This article was downloaded by: On: 7 April 2011 Access details: Access Details: Free Access Publisher

Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713635808

'Enverists' and 'Titoists' - Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova, 1941-99: From the Partisan Movement of the Second World War to the Kosova Liberation War
Stephen Schwartz

To cite this Article Schwartz, Stephen(2009) ''Enverists' and 'Titoists' - Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova,

1941-99: From the Partisan Movement of the Second World War to the Kosova Liberation War', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 25: 1, 48 72 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13523270802655613 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523270802655613

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Enverists and Titoists Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova, 194199: From the Partisan Movement of the Second World War to the Kosova Liberation War

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

Enverists, or supporters of Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha, and Titoists, referring to sympathizers with the architect of communist Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, are terms used in Albanian discourse over Kosova. But they are generally misconstrued to suggest differing orientations towards the rival regimes, when they more properly refer, as Albanian sources demonstrate, to attitudes about the fate of Kosova itself. Enverists in Kosova very rarely supported Hoxha and Titoists were not necessarily loyalists of Yugoslavia. Rather, the terms signify a distinction between those who saw the Albanian national question as one involving all Albanians, in Albania proper, Kosova, and neighbouring territories (Enverists) and those who viewed the problem of Kosova as a separate question (Titoists).

Introduction Albania has a population of 3.6 million, which is 65 per cent Muslim, with a Sunni majority, and a considerable minority, perhaps 30 per cent of the whole population, or one million, afliated with the Bektashi Su order, mainly in southern Albania. Bektashis, a unique community of indigenous Shia Muslims in Europe, have been headquartered in Albania since the suppression of Susm in Turkey in 1925, and have as many as two million adherents in Albanian-speaking communities. The remaining, non-Muslim, 35 per cent
Stephen Schwartz is Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, ,http:// www.islamicpluralism.org., Washington, DC. His most recent book is The Other Islam: Susm and the Road to Global Harmony (2008). This article was excerpted in a presentation at the academic conference on the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 protests in Kosova, Macedonia and Montenegro, organized by the Kosova Society of Political Prisoners, The Institute of History of Kosova and the Albanological Institute of Prishtina, in Prishtina, Kosova Republic, 26 Nov. 2008. It is dedicated to the Albanian communist Llazer Fundo (18991944), who wrote: Far from my country/I nd myself in Mongolia. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.25, No.1, March 2009, pp.48 72 ISSN 1352-3279 print/1743-9116 online DOI: 10.1080/13523270802655613 # 2009 Taylor & Francis

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

49

in Albania are roughly 20 per cent Christian Orthodox (in the south) and 15 per cent Catholic (in the north). The Kosova Republic, the second-largest Albanian-speaking country, with approximately two million people, is 80 per cent Sunni, 10 per cent Catholic, and 10 per cent Serbian Orthodox. Bektashis are present in Kosova and inuential beyond their small numbers, especially in the western region of Dukagjini, known to Serbs as Metohija, and also among veterans of the former Kosova Liberation Army or KLA (Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves UCK, more properly Liberation Army of Kosova). Many other Su orders are widely represented among Albanians, who are also the only European Islamic community with a major indigenous Su presence. Kosovas Albanian majority of 90 per cent is a subject of debate concerning its historical origins; however, that issue will not be examined in this article. Albanians in western Macedonia, who total at least 800,000, resemble their Kosovar homologues in religious sentiment. Orthodox Christian Albanians are rare in Kosova and western Macedonia, although long-prominent in the Albanian diaspora in the US. Among Albanians, religion tends to be a signier of local and family tradition, and there is no reliable means to determine how many people in any of the faith communities are really religious, rather than agnostics or atheists. Albanian national tradition holds that the people do not allow religious differences to divide them. Albania proper has seen a signicant movement of Muslims towards Catholicism, which is alleged to be the main primordial religion of the nation, prior to the Ottoman conquest of the fourteenth century. Protestant Christian proselytism is prevalent in Albania and Kosova, where missionaries function unimpeded. The political typology of Enverists and Titoists in Albanian political history, and especially that of Kosova, could easily lend itself to misinterpretation. The distinction could be taken to reect an enduring preference for different styles of communist governance extreme dictatorial tyranny under Enver Hoxha (1908 85), ruler of Albania proper after 1944, and liberal communism under Josip Broz Tito (1892 1980), the architect of communist Yugoslavia. Such an assumption would be mistaken. As will be shown, no Kosovar Enverists after the 1960s were supporters, per se, of Hoxhaite social or economic polices. Kosovar Albanians suffered various forms and degrees of discrimination under Yugoslav communist and Serbian neo-communist domination, culmi nating in decisions in 1987 90 by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to expel the Kosovar Albanians from the Yugoslav political, employment, education and health systems. Kosovars were then compelled to organize a parallel economy and political life, independent schools and improvised medical services. The aggravated oppression suffered by Albanians culminated in

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

50

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

the Kosova liberation war of 1998 99, in which NATO intervened on their side, and the declaration of independence of the Kosova Republic in 2008. Nevertheless, throughout the period of Serbian communist suppression of the Kosovar Albanians, the latter were never effectively denied freedom of worship, or the right to pluralistic cultural expression diverging from a single Albanian literary standard and from socialist realism. This was not the case in Hoxhas Albania: he declared Albania the worlds rst statutorily atheist country in 1967, and all mosques, churches, Su centres and the countrys sole Jewish synagogue were seized as state property and assigned to such secular uses as cinema theatres and sports facilities. Religious functionaries were executed, including Muslim and Catholic clerics and Su shaykhs and babas (the title of Bektashi clergy). In addition, the Hoxha state forced extremely harsh restrictions on all cultural and educational activities, ruthlessly imposing a linguistic variant known as Unied Literary Albanian or letrare, attempting to extirpate the northern or Gheg variant of Albanian,1 and forbidding and assailing artistic and literary modernism, which had been an important element in Albanian literature since the end of the First World War. While in 1987 90 Kosovar Albanians under Milosevic were red from their jobs and prevented from schooling their children or obtaining health care in Yugoslav state institutions, the communist and Serbian nationalist Yugoslavs, even then, as well as during the liberation war of 1998 99, did not impede Albanians from attending mosque or church services (except during the war, when Serbs demolished mosques and Su structures) or writing and painting in whatever idiom or style they chose. Indeed, Yugoslavia, as long as Tito was alive, asserted pride in its commitment to religious autonomy, linguistic and dialectal diversity, and aesthetic experimentation (although these claims were in some periods mendacious), and used these conceptions to promote its image as a democratic socialist commonwealth. Under Hoxha, by contrast, everything except praise of the dictator, the Albanian Party of Labour (formerly the Communist Party of Albania), and nationalist communism was banned. Under Tito, by contrast, nationalist propaganda (which could take the form of items as innocuous on the surface as folk balladry) was subject to sanctions, for Croats, Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Serbs and Albanians. Exceptions to the Titoist suppression of nationalist aspirations obtained among Slovenes, whose patriotic traditions were considered unthreatening to Titoite communism, and Macedonians, who were encouraged to develop a specic literary tradition as an alternative to the appeal among Macedonian Slavs of neighbouring, Soviet-aligned Bulgaria.2 It would also be a conceptual error to equate Enverism in Kosova with aggressive agitation for a single ethnic Albania or Greater Albania uniting Albania proper, Kosova and the Albanian-speaking areas of western

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

51

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

Macedonia, Montenegro, southern Serbia and northern Greece. As the Kosovar Albanian publicist Nexhmedin Spahiu wrote in 1999, while Enverists were viewed as moderately sympathetic to Hoxhas regime, the essential cleavage separated Enverists, who placed the issue of Kosova within the general context of a broad national consciousness in a people partitioned between Albania proper and Kosova, and Titoists who considered the Kosova problem to be distinct from the destiny of the broader Albanian community. In the period preceding the Kosova liberation war, Spahiu identied Enverism with the noted essayist Rexhep Qosja (born 1936) and Titoism with the moderate and non-violent national leader Ibrahim Rugova (1944 2006).3 As will be explained below, the KLA-UCK, which triumphed in 1999, was neither Enverist nor Titoist, regardless of Western speculation about its supposed Marxist origins. Furthermore, as I will seek to elucidate, in the aftermath of communisms collapse in both Albania and Yugoslavia, as well as the success of UCK, the terms Enverist and Titoist disappeared from the Kosovar political vocabulary. Although a nationalist Left is present in Kosova today, its main protagonists do not identify with the legacy of either communist Albania or Yugoslavia. The Foundation of the Communist Movement in Albania and its Antecedents Albania was occupied by fascist Italy in 1939, its ruling King Zog (Ahmet Zogolli) ed, and Yugoslavia was subdued by Germany in April 1941. Kosova was soon occupied by the Italians and mainly attached to Albania, although the key mining area north of Mitrovica came under German control and was assigned, on the map, to Serbia, but as an Albanian autonomous zone. The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 brought about a change in the line of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), which, while the Stalin Hitler pact was in force, had concentrated its efforts on anti-British propaganda. Albania proper had not yet produced a communist party, and at the foundation of such a party, in the aftermath of Hitlers break with Stalin, communism in the country was entirely Titoist. This was because, lacking an industrial working class, Albania had no stable basis for communist activity. At least 50 Albanians from Albania proper and Kosova, however, had participated in the Soviet-controlled International Brigades (IB) in Spain during that countrys civil war of 1936 39. When an Albanian Communist Party was founded late in 1941, its inspiration, and even its guiding spirits, were Yugoslav; it was established in Tirana, the Albanian capital, by two Slav representatives of the Kosova section of the KPJ, Dusan Mugosa and Miladin Popovic. Their mission was unambiguous: to recruit allies for the Yugoslav anti-fascist movement. Mugosa and

52

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

Popovic fashioned the new party out of three small groups that were little more than study circles. Sadik Premte, an early and popular leader of the Albanian communists, expressed suspicion of Popovic, whom Premte described as a crafty Serb chauvinist who, under the mask of Communism, wanted to form a clique for the sake of better serving the interests of his country, namely Yugoslavia. Premte, in turn, was accused by the Yugoslav communist Vladimir Dedijer (1914 90) of Trotskyism and being anti-Yugoslav.4 Premte and other pioneers of the Albanian communist movement were soon expelled from the new party; Premte and a certain Anastas Lula were thrown out after a purge trial in Tirana in mid-1942. At least two Albanian dissenters from the ofcial commu nist line, Lula and Llazer Fundo (1899 1944),5 were murdered during the war at the behest of Hoxha, a former Albanian student in France (where he may have been recruited to communism by Fundo). Hoxha was long suspected of serving as a monarchist police agent among the Albanians abroad, serving the regime of King Zog, but would become the Yugoslav-installed communist chief of his native land. According to Premte, many more such dissidents were assassinated. In memoirs, Hoxha referred to the purge of Lula and Premte as the removal of an abscess, and Albanian ofcial party literature from Tirana continued to denounce them decades later. Premte escaped to France, where he lived in exile from 1947 until his death in 1991; there he remained a target for assassination by Hoxhas agents, but joined the international Trotskyist movement. Premte survived to see the fall of the communist regime in Tirana, and was praised by the French Trotskyists for having remained faithful to the belief that there can be no socialism without democracy.6 Llazer Fundo, although largely forgotten by Albanians today, was immortalized by British liaison ofcers assigned to the anti-fascist resistance movement in Albania, as well as Italian left-wing historians. Fundo was born in the town of Korca in Albania proper; his family were merchants from the nearby, once prosperous city of Voskopoja (Moschopolis), which embodies a unique chapter in Balkan history. Voskopoja had been the economic centre of Vlach (West Balkan Romanian) people, and in the eighteenth century established one of the earliest printing industries in Christian languages in the Ottoman empire. (Jewish printing under the Ottomans had begun earlier, in 1493, immediately after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and their invitation to settle in the Turkish lands, extended by the sultan.) Fundo was a Vlach. Voskopoja was largely depopulated at the end of the eighteenth century, and today is but a small village, yet is still famous for the beauty of the frescoes in its Orthodox churches. Fundo studied in Salonika and Paris before returning to Albania in his early twenties and joining a political group led by Avni Rustemi

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

53

(1895 1924), a revolutionary democrat. Rustemi was assassinated, and Fundo assumed editorial responsibility for Rustemis periodical, Bashkimi (Unity). Fundo later worked in the Balkan Federation, a front group for the Communist International (Comintern), active in regional nationalist politics and opposed to White Yugoslavia as a counter-revolutionary monarchy that had welcomed Russian military opponents of the Bolsheviks. The Balkan Federation assisted the leading Albanian movement directing mass armed resistance to Serbian rule over Kosova in the 1920s, the Kosova Committee (Komiteti e Kosoves or KK), in which Fundo was active. Fundo became a high Comintern functionary, associated with the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov (1882 1949), and remained in Berlin after Dimitrov was arrested with two Bulgarian comrades in 1933 by the Hitler government, and tried for the arson attack on the Reichstag. Fundo helped direct the legal defence for Dimitrov, who was acquitted and expelled from Germany, at which time Fundo also left the country. The KK anticipated the later KLA-UCK in lacking an elaborated political platform, aside from Albanian nationalism, or even the rudiments of an economic reform programme. While the KK was led by the outstanding Kosovar Albanian patriots of the time, such as the long active anti-Serbian combatant Bajram Curri (1862 1925), it had no social-revolutionary content, and indeed was viewed by most observers as defending the property rights of traditional Muslim landlords. KK members also included the notable Hasan Bej Prishtina (1873 1933), who had served as prime minister of Albania proper, and one of the most famous of all Kosovar guerrilla ghters of his generation, Azem Bejta Galica (1889 1924). Azem Bejta is perhaps even more renowned for the armed role taken on by his wife, Qerime Shota Galica (1895 1927), who has become an epic female hero among the typically patriarchal Albanians. The zone of operations of Azem and Shota Galica Drenica in central Kosova became the cradle of the KLA-UCK campaign in 1997, and included the town of Prekaz i Ulet, home of Adem Jashari (1955 98), the most prominent martyr of the Kosova liberation war.7 In Kosova at the beginning of the Second World War, the eminent South Slav historian Ivo Banac states atly, the KPJ had no following among Albanians.8 As the Albanian communist Koco Tashko wrote to Moscow in late 1942, in a letter cited by the historian Noel Malcolm, The hatred and fear of the Kosovars for the Serbs and Montenegrins is very great. But the brunt of Tashkos letter involved a complaint that Miladin Popovic had rejected proposals for a separate Communist organization to be set up in Kosova. For, Tashko added, let us not forget that [Kosovars] also have a great hatred for the fascist Italians, whom they call weaklings and in dels.9 Popovic briey asked that the party in Dukagjini be placed under the authority of the Albanian (Tirana) communist leadership rather than the

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

54

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

Yugoslav, and for the partisans in the same area to report to the Albanian partisan staff in Albania proper. But such a decision might have legitimized the Italian extension of Albanian authority into Kosova, and Popovic soon abandoned that proposal. Nevertheless, Kosova remained Albanian in its majority, and its association with Albania was logical and justiable by almost any measure except that of Serbian nationalism. Only once, during the war, did the Albanian communists from Tirana seem to dissent seriously from their Yugoslav masters on these matters. At the end of 1943, a conference of communists was held in Bujan, in north-east Albania, at which just one in seven of those attending were not Albanian, and it created a Kosova Peoples Committee. The committee declared that only common partisan struggle with the Yugoslav nationalities would allow the Kosovar Albanians to decide their own future through the right of self-determination, up to the point of secession. This formulation was almost immediately rejected by the supreme Yugoslav partisan leaders. However, Banac has shown that Tirana Albanian communists had attempted to break through this system of control on other occasions. The party organization within Albania proper unsuccessfully sought to assume command over Albanian partisans in Kosova and western Macedonia, and to bring Dukagjini under its jurisdic tion, in line with the original proposal of Popovic; at least one obscure manifesto, very early on, seemed to grant Kosova and its Albanians equal standing in the partisan liberation effort with Montenegro, Serbia and Greece.10 Before continuing a review of Albanian Yugoslav tensions in the Balkan partisan milieu, it is appropriate to examine further the predecessors of the ofcial Albanian party in the history of communism in the Albanian lands. Because no historical Albanian socialist or communist movement existed, the rst Albanian Marxists originated in the ranks of an anti-Stalinist political tendency that today is virtually forgotten, the Greek Archeio-Marxists, so named because they published a periodical entitled Archives of Marxism. The Archeio-Marxists fostered a youth group called Zjarri (The Flame) among Albanian students in Athens. Unfortunately, a historiography of Zjarri is lacking in Albanology.11 As noted above, some 50 to 100 Albanians, including Kosovars, joined the International Brigades in Spain. Their transportation had been facilitated by Llazer Fundo; they refused assignment to the South Slavic detachments of the IB, which were commanded by Serbian and other South Slav ofcers, and the Albanians were included in the Italian-language Garibaldi Battalion. Unfortunately, the Albanians were involved in the suppression of the 1937 anti-Stalinist demonstrations in Barcelona known as the May events,12 recorded by George Orwell in his classic Homage to Catalonia. The most famous Albanian IB veteran was doubtless Mehmet Shehu (1913 81), who rose to serve as Hoxhas prime minister before his probable

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

55

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

murder. The experience of the Albanians in Spain is evoked in a novel, Hasta la Vista by Petro Marko (1913 91),13 who was jailed under the Hoxha regime in the late 1940s. He is considered a major Albanian modernist, and Hasta la Vista has remained in print. According to the Albanologist Robert Elsie, the leading Albanian poet Migjeni (Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, 1911 38), who was of Slav ethnic origin and had Trotskyist associations, similarly wanted to go to Spain to ght but was prevented from doing so by his acute tubercular condition, which led to his early death.14 The Tito representative to Albania, Miladin Popovic, was also a Spanish civil war veteran. Apart from authentic Marxists and volunteers in Spain, the Albanian lands included a number of important political gures associated or aligned with the Soviet Union. In the rst category, it is worth recalling the short-lived Albanian democratic regime of Theofan Stilian Noli (1882 1965), established in the second half of 1924 by a revolution beginning with protests against the murder of Avni Rustemi. Although Noli was an Albanian Orthodox Christian bishop and his government enjoyed Catholic support, he and his supporters were attacked as communists during the preparation of the Noli republics rapid destruction by intervening Yugoslav forces. Nolis administration had established relations with the Soviet Union, but could hardly be considered a revolutionary socialist government. Nevertheless, the label communist was widely attached to Noli in foreign media. After its overthrow in December 1924, the Washington Post reported: When the Fan Noli government recognized the soviet regime . . . Moscow promptly sent a delegation to Tirana (including a military delegate) which at once began to sh in troubled waters and arm bands of lawless Albanians to raid Greek and Jugoslav territory . . . Strange to say, one European statesman (and not the least), Dr. [Edvard] Benes, the minister of foreign affairs of Czechoslovakia, refuses to regard the Communistic danger as a very serious one.15 Such highly coloured reports were predictably exaggerated, lending credi bility to the doubts of Benes. On 12 September 1924, the general secretary of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RCP(b)), Joseph V. Stalin, signed a letter of the party Central Committee announcing the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Mexico, then considered a leading revolutionary country, Albania, and the Arabian state of Hejaz (which, as it happened, was just then suffering its nal invasion by the Wahhabi forces of Ibn Saud, also considered revolutionary by some observers).16 The opening of Soviet archives has disclosed that Moscows relations with Noli were signicantly affected by the commitment of the Communist International to the Balkan Federation and the KK. Noli was friendly towards the KK, but the Soviet archives do not sustain a charge of wholesale

56

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

attacks in Kosova or Greece coordinated with Russian help. With the end of the Noli regime, Llazer Fundo, a member of Nolis inner circle, had ed to Russia. Comintern personnel les on Fundo and other Albanian gures prior to 1941 are absent.17 Albanians were apparently unique in Europe as the only nation that viewed Comintern support for their struggle against foreign (that is, Serbian) domination as a separate Soviet policy from Moscows programme for communist organization. The obvious reason for this is that, while the Comintern was international, the KPJ was Yugoslav South Slav and therefore different from and, at least presumably, opposed to Albanian identity, which is neither historically nor linguistically Slav. In addition, Catalan, Croatian, Macedonian Slav and Irish nationalists had temporarily beneted from such aid by Moscow, but in all four of these cases local socialist and labour traditions drew Soviet attention away from nationalism to standard Marxist perspectives. The history of the Noli regime and of Comintern support to the KK parallel with inconsistent Yugoslav communist co-operation with other anti-Serb movements in the Balkans, including the Croatian peasant movement of Stjepan Radic and the terrorist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO) nevertheless persisted as obstacles to the complete suppression of Albanian national demands in the Western Balkan partisan milieu during the Second World War.18 Tito, who came from a mixed Slovene and Croat background, committed the KPJ to moderate accommodation with all such sentiments. Co-operation and Competition in the Yugoslav and Albanian Partisan Movements With the establishment of communist governments in Yugoslavia and Albania after the partisan victories in the war neither country having needed signicant Soviet military assistance in defeating the Axis unresolved interethnic Slav Albanian conicts were bound to emerge. As might have been predicted, the rst such clashes occurred in Kosova. In 1948 the Yugoslav communists were expelled from the Moscowdirected Comintern, and Albania chose to side with Stalin against Tito; indeed, alleged (and probably real) Yugoslav intrigues to absorb Albania supposedly played a role in the break between Stalin and Tito. Yugoslav government sources, apparently intended to bind Kosovar Albanian identity to Yugoslavia and to counter nationalist propaganda by Hoxha, then claimed that Albanians had initiated the wartime partisan struggle in Kosova. This ofcial Yugoslav documentation asserted that Kosovar Albanian miners had joined their Slav colleagues in sabotage actions at the Trepca mines near Mitrovica as early as July 1941. On 28 November 1941, according to the

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

57

same sources, an Albanian Flag Day commemoration in the Dukagjini city of Gjakova turned into an anti-fascist demonstration of 6,000 Albanians. In 1942, telephone communications throughout Kosova were repeatedly cut in order to sabotage Axis occupation activities.19 The authorized Yugoslav account states that the rst Kosovar Albanian partisan detachment had been recruited in Ferizaj in September 1942, followed by the formation of units made up of Kosovar Albanians, Serbs and Macedonian Slavs, in the then Bulgarian-controlled region of Vranje, on the frontier of South Serbia (also known as Eastern Kosova), and in the Sharr mountains. A new unit, named after the Kosovar Albanian communist Emin Duraku, killed in 1942, was set up in Dukagjini and began operating in both Kosova and Albania. It was eventually followed by a partisan formation named after Bajram Curri, which fought also in Kosova and Albania proper. Partisan groups were further named after an Albanian communist, Ramiz Sadiku, and a Slav, Boris Vukmirovic. Anti-Axis demonstrations were repeated in Prishtina, Gjakova, Prizren and Peja (the last three are the main cities in Dukagjini). Kosovar Albanian partisans entered Macedonia, where similar units were formed by Kosovars previously imprisoned in Albania proper, and by local ethnic Albanians. Kosovar Albanian partisan groups, unspecied Macedonian units, and partisans from Albania proper were credited with the liberation of the remote eastern Albanian town of Peshkopia, and Kosovar Albanian units were assigned responsibility for the liberation of large areas of northern Albania. A combined Kosovar Albanian and Macedonian partisan brigade was also established in 1943 and fought in northern Greece. Late in 1944 a joint operations staff was established in the Gjakova region by the rst and fourth Kosovar and third and fth Albanian (Tirana) partisan brigades. At the end of combat in Kosova, nine partisan brigades, overwhelmingly composed of ethnic Albanians, were active in the region. Kosovar Albanians participated in Yugoslav military actions, with the partisan forces transformed into a regular army, in Bosnia-Hercegovina, in the Srijem area on the border of Croatia and Serbia, and in Trieste, a city contested between Italy and Yugoslavia.20 Thus, during the war, the roles of the various Albanian groups in the conict had become indistinct. A decision by the Yugoslav partisans to dispatch Fadil Hoxha, a semi-literate Kosovar Albanian communist, to form combat groups in the Malesia e Gjakoves, a mountain range on the post-1912 border of Kosova and Albania, apparently reected the assumption of the Yugoslav communist leaders that they could exercise general control over operations in the partisan fronts of both Yugoslavia and Albania. Fadil Hoxha was appointed Yugoslav partisan staff commander for Kosova in 1943, the year in which the Italian occupation of Montenegro and Albania ended.

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

58

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

It was perhaps not surprising that Albanian partisan detachments reporting to Tirana entered areas of Axis-controlled Yugoslavia to join Yugoslav partisans in military actions, given the ideological nature of the conict. The Yugoslav communists, however, also insisted that Tirana-coordinated Albanian partisans active in western Macedonia should withdraw into Albania or face armed attacks by their alleged comrades who were Slavs. Enver Hoxha, installed by the Yugoslavs as head of the communist network in Albania, expressed no qualms, during the war, about supine obedience to orders from Tito. As Banac has written, the Kosovar Albanians greeted strictly Albanian partisan units with occasional tolerance, rather than enthusiasm. Banac notes that Kosovar Albanian partisans claimed that their enemies included not only rural folk, but also dogs, shepherds, and even goats. Various sources describe a pitched battle, lasting several hours, in 1943 between partisans and 2,000 armed and enraged Kosovar Albanian peasants, at Livoc near Gjilan, which ended only when the attackers realized that the partisans were also Albanian. It is difcult to determine how much the signicance of these diverse incidents may have been distorted in post-war propaganda, in the hope, as noted, of binding the Kosovar Albanians to Yugoslavia after the split between Tito and Stalins surrogate Hoxha; a sound, credible historiography of the Albanian partisan movement has yet to emerge, and must begin with the opening of archives that still remain inaccessible. But the foregoing chronicle of partisan activity almost certainly represents a narrative mainly intended to legitimize the inclusion of Albanian-majority Kosova in Titos post-war Yugoslavia. While it sustains the assumption that the communist internationalism of the partisans transcended not only ethnic but also national state barriers, it also underscores the somewhat factitious nature of the Yugoslav Albanian state borders, which were and remain persistently viewed by Albanians as a partition of their nation. To emphasize the point, partisans originating in both Yugoslavia and Albania assembled members of diverse ethnicities and operated in Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. The borders of these states and Bulgaria had either been dissolved (in the Yugoslav case) or redrawn, and the Yugoslav partisans could justify their disregard of the pre-war frontiers by the exigencies of the armed struggle under new occupation authorities and, in some cases, against enemies different from what might previously have been expected. A considerable number of ordinary Albanians, however, viewed this transnational mobility as an expression of Slavic imperialism, and a sound argument may be made that Tito exploited the Axis reassignment of territories and shifts in demarcation to direct Yugoslav partisan operations expansively, just as Albanians viewed the same uctuation on maps as a de facto recognition of their authentic ethnic territory. The new borders drawn by the Axis

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

59

occupiers could be used by either Yugoslav or Albanian partisans in their hidden but real competition. Albanians could use the joining of Kosova to Albania by the Axis to facilitate their recovery of Kosova, alienated since 1912 by Slav power, but Yugoslav communists could use the same merger as a pretext to operate in Albania. Recruitment to Albanian partisan units was slow in both Albania proper and Kosova. Still, in 1944, partisan units from Albania were invited into Dukagjini to do work that Slav troops could not be expected to complete among the Albanian majority in Kosova the suppression of independent anti-fascist but also anti-communist ghters. This was ironic given the rejection by the Yugoslav partisans of weak Albanian communist initiatives, symbolized by the Bujan colloquies, towards recognition of Kosovar Albanian demands. The Yugoslavs would not recognize Albanian rights in Kosova but would use Albanians to deny such rights. The situation within Kosova was, in reality, never as positive for the Yugoslav partisans as one might imagine from reading the ofcial Titoist nar rative. Llazer Fundo was murdered in Kosova while participating in an antiStalinist and anti-fascist movement led by a powerful family of Kosova Muslim notables, the Kryeziu brothers. Gani Kryeziu and his two brothers Hasan and Sahit, from Gjakova, were sons of a long-established Kosovar Albanian leader. During the Second World War, the Kryezius favoured the British, the Americans, and other democratic and non-communist powers in the Allied coalition. At the end of 1943, one of the Kryeziu brothers initiated contact with a British liaison ofcer in Kosova, Peter Kemp (a man of the political right who, curiously enough, had also fought in the Spanish civil war, but for Franco), presenting him with a proposal for an independent insurrectionary movement against the Germans. Albanian communist cadres from Tirana were so fearful of such a possibility that they secretly informed the Gestapo of Kemps rst meeting with Hasan Kryeziu. Kemp soon agreed to provide support, but he was overruled by his superiors in London, who favoured the ofcial partisans. Still, the British ofcers on the ground, if they could not provide immediate aid to the Kryezius, depended on them for help. Earlier work with the Kryezius had been carried out by another British agent, Julian Amery,21 who had also gone to Spain during its war, but as a journalist, while a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, Tony Neel, established a liaison with Gani Kryeziu in the Kukes area of north Albania, on the Kosova border. After six months, British backing, at least in words, was given to the Kryeziu brothers effort, which aimed at liberation of the Albanians from the Axis, but with continued unity of Albania proper and Kosova. The Kryezius were considered to be local supporters of the deposed King Zog in Albania, and were joined by Fundo.

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

60

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

In the aftermath of his involvement in the world-famous Reichstag Fire trial, Fundo had broken with the Comintern in 1937, during the excesses of the Yezhovshchina repressions in the Soviet Union, but was saved from the purge machine by his association with Dimitrov. Amery, who developed a close relationship with him, described Fundo as the main Albanian Comintern gure, and, in the early period, the only Albanian communist aside from the poet Sejfulla Maleshova (1901 71). Like Fundo, Maleshova had been a signicant gure in the government of Noli, and originally went to Moscow via Paris. Robert Elsie states that Maleshova joined the communist movement after 1930 but was expelled as a follower of Nikolai Bukharin, and later reinstated.22 Maleshova developed a venomous rivalry with Fundo, whom he twice denounced. Both these leading Albanian communist intellectuals were reputed to be followers of Bukharin, which was probably a predictable outcome given that Bukharins line in the Comintern, during the late 1920s, emphasized the social weight of peasants in societies such as China and among the Croats. Albania, without an industrial proletariat or even a substantial petit-bourgeoisie or secular intelligentsia, was yet more susceptible to a pro-peasant strategy than were Far Eastern countries, although Albanian peasants never formed a movement based on their economic function. Fundo was called back to Moscow after Maleshovas second denunciation of him but, like others outside the Soviet Union at the height of the purges, refused to return there. He may have made contact in Spain, during the civil war, with the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer dUnicacio Marxista (POUM), in the militia of which Orwell served. An Albanian known only by the nom de guerre of Jovan was present in the POUM milieu in Barcelona during the revolutionary phase of the Spanish conict.23 Amery recalled that Fundo had gone to Albania in 1938 with the intention of establishing an Albanian Socialist Party with a social-democratic orientation. He also described Fundo as a former Comintern supervisor of Tito, while the latter, through his propagandist author Dedijer, later appeared obsessed with Fundos alleged Trotskyism. Maleshova, who had hounded Fundo, was himself purged from the Albanian communist leadership in 1946. Fundo was deeply patriotic and wrote a series of poems expressing his nostalgia for Korca and Albania, including one entitled I remember the home land, composed during a trip to Outer Mongolia; even there he wrote of being far from my country. He was arrested by the Italians in Albania in 1941 and deported to the prison island of Ventotene. There he met Gani and Sahit Kryeziu, who had also been interned by the Italians as anti-fascists, and also an Italian Trotskyist, Luigi Zanon, previously arrested and imprisoned by pro-Moscow communists in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war, and a group of Spanish and Italian anarchists. Freed with the Kryezius in 1943, at the end of Italian involvement in the war, Fundo insisted on returning with

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

61

them to rejoin the Albanian national struggle in Kosova. The Italian socialist politician Sandro Pertini (1896 1990) tried to dissuade him, and held a nal meeting with Fundo in Rome in August 1943. Pertini later served as president of the Italian Republic from 1978 to 1985. Given his past association with the KK, it may have been inevitable that Fundo would be attracted to the struggle in Kosova. He became a prominent gure in the Kryeziu brothers movement, but was arrested by Hoxhas Albanian partisans in the mountains between Kukes and Gjakova with two British ofcers, and beaten to death in November 1944.24 Also at the end of 1944, in a series of incidents that remain alive today in the collective memory of Kosovars, at least 4,000 Kosovar Albanian ghters under the command of an elderly combatant, Shaban Palluzha (1871/73 1945), who had formed the Democratic Anti-fascist Movement of Drenica in 1941, became involved in an uprising against the Yugoslav partisans. Palluzhas situation was extremely confused and tragic, yet he became an immortal hero of heroes to Kosovars, who write ballads about him even today. Titos staff ordered the removal of Palluzhas ghters to the Srijem district near Belgrade, but Palluzha insisted they were needed to defend Drenica, the old heartland of Azem Bejta and Shota Galica, where a horric massacre of Albanians by Serbs had occurred as the war came to an end. Furthermore, an Albanian partisan sent to investigate the Drenica affair was shot by Yugoslav partisans when he attempted to present his report. According to reputable accounts, 20,000 ghters joined Palluzhas ranks, which were re-titled Military Forces of the Movement for National Liberation and Unity (Forcave Ushtarake te Levizjes per Clirim dhe Bashkim Kombetar FULCBK) and were attacked by Yugoslav and, again, by Albanian partisans, with bloody results.25 Leadership of the Kosovar uprising was assumed at the end of the war by a new organization that emerged almost spontaneously: the Albanian National Democratic Movement (Levizja Nacional-Demokratike Shqiptare) known by its Albanian initials as LNDSh, and in the popular vocabulary as Endeja (ND-ja) or the ND.26 ND-ja became an informal but near-total resistance effort. It drew some of its members from among the functionaries of the former pro-Axis Albanian occupation regime, but since the insurrection became general, embracing almost the entire Kosovar Albanian populace, numerous Kosovar Albanian partisans were quickly drawn to participate in it. Indeed, ND-ja represents a unique example of a near-unanimous popular insurrection in Europe, neglected by historians who do not know Albanian sources. It was a genuine collective rebellion encompassing Dukagjini and western Macedonia. Between 1945 and 1947, the LNDSh organized three underground congresses. A debate took place in the movement, with one trend favouring relocation of the leaders to Greece and their opponents insisting that the ght should continue within Kosova. In the parlance of later revolutionary

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

62

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

movements elsewhere in Europe, these could be described as external and internal factions. The main internal leader, Ajet Gurguri, remained on the scene in Kosova but was arrested and executed. He was followed in death by Gjon Serreqi, a Catholic patriot, who had been sent to a prison camp by the German SS in 1944. Serreqi had directed the clandestine ND-ja while serving as a teacher in the Sami Frasheri high school in the historic centre of Prishtina, whose students organized an LNDSh student youth committee. He became a major symbol of Albanian deance of Slavic aggression, the latter in communist garb. On 11 March 1945, the Albanian women of Gjakova went on to the streets to protest against the drafting of their men-folk to serve the Yugoslavs in the repression of ND-ja. Many of the women protestors were arrested and received lengthy prison sentences. But one Albanian woman stood out from the others. She was Marie Shllaku (1922 46), a Catholic schoolteacher born in Shkodra in northern Albania.27 Marie Shllaku became a martyr, succeeding to the legacy of Shota Galica; she even surpassed her, and is known as the Joan of Arc of Kosova. Marie Shllaku was seriously wounded during ghting in Drenica. Sheltered by a peasant family, she was discovered and arrested. The Yugoslav police ignored her injuries, beating and otherwise torturing her. She was carried into the courtroom in Prizren, where she was tried. The judge was Ali Shukrija, the leading communist among the Kosovar Albanians for many years afterwards. He ranted at her during the proceeding, declaring that she was unt to be shot, and should be burned alive. In her last words in court, Marie Shllaku declared, One day your sons and daughters will be ashamed of your treachery and inhumanity against us and against the whole Albanian people. During the period when she awaited death, she was heard in her prison cell nightly singing folk songs from Shkodra, as if preparing for her wedding. She was 24 when she was executed in late 1946. Many more LNDSh supporters were imprisoned and killed before the insurrection was completely defeated. Fighting in Kosova did not end until the establishment of martial law in 1945; several tens of thousands of Albanians perished in the uprising. More than half a century later, Slobodan Milosevic referred to these events in a discussion with the United States General Wesley Clark. Milosevic averred, We know how to handle problems with these Albanian killers . . . We have done this before . . . [In] Drenica [in] 1946 . . . We kill them, all of them.28 Throughout this period Enver Hoxha demonstrated that he was no Albanian patriot, by fullling the orders of the Tito leadership. After their immediate usefulness to the Yugoslav communists was deemed to have ended, Tirana-loyal Albanian partisan units withdrew from Kosova; furthermore, Hoxhas early administration, like the original cadres of the Albanian Communist Party, included numerous Yugoslav advisers in positions of

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

63

authority. This left the resolution of the Kosova issue, within the new, communist Yugoslavia, entirely in the hands of Tito and his Slav-majority Politburo. The rst measures taken by the Tito communists after they established control over Kosova were unmistakable in their import: the Kosova communist district committee was abolished and all local organizations were placed under the responsibility of the Serbian republic leadership. Still, Kosovar Albanian recalcitrance remained visible, as numerous local communists resigned their posts and gave up party membership in protest at this action. A special commission directed by the Montenegrin Milovan Djilas (1911 95), number four in the KPJ party hierarchy, re-established the district party committee for Kosova, and the territory was granted ofcial but limited autonomy within Serbia. Nevertheless, Kosova remained a troubled region. Early in 1945, Miladin Popovic, one of those responsible for the creation of an originally Slavophile Albanian Communist Party, was assassinated in Prishtina. For decades, a legend among Kosovar Albanians held that Popovic had been murdered by the Yugoslav secret police because he insisted on fullling the vague wartime pledges made by the Titoites to grant self-determination to the Kosovar Albanians. In addition, until his own death Hoxha insisted on honour ing Popovic as an internationalist. Claims that Popovic was liquidated by his Yugoslav comrades were, none the less, merely extravagant conspiracy theories. Popovic was killed by two ND-ja supporters: Qazim Vula, an activist from Gjakova in his early thirties, and Haki Taha. Haki Taha entered the building of the communist regional committee for Kosova, red the shots that killed Popovic, and was himself killed. Qazim Vula stood in the street to ensure Tahas escape; he was arrested and taken to Nis in central Serbia where he was sentenced to death. Incredibly, but perhaps typically of Albanian ghters, he managed to escape from prison and made his way across the border into Albania, where, when he announced that he had participated in the attack on Popovic, he was again arrested for a crime against Hoxhas internationalist exemplar and served another long sentence. He died in Shkodra in 1987, in his mid-seventies, and was reburied in Gjakova in spring 2000.29

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

The Tito Hoxha Break and Its Consequences for Kosova The rupture between Tito and Stalin in 1948, with Hoxha favouring the latter, has been amply discussed in Yugoslav and Albanian historiography, including works by condants of Tito such as Djilas and Dedijer, critical historians exemplied by Banac, and the unreliable memoirs of Hoxha himself.30 Kosova itself played no major role in the split. Stalin and his Politburo are

64

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

perceived to have grown suspicious of Yugoslav competition with Russia for domination throughout the Balkans, including Bulgaria as well as Albania. According to the commonly accepted version, Stalin encouraged Tito to exploit the presence of Yugoslav advisers in Albania and annex the latter country as a new constituent republic of Titos state; the Soviet chief then turned on Tito and incited Hoxha to join Moscow in denouncing Yugoslavias regional ambitions. Given that, even after the break with Tito, Hoxha never actively supported Kosovas demands for autonomy within Yugoslavia, much less the historical struggle for emancipation from Slav rule, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of this account. Hoxha himself declared, in his memoirs, The Titoites, that he told Tito that promises of autonomy even up to secession had been made to the Kosovar Albanians at Bujan in 1943, and that he (Hoxha) advanced the demand that Albanian-majority regions of Yugoslavia should be united with the Albanian state. According to Hoxha, Tito replied benevolently, I am in agreement with your view, but for the time being we cannot do this, because the Serbs would not understand us. In turn, the Albanian dictator alleged that he effectively allowed the matter to be ignored, after reminiscing about Comintern support for the Kosovar antiSerbian movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Hoxha said he summarized his attitude as follows: When we began the [anti-fascist] National Liberation War and in the course of the war, we never thought about this problem. Hoxha claims he concluded his exchange with the Yugoslav ruler by insisting, work must be done to resolve the question of Kosova justly, and that Tito afrmed, We shall work in this direction, Tito gave me his word. However, all Titos words and pledges were a bluff. In reality, history shows that Hoxha was much more a bluffer than Tito. The latter in 1974 acted to make Kosova, previously a mere district of the Yugoslav socialist republic of Serbia, an autonomous province of the Yugoslav federation, on a de facto equal standing with the six constituent republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Vojvodina, previously governed as a Serbian province but with a large Hungarian minority, was elevated to the same status. Kosovas improved standing came after decades in which its affairs were dominated by an Albanophobic Serb, Aleksandar Leka Rankovic, who became head of the Yugoslav secret police, known under various acronyms, but mainly as the UDBA, or Administration for State Security. The period was called the Rankovic era, with extremely grim connotations among Kosovar Albanians. Throughout the decades from 1948 to 1985, when he died, Hoxhas support for Kosovar Albanians was limited to words. Hoxha expressed continued effusive admiration for Miladin Popovic, while also pointing out that Kosovar Albanians suffered repression at Slav hands. Hoxha alleged that Yugoslavia had constructed no schools for the Kosovar

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

65

Albanian population, which was easily disproved in ofcial Yugoslav publications after the breach between the two states. Given this context, it is not surprising that a considerable section of Kosovar Albanian nationalist opinion, in the period after 1987, dened itself as Titoist rather than as Enverist. The Titoist phenomenon among Albanians was not simply, as it is often described, an expression of nostalgia for Titos gift to Kosova of its position as a Yugoslav autonomous province: Titoist social reforms had, at least at the beginning, been carried out in a much more benign fashion than the Hoxhaite transformation of Albania proper. In the early 1950s, after the Hoxha regime had commenced a venomous propaganda campaign against Tito, concentrating on the anti-Stalin betrayal by the latter rather than on Kosovar Albanian rights, Belgrade issued statistics noting that three Muslim madrasas functioned in Sarajevo, Prishtina and the Macedonian capital of Skopje. The Tito regime ruthlessly suppressed the Bosnian Su orders, and expressed its opposition to Su inuence among Albanians. But it was unable to carry out a Bosnian policy in Kosova, where Susm survived in a vibrant mode, such that Kosova and Albania remain today the most accessible area for Westerners to encounter Islamic spirituality in its most animated form.31 In 1951/52 a total of 623 Albanian-language schools were open in Kosova, apart from trade schools, and included 523 primary schools, with the others providing middle- and high-school level instruction. Eight technical schools had been established, with curriculums in agriculture, architecture, nance, commerce, bookkeeping, nursing, midwifery and administration. The Yugoslav authorities also vaunted their success in liberating Muslim girls in Kosova from traditional obstacles to their education, including covering of the face (niqab, typically referred to as the veil).32 It should nevertheless be noted that the wearing of niqab has never been a well-established practice among Kosovar Albanian Muslin women. Notwithstanding their zeal for modern schooling, however, the Yugoslavs failed to notice that the Bektashi Sus had long pressed for popular education and female equality among Albanians. Decades before the arrival of either Tito or Hoxha, the Bektashis and the Albanian Catholics together had led the way in the development of the Western-style, Latin-based Albanian alphabet (which embodied a standard proposed by Catholic clergy and adopted at a congress convened in Macedonia in 1908), Albanian-language journalism, belles-lettres, and related elds of endeavour. The Tito regime ignored such achievements and banned some of their notable products, such as the patriotic epic Lahuta e Malcis (The Mountain Lute) by the Albanian Franciscan Father Gjergj Fishta (1871 1940), who was the main gure in the creation of what later became the Albanian alphabet. Yet the Hoxha regime sought to extirpate all memory of them, putting the best of the Albanian Catholic intellectuals on

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

66

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

trial and executing them, then making possession of any of their works a capital offence, and for decades conducting a campaign of gross libel against their memory. The situation in Albania proper was so bad that Albanian Catholics ed to Serb-dominated Kosova. And when a Kosovar Catholic priest, Father Shtjefen Kurti (1898 1972), who had distinguished himself as a patriot in the 1930s and then took refuge in Albania, was caught baptizing a child under Hoxha, he was executed. At the time of his death, he had only recently completed the second of two prison sentences in Albania.33 Kosovar Albanians nevertheless often expressed a sentimental attachment to Albania. In 1964, the Kosovar Albanian author Adem Demaci was impri soned for allegedly forming a Stalinist group. Demaci was born in 1936 in Prishtina and rst showed literary promise as a secondary school student in the early 1950s. His work was discovered by the literary editor of the Kosovar Albanian communist newspaper, Rilindja (Rebirth), Gjon Sinishta (1930 95), a former Jesuit seminarian, poet and exile from Hoxhas Albania. Demacis short story, Lustraxhiu (The Shoe Shiner), won the annual short story contest run by Rilindja. Demaci joined the papers staff and worked alongside Sinishta until 1956, when Sinishta was arrested following his refusal, as a believing Albanian Catholic, to become a communist party member. In 1958 Demaci published a novel, Gjarpinjt e Gjakut (Blood-thirsty Snakes), a depiction of blood feuds among Albanians that is considered his masterpiece. The book became extremely popular among Kosovar Albanians, who appreciated Demaci as an author acutely sensitive to the suffering of helpless folk and to social inequality, according to the Albanian American scholar Peter R. Prifti. A Kosovar literary critic, Idriz Lamaj, who edited a denitive edition of the work, perceived in it a serious critique, indeed an exposure and denunciation, not only of violence between Albanians but of Slav rule in the region. This message was not lost on the Yugoslav authorities: soon after the books appearance, Demaci was arrested for the rst time on 19 November 1958, joining his friend and mentor Sinishta in prison. For three years, the pair were together in jail and they became extremely close, even though Demaci was then a Marxist by conviction and Sinishta a Catholic and opponent of communism. Demaci became the leading symbol of Kosovar Albanian patriotism for decades, and remains a gure of great respect in the republic. After his release in 1961, Demaci was rearrested in 1964 and 1975. In 1968, demon strations for the autonomy of Kosova broke out in the territory, and a Revolu tionary Movement for the Unity of Albanians (Levizja Revolucionare per Bashkimin e Shqiptareve) was briey prominent, inspired by Demaci. But its revolutionary character was more utilitarian than ideological. In 1975, Demaci was tried as the leader of the group of Adem Demaci. He was

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

67

tortured, and nearly went blind. His third arrest resulted in a sentence of 15 years. Demaci served time in the prison of Srijemska Mitrovica, and also on Goli Otok (Naked Island), the most feared of the Yugoslav communist punishment sites. He later abandoned a Marxist position, creating the Council for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms, known by its Albanian initials as KMDLNj and still functioning today, followed by a Kosova electoral party, before serving as a spokesman for UCK. Banac writes that after the Stalin Tito split, the Kosovar majority were somewhat pro-Hoxha, but this allegiance had little to do with any signicant appreciation of Albanias radical political system . . . the Albanians of Yugoslavia might have been . . . attracted to a more humane government in Tirana, provided, of course, that such a government maintained a clear distance from Belgrade.34 Banac further argued in the late 1980s that during the rst major crisis in the autonomous province of Kosova after Titos death in 1980 student protests and mass demonstrations in 1981, followed by martial law and a purge of Kosovar Albanian communist leaders the Hoxhist version of MarxismLeninism furnished and would continue to provide the language, concepts, and political culture of the Albanian national movement in Yugoslavia.35 This unambiguous observation and condent prediction turned out to be based on epiphenomena, and, with the advance of Albanian disaffection in Kosova, was quite wrong. Kosovar Albanians who lived through the period of cultural revival after 1974, when books printed in Tirana were introduced into Kosova in large quantities, typically comment that in those days Kosovars viewed Albania with undiluted affection, until they began visiting the Hoxha-ruled state and saw its poverty and oppression for themselves. Still, the reality of Hoxhas misrule did not dissuade the Kosovar Albanians from such actions as the adoption as their written medium of the Hoxha-fostered national idiom, or letrare even as they continued to speak the northern, Gheg variant of Albanian (as they still do today), which Hoxhas regime had taken every conceivable measure to destroy. Their mouths betrayed the division of their hearts: Enverists on paper, they remained anti-Hoxha, or empirically Titoist in speech. In the post-Tito period, with Hoxha still alive and in power, some protestors in Kosova may have had recourse to a Hoxhaite vocabulary, but this was not the same as Enverism properly dened. Noel Malcolm has provided a more objective analysis of the 1981 outbreak, noting that reports of street cries for Unication with Albania! originated with Serbian communist media, and that participants in demonstrations expressed little interest in Hoxhas regime. As the 1980s wore on, groups of Leninist opponents of the Serbian regime in Kosova occasionally appeared in global media reportage, but no trace of them remains in the republic today. Genuine supporters

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

68

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

of either Titoite or Hoxhaite communism had already become very thin on the ground in Kosova. Even those Albanians who had risen in the local Yugoslav communist structure were motivated by personal ambition and a need for community representation, rather than belief in Marxism. After the extremist mobilization of Serbs in the province and Milosevics assault on the social status of Kosovar Albanians in 1987 90, the individual identied by Nexhmedin Spahiu at the beginning of the present text as an example of Kosovar Titoism, Ibrahim Rugova, emerged as the main leader of Kosovar Albanians, heading the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK), which remains one of the major political forces in the republic. The long domination of Kosovar Albanian politics by Rugova also gave the lie to Serbian claims that the Kosovars sought a Greater Albania in union with Albania proper. Rugova, the son of a man killed by Yugoslav partisans, sought an independent Kosova, not a merger with a country that was then the worst economic disaster area of the Balkans, with profound retardation, still problematical today, of its post-communist reform. Spahiu has argued that Kosova, and not the modern Albanian state, is the true heartland of Albanian nationalism, writing: Kosovar national ideology represented the core of the Albanian nation and the original version of the Albanian national ideology.36 Rexhep Qosjas contrasting Enverism was enunciated in many documents, including an interview with Robert Elsie published in English in 1997, without mention of the KLA/UCK. Therein, Qosja, who was born in the Albanian-speaking district of Plava (Gucia) in todays Montenegro, declared: The Albanian question is one embracing all unliberated Albanians living on Albanian territory bordering on Albania, i.e. in regions which are ethnically and geographically [contiguous] with Albania and in which the Albanians constitute either the only inhabitants or the vast majority of the inhabitants. These regions include not only Kosovo, but also Western Macedonia and Albanian land, inhabited by Albanians, in Montenegro. Any comprehensive solution to the Albanian question must take the problem of all these Albanians into account. Another aspect of the Albanian question is the consolidation of democracy.37 On the same occasion, Qosja condemned Rugovas LDK, but he also declared: The notion of a Greater Albania [uniting Albania, Kosova, western Macedonia, and other territories in a single polity] was created by supporters of Serbian nationalism . . . Albania, including Kosovo with its 90% Albanian majority . . . should not be called Greater Albania but simply a real or normal Albania . . . a union of Western Albania (the present-day Albanian state) and Eastern Albania (Albanian territory as

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

69

yet unliberated) . . . I am not sure that solving the Albanian question by creating a second Albanian state in the Balkans is a good idea . . . I am in favor of solving the Kosovo question, and thus the Albanian question, by uniting the Albanians . . . into one state.

But Qosja further noted that he was not well-received in Tirana, adding: The regime in Albania is not the same as the Albanian people. He berated the Albanian authorities for limiting their political co-operation with Kosovars to Rugovas LDK notwithstanding the Titoism of the latter and maintaining economic relations with Serbia, including sale of Albanian oil to Belgrade. Yet Qosja nally insisted that he hoped to unite Kosovo with Albania. The emphasis on democracy in Qosjas Enverism illustrates the absence of anything resembling Hoxhaite communism in such a platform. But it is also worthy of note that while global media, after the Kosova liberation war began in 1998, identied the KLA/UCK with schemes for a wider Albanian national unication, Qosja has been sidelined since 1999, and today plays a minor role in Kosovar Albanian politics. The goal of the so-called Titoists has been realized: Kosova today is a second independent, Albanian-speaking sovereign state. Media have also established the alleged Maoist or other Marxist-Leninist background of UCK as a common and even banal trope in reporting on Kosova. The journalist Tim Judah, in a mass-market volume recounting the events of the liberation war,38 included a section entitled The Enverists in which he referred to tiny Marxist-Leninist or so-called Enverist groups in the historical background of UCK. The most commonly mentioned among these was the Popular Movement of Kosova (Levizja Popullore e Kosoves LPK), about which much ink has been spilt, little of it authoritative or otherwise usable in determining the reality of a Marxist-Leninist characteristic. Judah also mentions an obscure Group of Marxist-Leninists of Kosova, the Popular Movement for the Republic of Kosova, and one veriably real but not provably communist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kosova or Levizja Kombetare per Clirimin e Kosoves (LKCK). These groups were no more important than the numerous marginal political efforts in any country. Judah quotes Bardhyl Mahmuti, a member of one of these underground groups, as follows: It was not a matter of ideology, rather Leninist theory on clandestine organizations. But there is no unique Leninist theory in this context, and neither Bolshevik centralism nor the concept of the professional revolutionary enunciated by Lenin was ever typical of Kosovar Albanian nationalist activity. In reality, the emergence of Rugovas LDK and of UCK was expressive of the failure of communist ideology among Albanians.

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

70

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS

Conclusion: Islam and Kosovar Albanian Nationalism As should be immediately apparent, Islam as a faith has not been a factor in differentiating between Enverists and Titoists in recent Albanian history, including that of Kosova. If anything, the Tito regime was more tolerant of Islam than was that of Hoxha. This did not prevent Western observers of little competence from indulging in scholarly and journalistic misapprehensions and even wild misinformation about both religion and politics when engaging with Albanian issues. Although UCK comprised Sunni Muslims, Catholics and people of no religious observance, plus a major contingent of Bektashi Sus, foreign media have repeatedly circulated unsubstantiated claims that the liberation army was Islamist in its origins, as well as being Maoist or Hoxhaite. Much of this speculation has been made respectable by the inclusion of exaggerated charges about the post-communist Islamic revival in the Balkans in academic works. With regard to radical Islam, the position of UCK was succinctly dened in the immediate aftermath of the Kosova liberation war, when the organizations then functioning news agency, Kosovapress, declared: For more than a century civilized countries have separated religion from the state . . . [However], we now see attempts not only in Kosova but everywhere Albanians live to introduce religion into public schools . . . Supplemental courses for children have been set up by foreign Islamic organizations hiding behind assistance programs. Some radio programs, such as Radio Iliria in Vitia, now offer nightly broadcasts in Arabic, which nobody understands and which lead many to ask, are we in an Arab country? . . . It is time for Albanian mosques to be separated from Arab connections and for Islam to be developed on the basis of Albanian culture and customs. We ask the same regarding the Albanian Catholic church, that it function independently from outside inuence, as well as the Albanian Orthodox church.39 If one compares the experience of UCK with that of the KK and its relations with the Comintern in the 1920s, and also that of Shaban Palluzha and similar gures, it is clear that nationalism has consistently overcome other ideologies in the collective life of the Albanian people. A small remnant of the former Albanian-speaking element in the Yugoslav communist bureaucracy operates in Kosova as the Social Democratic Party, but is unrepresented in the republics Assembly. A libertarian revolutionary trend, the Levizja Vetevendosje! (Self-Determination! Movement) enjoys great credibility with the Kosovar Albanian masses for the honesty and articulate criticism of foreign and local rulers over Kosova by its founder, Albin Kurti, a longexperienced leader beginning with the student movement before the Kosova

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

COMMUNISM AND ISLAM IN ALBANIA AND KOSOVA

71

liberation war, and a veteran of Serbian prisons.40 The above-mentioned LKCK maintains a semi-clandestine existence. But nothing resembling any of the historical communist movements has survived in Kosova. The terms Enverist and Titoist are as dead as the men with which they originated.

NOTES 1. On the Gheg language issue, see Arshi Pipa, The Politics of Language in Socialist Albania (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989). 2. The history of Bulgarian Macedonian relations is irrelevant to the present inquiry; an authoritative outline of the emergence of Macedonian identity is found in Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 3. Nexhmedin Spahiu, Serbian Tendencies for the Partitioning of Kosova (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). 4. Vladimir Dedijer, Jugoslovensko-Albanski Odnosi (19391948) (Belgrade: Borba, 1949). 5. On Llazer Fundo, see Julian Amery, Sons of the Eagle (London: Macmillan, 1948), pp.151 3, 309 11; Dedijer, Jugoslovensko-Albanski Odnosi; and Reginald Hibbert, Albanias National Liberation Struggle: The Bitter Victory (New York: St. Martins, 1991), reviewed by Stephen Schwartz in Albanian Catholic Bulletin (annual, San Francisco), 1992, pp.119 21; also material on Fundo including photographs of him assembled in commemoration of the Italian pioneer of European federalism, Altiero Spinelli (1917 86), at ,http://www. altierospinelli.it/compagni/fundo/index.php., accessed 28 Nov. 2008. 6. Sadik Premte, Stalinism and Communism in Albania, Fourth International (New York), January 1949; Jon Halliday (ed.), The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986); Stephen Schwartz, Sadik Premte, Albanian Catholic Bulletin (1991), p.181. 7. Basic accounts of the KK are found in Banac, The National Question, and Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). A substantial literature on the KK and its leading gures has been published in Albanian, little of which focuses on its links with the Comintern: see, in particular, the seminar of the Academy of Sciences of Albania and the Institutes of History of Tirana and Prishtina: Akademia e Shkencave e Shqiperise, Instituti i Historise Tirana, Instituti i Historise Prishtina, Komiteti Mbrojtja Kombetare e Kosoves (Tirana: Akademia e Shkencave, 2004). Also, as an example of popular literature on the topic, see Bedri Tahiri, Azem Bejte Galica (Prishtina: Shkendija, 2005). 8. Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p.205. 9. Malcolm, Kosovo, p.302. 10. Banac, With Stalin Against Tito, p.209, n.206. 11. A brief discussion of Zjarri appears at ,http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/backiss/ Vol3/No1/Premtaj.html., accessed 28 Nov. 2008. 12. On Albanians in the IB, see Prenk Uli and Qemal Sarajeva, Asim Vokshi (Tirana: 8 Nentori, 1982). 13. First published Tirana: Ndermarrja Shteterore e Botimeve, 1958. 14. Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature: A Short History (London: Tauris, 2005), pp.136, 184. 15. Bolshevist Intrigue, The Washington Post, 26 Dec. 1924. 16. Islam Lauka and Eshref Ymeri, Shqiperia ne Dokumentat e Arkivave Rusi (Tirana: Toena, 2006), pp.5051. 17. See ,http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/comintern/docs/albania-f495-op188-vetted.doc., accessed 28 Nov. 2008. 18. On Comintern involvement with Catalan nationalism, see Vctor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). On the Cominterns line on Croatian and Macedonian opposition

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

72

J OURNAL OF CO MMUNIST STU DIES AND TRANSITION POLITICS to Serbian expansionism, see Stephen Schwartz, Ante Ciliga (1898 1992): A Life At Historys Crossroads, Journal of Croatian Studies (annual, New York), 1997, pp.181204. Ljubisa Stojkovic and Milos Martic, National Minorities in Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Jugoslavija Publishing and Editing Enterprise, 1952), p.35. Ibid., pp.37 9. Amery, Sons of the Eagle, pp.1513, 309 11. Elsie, Albanian Literature, p.163. Alba and Schwartz, Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism, p.295. Further on Fundo, see Amery, Sons of the Eagle; Dedijer, Jugoslovensko-Albanski Odnosi, passim; and Schwartz review of Hibbert (n.5 above); the website ,http://www. altierospinelli.it/compagni/fundo/index.php., accessed 28 Nov. 2008, includes Fundos encounter with Pertini and Fundos poetry. On Shaban Palluzha, see Malcolm, Kosovo, p.312; Sabile Kecmezi-Basha, Levizja Ilegale Patriotike Shqiptare ne Kosove (19451947) (Prishtina: Rilindja, 1998), passim; Azem Hajdini-Xani, Shaban Palluzha, 3 vols. (Prishtina: Rilindja, 20013), passim. Ismet Dermaku, Gjon Serreqi dhe NdSH-ja (Prishtina: no publisher, 1996), passim. On Marie Shllaku, see Gjon Sinishta (ed.), The Fullled Promise (Santa Clara, CA: no pub lisher, 1976), pp.167 8; Tome Mrijaj, Marie Shllaku, Bije e Shkodres martire e Kosoves (New York: no publisher, 2004), passim. See also Stephen Schwartz, Kosovo: Background to a War (London: Anthem Press, 2000); Albanian translation, Kosova: Prejardhja e Nji Lufte, 2nd Albanian edn (Prishtina: Rrokullia, 2006), p.97. Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p.187. M.B., Historia e Trishtueshme e Atentorit te Miladin Popoviqit, Bota Sot (Prishtina), 27 May 2000. Banac, With Stalin Against Tito; Enver Hoxha, The Titoites (Tirana: 8 Nentori, 1982), pp. 284 286; Halliday (ed.), The Artful Albanian. Schwartz, Kosovo, and Stephen Schwartz, The Other Islam: Susm and the Road to Global Harmony (New York: Doubleday, 2008), passim. Stojkovic and Martic, National Minorities in Yugoslavia, p.206. Sinishta, The Fullled Promise; Pjeter Pepa, The Criminal File of Albanias Communist Dictator (Tirana: Uegen, 2003). Banac, With Stalin Against Tito, p.216. Ibid. Spahiu, Serbian Tendencies, pp.912. This quotation and those that follow are taken from Interview with Rexhep Qosja, in Robert Elsie (ed.), Kosovo (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1997), pp.497504. Judah, Kosovo, pp.102 20. Kosovapress (Prishtina), 29 Dec. 1999. Albin Kurti, Zgjohu! Per Rezistence drejt Lirise (Prishtina: no publisher, 2007).

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

Downloaded At: 14:02 7 April 2011

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.