Robert Clegg Austin - Making and Remaking the Balkans: Nations and States since 1878

MAKING AND REMAKING THE BALKANS

NATIONS AND STATES SINCE 1878

MUNK SERIES ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS

University of Toronto Press 2019
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in Canada

eISBN 978-1-4875-3072-3

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Munk Series on Global Affairs

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Making and remaking the Balkans : nations and states since 1878 / Robert C. Austin.

Names: Austin, Robert C. (Robert Clegg), 1964, author.

Series: Munk series on global affairs.

Description: Series statement: Munk series on global affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20190053305 | ISBN 9781487504694 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Balkan Peninsula History 1989. | LCSH: Balkan Peninsula Politics and government 1989.

Classification: LCC DR48.6 A97 2019 | DDC 949.605dc23

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Contents

I have many people to thank and acknowledge, and it is best to do so chronologically. I will always be indebted to Paskal Milo and Fatos Tarifa. They made my first few visits to Albania possible. Both of them as well as their families were a source of constant support. I am also especially grateful to the Nathanaili family in Tirana for such a wonderful friendship, along with Lindita Bubesi, Spiro and Maria Dede, and Nasho Jorgaqi. The book benefitted from the extraordinary input of many close friends such as Besim Abazi, Shpend Ahmeti, Vlora Basha, Visar Berisha, Srdjan Darmanovic, Thanos Dokos, Jasa Jovicevic, Genc Krasniqi, Ivan Krastev, Ylber Kusari, Remzi Lani, Momchil Metodiev, Veton Surroi, Milka Tadic, Vessela Tcherneva, Ivan Vejvoda, and Arbana Vidishiqi. Thanks to all the local leaders who gave up time to talk to me as well. I enjoyed wonderful access in the Balkans along with the customary hospitality. Outside of the region, the tiny group of Albanian experts kept doing the research so that books like this could be written: thanks to Elez Biberaj, Bernd Fischer, Nicholas Pano, and Louis Zanga for doing all the heavy lifting in Albania studies and for our long friendships. On many trips to the region I was accompanied by my dear friend, Ness Gashi. A better travel companion and friend would be hard to find.

Closer to my home base in Toronto, I am fortunate enough to work at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. My friends at the Munk School have been extremely helpful, and I am very fortunate to work there. At the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Director Randall Hansen always encouraged me to pursue my interests wherever they took me. Edward Schatz read some early drafts and actually liked them. Laurie Drake, a PhD candidate in history at the time, did great background research and nice editing too. At the University of Toronto Press, Jennifer DiDomenico saw the value of the book from the start, as did the board of the Munk Series on Global Affairs. Thanks are due to Ron Levi, Anna Porter, Doug Saunders, Janice Stein, and Robert Vipond.

Finally, I have wonderful family and friends. Special thanks to Barbara and Jordan Oelbaum and Jodi and Thomas Ungar. I have two great children, Andrew and Kate, who learned to love adventure, mostly in canoes, but have yet to be in the Balkans. Maybe this book will encourage them to go. My wife, Maureen Hendzel, is the indispensable partner in all journeys anywhere. I dedicate this book to her.

Robert C. Austin
Toronto, October 2018

As an undergraduate at Carleton University in the 1980s, I developed an interest in what was then known as the Peoples Socialist Republic of Albania the only country in the communist bloc of states to declare that it had achieved advanced socialism and abolished religion too. Isolated, with a history of subjugation and occupation by Ottomans, Italians, and Germans, Albanians had, as their long-time communist leader, Enver Hoxha, noted, hacked their way through history. They were, along with the Hungarians, the ultimate survivors in Europe, speaking a language that was unintelligible to their Slavic and Greek neighbors. I started reading everything I could, and there was not much. I then wrote a very mediocre undergraduate thesis on the foreign relations of Albania under the communists who ruled Albania between 1944 and 1991. During this time I was also trying to get there, which was hard, as Albania shunned individual travel. I wrote letters to communist leader Ramiz Alia, Hoxhas successor, in hopes he could intervene and secure me a visa. (I subsequently met Alia years later, and he had no recollection of my pleas for a visa.) The Albanian government, through its mission to the United Nations, which was the only diplomatic outpost it maintained in North America, replied to my letters. They ignored my visa requests but did send me countless books by Hoxha, who ruled from 1944 until he died in 1985. The books were all his classics but totally unreadable, written in that leaden prose that was the hallmark of all of the twentieth centurys great communist leaders.

In any case, I finally did get to Albania in the months before the first multiparty elections in 1991. And so began more than twenty-five years in the Balkans. The University of Tirana historian Paskal Milo, who went on to become Albanian foreign minister during some very bad times in the late 1990s and after, invited me to Albania. I remember the letter saying how touched he was that a young person was so interested in Albanian history. Albania then was strange and exotic but also beautiful. No private cars, a nearly unspoiled Adriatic coast, no obesity, extremely hospitable people, and a respectable life expectancy. With very little industry, Albania was pristine in many ways. Only the elite had phones; the sleepy capital Tirana filled every evening with people walking arm in arm, strolling the grand boulevard. It was the only way to get news from your friends. Tirana looked pretty with its tree-lined streets, the fascist-style government buildings built by the Italians in the 1930s mixed in with the Socialist Realist National Museum with its mosaic of Albanias triumphal march to communism, library, and Palace of Culture. There was a feeling that something either really good or really bad was about to happen. It was a tense and even gloomy time. After all, loads of observers, looking elsewhere in communist Europe in 1989, thought Albanian communism just might survive la North Korea. A New Yorker cartoon in November 1989, just when the Berlin Wall fell, showed a peaceful and idyllic village scene, not a soul around, with the caption, Meanwhile ... in Albania.

Like all foreign visitors, I was put up in the Hotel Tirana on the seventh floor. Built in 1979 with fifteen floors, it was then the tallest building in the country. In 1990 and in the years after, Albania was in very bad shape and on the brink of collapse. Thousands of people flooded the port of Durres on the Adriatic in the hope of getting out. Albanias borders had been shut and militarized since 1948. Some 13,000 people successfully fled between 1948 and 1990. Almost 1,000 were killed trying. In 1990 and 1991, images of young Albanians hanging off rickety ships hoping to make it to Italy or the thousands that stormed Western embassies dominated the headlines. Food was scarce, even in the hotel, where the chain-smoking waiters offered little more than eggs, onions, and acidic Riesling from Korca in the south of the country. The situation was fraught as the county headed to its first free elections since 1924. Albania, almost dissident free due to the depth of communist repression with its vast network of secret police, prison camps, and internal exile, witnessed an explosive growth of new and anti-communist parties that were largely filled with people who had fairly good communist credentials. It was clear from the outset that the Albanian exit would be different and that it would look more like a revolving door. It would not go smoothly. In a testimony to its uniqueness, Albanias communists would easily win the first elections in March 1991, just as they would in Bulgaria and Romania too. In fact, with the exception of Slovenia, the entire region would experience countless disasters during a period that brought war and the inaccurately termed transition to market capitalism and democracy.