet Union; made tentative gestures of friends.h.i.+p toward Yugoslavia; continued their tirades against Western imperialism; and, in general, tried to present themselves to the world as the embodiment of true Marxism-Leninism.

FORMAL STRUCTURE OF GOVERNMENT

The People's a.s.sembly

The Const.i.tution established the People's a.s.sembly as the legislative branch of the government and refers to it as "the highest organ of state power." Representatives to the a.s.sembly are elected from a single list of Party-selected candidates for a term of four years in a ratio of 1 representative for every 8,000 inhabitants. The a.s.sembly meets in two regularly scheduled sessions annually, and there is const.i.tutional provision for the convening of extraordinary sessions.

All legislative power is vested in the People's a.s.sembly, although proposals for legislation and for const.i.tutional amendments can be made by the Presidium of the People's a.s.sembly or the Council of Ministers, as well as by members of the a.s.sembly itself. Bills become laws after an affirmative vote by a simple majority of the a.s.sembly, but an amendment to the Const.i.tution requires a two-thirds vote. In practice, the a.s.sembly listens to the reading of bills drawn up by its Presidium and then votes unanimous approval.

The a.s.sembly elects officers to preside over its meetings and direct its affairs. Usually a chairman, two vice chairmen, and a secretary are elected for the four-year term of the a.s.sembly. The chairman of the People's a.s.sembly in 1970 was Abdyl Kellezi, who was concurrently a candidate member of the Party, Political Bureau (Politburo). One of the two vice chairmen and the secretary were also members of the Party Central Committee. The a.s.sembly has the power to appoint commissions, to carry out specific functions, or to conduct investigations.

The Presidium

The Const.i.tution provides that the People's a.s.sembly elect its Presidium, which is made up of a president, two vice presidents, a secretary, and ten members. The president of the Presidium becomes the t.i.tular chief of state and, in 1970, this office was held by Haxhi Les.h.i.+, a member of the Party Central Committee. Enver Hoxha was one of the ten members of the Presidium, and a majority of the other Presidium members concurrently held high Party positions. Because of the infrequent and short meetings of the a.s.sembly and because the real power, that is Party power, is held by the Presidium, it has become the actual legislative branch of government.

The Presidium performs several functions besides that of conducting the affairs of the a.s.sembly between sessions. It calls for the elections of representatives to the a.s.sembly and convenes its sessions. It has the power to issue decrees and to ratify international treaties. The Presidium also appoints or recalls diplomats, receives credentials and letters of recall of foreign diplomats, and appoints and recalls the supreme commander of the armed forces. Between sessions of the a.s.sembly, the Presidium is empowered to decree general mobilization and a state of war and to appoint and relieve ministers as proposed by the premier. The Presidium also designates ministry jurisdiction over various enterprises according to the recommendations of the premier.

The Council of Ministers

The Council of Ministers, referred to as the government in the Const.i.tution, is the highest executive organ and const.i.tutionally is appointed by, and responsible to, the People's a.s.sembly or its Presidium. The chairman of the Council of Ministers, by virtue of his position, is also the premier or prime minister. Mehmet Shehu, who a.s.sumed this position in 1954, still held it in 1970. Shehu was also a member of the Politburo of the Party Central Committee. The Council of Ministers is composed of the chairman, three deputy chairmen, thirteen ministers, and the chairman of the State Planning Commission, who has ministerial rank. The Const.i.tution provides for the establishment of new ministries and the abolishment or combining of old ones.

The Council of Ministers, as a unit, is const.i.tutionally responsible for preparing the overall economic plan and the budget, which must then be approved by the People's a.s.sembly. After approval, which is pro forma and usually granted without discussion or debate, the council is responsible for implementation. The council also directs the monetary system; a.s.sures protection of citizens rights and the maintenance of public order; directs the organization of the army; oversees foreign relations; and, in effect, administers the entire economic and cultural life of the nation.

The interlocking of the Party with the Council of Ministers has been standard practice since its inception. In 1970 eight of the seventeen princ.i.p.al officers of the council were members or candidate members of the Politburo, six were Central Committee members, and the remaining three were regular members of the Party. With every key position occupied by a Politburo member, the Party elite maintained direct control over the entire governmental structure.

Local Government

People's councils are the const.i.tutional agencies on the local level.

Elected for three-year terms to administer districts, cities, and villages, they are responsible to their const.i.tuencies as well as to the higher organs of state power. According to the Const.i.tution, the councils are charged with economic and cultural matters and direct the affairs of the administrative organs within their jurisdictions.

Councils are responsible for maintaining public order, for implementing laws, and for drawing up local budgets. The Const.i.tution also requires that the councils call periodic meetings of their const.i.tuents to keep the people informed on council activities.

Each council chooses an executive committee from among its members.h.i.+p, and it is through this committee that the actual work of local government is accomplished. Other committees or departments may be established at the discretion of the executive committee for the performance of specific tasks or for the supervision of a particular enterprise. In performing such functions, the special committees and departments are const.i.tutionally responsible to the people's councils and to corresponding sections at higher levels of the bureaucracy. The people's councils are elected from lists of the local organizations of the Albanian Workers' Party.

COURT SYSTEM