Those hopes were disappointed by the final result. Despite sweeping successes for the ADP in the urban areas - leading to the defeat of Albanian president, and PLA leader, Ramiz Alia, together with several of his "reformist" allies — the PLA's strength in the rural towns and villages where two thirds of Albania's population lives was sufficient to carry it to victory with 168 of 250 seats, against 75 for the ADP.
These were the final scores after the second round of voting on April 7 - the Omonia party, representing the Greek minority, won five seats and the hard line Stalinist "Union of Veterans" one.
Confounding the predictions of both western sentimentalists and the PLA -when it was still trying to justify the one party system - support for a restoration of Albania's pre-war monarchy appears to be practically non-existent. 8 The victory was a bittersweet one for the PLA, with the urban scores indicating International Viewpoint #205 • April 29, 1991 the extent to which it has lost control amongst youth, workers and even sections of the bureaucracy. Disillusionment and anger amongst the ADP's supporters rapidly reflected itself in demonstrations and rioting, particularly in the north of the country. In Shkoder, a hotbed of opposition and the traditional center of Roman Catholic intellectualism in Albania, 4 people were killed (including an ADP leader) and 58 wounded, while troops fired on crowds in the capital, Tirana, and elsewhere.
The recently formed grouping of free trade unions, with the support of the ADP, called a general strike for Thursday April 4 which appears to have been patchily successful.
Opposition adapts to mood of streets
The ADP had to some extent functioned as a "loyal opposition" in the months up to the elections, receiving both funding and an organizational infrastructure from the state. Its leaders are in the main exPLA. After the elections, however, it appeared to be stepping up its anti-PLA rhetoric and actions in an attempt to ride the mood of the streets, while ruling out entry into the coalition government that PLA prime minister Fatos Nano now desperately wants to see.
The ADP has now announced that it will boycott the new parliament until a satisfactory enquiry is conducted into the Shkoder deaths.
The backdrop to the current crisis is a nine month period of turmoil following the appearance of the first cracks in the PLA's Stalinist monolith in July 1990,
ton from het ill hai tion from hero to villain, but in a drastically telescoped time-scale. As recently as the beginning of this year, his name was chanted during opposition demonstrations; the outcome and aftermath of the elections has changed all that.
The programmatic statements put out by the ADP reveal more nuanced and pragmatic positions than is indicated by the familiar rhetoric about an "end to communism" and "rejoining the west" — rhetoric which is hardly surprising given the legacy of the PLA's caricature of "Marxism-Leninism"
Their most prominent leaders are Sali Berisha, a surgeon, and Gramoz Pashko, an economist, said to have been a close friend of disgraced former Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, who supposedly committed suicide in 1981 following one of the PLA's many internecine struggles.
The division of the Albanian nation
Berisha appears to strike a more nationalist tone than Pashko and his name indicates that he is of northern Gheg, or possibly Kosovar, origin. He has made fiery statements on the question of the persecuted Albanian population of Kosovo in Yugoslavia, going far beyond the mild positions of the PLA, which he has criticized for aiding Kosovo in words alone. The ADP newspaper, Rilindja Demokratike (Democratic Awakening) proclaimed in its first issue on January 4 that "the Albanian Democratic Party cannot accept the division of the Albanian nation as permanent" This issue also carried an interview with Pashko on the Albanian economy, in which he defended the practice of receiving aid from abroad. Subsequent issues of the newspaper have included articles on the plight of Albanian women and attacks on bureaucratic nepotism and privilege. The ADP's political programme, published on February 1, is in substance not Isnca on rebruary, Is in substance not radically different from the PLA's, published a month earlier. It called for the introduction of a market economy but also for the maintenance of state enterprises, together with new cooperative and private enterprises.
Land would be distributed to the peasants, who could choose whether to farm it individually or cooperatively, but the land of the large pre-1944 estates would not be returned to its former owners.
The programme also called for a reduction of the working week from 48 to 40 hours, a reduction in mandatory military service and "support for the struggle of the people of Kosovo for self-determination".
Whatever the optimistic declarations made to pre-election crowds, and the flights of fancy of the western press, ADP leaders privately conceded in advance that they faced an uphill task in unseating the PLA, even though they had succeeded in
ALBANIA forcing the latter to postpone the elections, originally scheduled for early February, to give them more time to prepare.
What then were the factors in the PLA victory? Obviously its omnipresence in every area of society for 45 years, its identification with national independence and its specific role in Albanian history give it a real base of support which is undenia-
Nothing could be more ridiculous than the attempts of the western media to attribute Albania's dire poverty and backwardness uniquely to 45 years of "Communism" — pre-war Albania was little more than a semi-feudal rural slum, the first railway being built only under the Italian occupation in 1942.
Nor can the PLA's strength in the countryside simply be attributed to rural conservatism or fear of the party apparatus, real as those factors are. Rigidly faithful to the Stalinist model in the political sphere, Hoxha had been something of a heretic in the area of economic development. The utopia he envisaged was an agrarian-based one, and he eschewed the model of heavy industrialization followed in the rest of Eastern Europe.
Alia has also attempted with some success to woo the peasantry through a programme which would give the cooperatives more control over production and allow them to develop new organizational methods. In the past few months, considerable sums by Albanian standards have been invested in new agricultural sectors.
An element largely overlooked in many analyses of the election results was the ethnic factor; although Alia is himself of Gheg origin, the PLA remains above all the party of the Tosk south, which since 1944 has dominated all spheres of life in the country.
This factor reflects the wartime division within the Albanian resistance, overwhelmingly dominated by the PLA in the south, but in the north tending more towards the monarchist faction of "King" Zogu — a military adventurer who destroyed Albania's previous brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in the early 1920s.
The interpenetration of traditional clan links with a classical Stalinist nomenklatura gives an especially Byzantine aspect to Albanian politics. The prospect of secession by the Gheg region, north of the river Skumbi which divides the country, is now being mooted by some of the Skhoder activists.
Whilst the opposition had previously talked about Albania facing a choice between the Hungarian and Rumanian paths from Stalinism, they now talk of a "Bulgarian scenario"; a ruling party of Stalinist origin wins a crushing victory in free elections but subsequently finds itself unable to govern because of significant mass opposition.
Evocations of this example are double-edged for the opposition however; the crucial factor in the Bulgarian scenario was the continuing denial of western aid to the country after its elections.
This had nothing to do with the question of democracy; as the Financial Times baldly puts it, "Bulgaria's Socialists received no assistance from the west because they failed to introduce radical market reforms aimed at paving the way for a market economy" (April 3, 1991).
The same scenario, the refusal of western aid unless a wrenching turn to a market economy is made, will be applied in Albania to the PLA - but it will also be applied in the event of the ADP coming to power, which would mean the latter having to break with many elements of its current political and economic programme, and turn against its current base amongst the youth and the urban working class. *
Obituary - Sadik Premtaj (1915-1991)
SADIK Premtaj, one of the founders of the Party of Labour of Albania (PLA), who joined the Fourth International in 1948 before subsequently becoming a supporter of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency of Michel Pablo, died on April 7. He had lived in exile in France since 1947.
Born in 1915, Premtaj became an antiroyalist activist and then a Communist while a student in Tirana. He was involved from the beginning in the resistance to Mussolini's fascist occupation, and in 1941 he enthusiastically participated in the foundation of the PLA. However, in the course of the next few years, Enver Hoxha, aided at the time by the Yugoslav Communist Party, tightened his grip on the PLA and eliminated all significant sources of opposition.
Having seen all his friends in the PLA killed, and threatened with the same fate himself, Premtaj decided to escape to Italy. His faith in what he initially believed to be the "true Communists" of the Italian Communist Party was swiftly dashed, however, and he soon discovered that the cancer of Stalinism had infected the whole of the international Communist movement. His experience led him to adhere to the Trotskyist Fourth International, where he was known under the name of "Victor"
In exile, he had no contact with his family in Albania for almost 40 years. Enver Hoxha pursued him with a vengeance and tried on several occasions to have him assassinated. To the end of his life, Sadik Premtaj remained faithful to the belief that there can be no socialism without democracy. * April 29, 1991 • #205 International Viewpoint