Acceptance speech by Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi Albanian American Freedom House Freedom Eagle Prize Award 2011 Given to Joseph DioGuardi and Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi October 5, 2011 Tonight I want to focus my remarks on the fall of communism in Albania in 1992 and what has transpired in the past twenty years. First of all, we must never forget the historic trip of former Congressman Joe DioGuardi and Congressman Tom Lantos to Tirana in 1990, as the first US officials to enter Albania in fifty years. Their arrival in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and their call to dictator Enver Hoxhas successor, Ramiz Alia, to democratize Albania, helped bring down communism in Albania. The year before DioGuardi and Lantos arrived in Tirana, the Germans had marked the fall of communism by dismantling the wall dividing East and West Berlin. A year after their visit, Albanians would begin to destroy their national symbol of tyranny: the hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers dotting the landscape of Albania, which Hoxha had forced the Albanian population to build to withstand the putative threat of a US invasion. Most important of all, democratic-yearning Albanians would free the thousands of political prisoners incarcerated in labor camps and penitentiaries across the country. As many of you remember, my first testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives took place in July 1996 before the Committee on International Relations, then chaired by Congressman Ben Gilman and co-chaired by then ranking minority leader Tom Lantos. I welcomed the opportunity to speak on behalf of a nation that had endured the most brutally repressive Communist regime in Europe for forty-five years after World War IIthe only one on a par with Stalins Soviet Union. Based on my knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust, I knew the dangers of remaining silent. And so I welcomed the opportunity to bear witness to the barbarous treatment that Albanians had suffered under Enver Hoxha and to applaud the transformation of a country from a prison without walls into an emerging democracyall within the space of four years and with virtually no bloodshed. Having visited Albania with Joe in 1995, I had seen the face of the new Albania, and I wanted to be sure that the U.S. government did not rush to judgment by isolating Albania because of the irregularities in the second election of President Sali Berisha in May 1996. (As those who attended this hearing will recall, Nicholas Gage of the Panepirotic Federation and other members of the Greek lobby had joined with Albanian Communists to lobby the US Congress against the Berisha government and to hold the July 1996 hearing.) In my testimony, I sought to draw attention to the obligation that the United States and Europe had to support post-Communist Albania, since for forty-five years the West had done very little to stop the totalitarianism of the Hoxha regime or even to speak out against its perverse ideology. That hearing was transformative, because I think that we can rightfully acknowledge that the Albanian American Civic League convinced the US government not to place -2- Albania under economic sanctions and to press its European allies not to allow Albania to be expelled from the Council of Europe. Consequently, twenty years later, I find it very sad to reflect on the reality that Albania is a democracy in name only. To be sure, it has never returned to the nightmarish reality of the Hoxha era, in which thousands of innocent civilians were deemed enemies of the state and either executed or imprisoned in labor camps and penitentiaries. Nevertheless, since the fall of communism, Albania has been locked in a power struggle between the Democratic Party and the Socialist Partya struggle that has left the citizenry defeated. To be sure, the West can be criticized for looking the other way as long as Albania did its bidding in the Balkans. But, in the end, it is the Albanian political elite that are responsible for the failure to truly democratize Albaniathat are responsible for the massive corruption, lack of rule of law, lack of free press, and the economic impoverishment of the majority. The Democratic Party has always claimed the anti-Communist label, and the diaspora has helped to uphold that image. For awhile, the DPA was the genuine face of anti-communism in Albania. But, especially in the last few years, it has become clear that there is little difference between the Democratic and Socialist parties, both of which have enriched themselves at the expense of the people. In January 2010, public outrage reached a crescendo, when a demonstration in Tirana turned violent, leaving three dead and 39 wounded. Although Socialist Party leader Edi Rama was the prime mover behind the demonstration, the crowd of more than 20,000 came from all political parties and walks of life to protest unpunished corruption among the political elite and an ever worsening economy. Berisha and Rama are now in a stand-off; this years local elections were full of irregularities; Albanias admission to the European Union has been put on hold; and Albanian citizens are exhibiting a siege mentality and cannot see a way forward. When I published an article about this deplorable situation in Balkan Insight on February 3 of this year, entitled Albanians Stand at a Perilous Crossroads, I said that Albania is still run by former Communist officials (and that includes DP officials), and that the patronage and control of both business and media sectors by both parties makes it very difficult for newcomers to enter politics. I added that both parties continue the pattern of confrontational politics, void of principles and values, which has thwarted national unity and progress since the Communist dictatorship fell in 1992. And I argued that it was essential that todays corrupt politicians are replaced by a new political bloc rallied around democratic values and prepared to lead Albania into a productive future with the rest of Europe. I emphasized that a new generation that wants to make a difference is being prevented from having a say in their future. Finally, I admonished the West to stop trying to maintain stability at all cost, but instead to support the Albanian populations yearning for genuine democracy and economic viability. I am sad to report that, while many Albanians here and abroad praised my article, it -3- was the first time that I received hate mail in quantity, and it came primarily from Democratic Party supporters in the diaspora, although I must hasten to add, not from Albanian Americans who had endured Hoxhas jails. Last August, Dimitar Bechev, head of the Sofia, Bulgaria, office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a trenchant article entitled The Protracted Death of Democratic Albania. In it, he said that Berisha and Rama together have done more to destroy their countrys progress than any other post-Communist leaders in Europe; that Prime Minister Berisha must take the lions share of blame with his increasing concentration of power under himself and his party; and that Albanias people, having endured hardship like no other in the Communist bloc, but possessing an entrepreneurial energy that is often more American than European indeed deserve better than their vote-rigging leaders have offered. Bechev called on Europe to take a more uncompromising stance with Tirana than they have done until now. Meanwhile, I think that we in the diaspora need to take a more critical and nuanced stance towards the political environment in Albania, and we owe it to all those who suffered and died under communism in Albania to do so. I have come to the conclusion in recent months that the biggest mistake in post-Communist Albania was that the criminals of the Hoxha era were not brought to trial and that the country never instituted a truth and reconciliation commission. Many like to forget that Sali Berisha was Enver Hoxhas physician, and no doubt he wanted to avoid any public scrutiny of his life under the regime. To this day, Prime Minister Berisha has not opened up all of the Communist archives for national examination. I think that this has to change. Burying the Communist Albanian past has brought neither justice nor healing to those who suffered. If anything, it has continued their suffering. This reminds me of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were forced to suffer in silence for years until Israel sought to fully reveal the traumatic legacy of Naziism and to shock the conscience of the worldbeginning with the capture and trial in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of Hitlers plan to exterminate European Jewry. In Albania, I believe that we need to start the process of healing the pain of the past (a past that is very much alive today) by obtaining from the Albanian government as full accounting as possible of the Hoxha era. The names of those persecuted, imprisoned, and executed by the Hoxha regime should be released to both the Albanian public and the international community. One of the great satisfactions of my life occurred this year when I received information about one of Enver Hoxhas most notorious prisons, the prison in Spaç. This led me back to where I began in 1996, but with the renewed awareness that the reckoning of a devastated country must finally take place. In the process, I was introduced to Pellumb Lamaj, who survived torture, hard labor, and imprisonment in Spaç for eleven years. Since Mr. Lamaj came to the United States, he has tried to bring the prison to the worlds attention in a number of ways. I want to conclude by reading a poem that he wrote during his first week of confinement, entitled Jail Cell: -4- Inside the four walls, Besieged by pitch darkness, My craving body crawls, Cant tell when sun rises. Within the four walls, Worn out of loneliness, Surrounded by ghouls, Of prison cell darkness. Inside the four walls, Lie down on ground frosty, Waiting until night falls, To turn to God Almighty. Within the four walls, In silent night sadden, I wait in vain for the Lord, He is high up in heaven. Spaçi, 1979
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 06:23:08 +0000
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