– Gjon Bruçi –
As if by an irony of fate, in the north of the country lie the “Accursed Mountains,” part of our Albanian Alps. Why did these mountains acquire this “savage epithet”?!
According to legend, a mother of our people, seeking to escape an enemy, fled into the mountains with her two young children. Unfortunately, there was not a single source of water there. The journey across the mountain ridges exhausted the mother and her young children and left them so parched that, eventually, they collapsed breathless to the ground. In her final throes, the mother, from the depths of her soul, cursed the mountains with these words: “O mountains, may you never have water! May flames consume you! May the clouds strike you down!” And she fell face down beside her children.
Whatever the truth may be, the legend bequeathed to our Alps the name “Bjeshkët e Namuna,” or the “Accursed Mountains.”
I ask: could it be that we, the descendants of that mother, who have lived at the foot of these mountains for thousands of years, are a nation cursed by some distant inheritance?! Or have we committed subsequent sins that have served to reinforce the curse of the mountains?!
I profess to be an atheist, yet legends and myths make me apprehensive.
We know from legend, but also from other accounts, that the Jews were the most downtrodden people up to the modern era. This was because, according to the legend, the Jews told the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus Christ of Nazareth instead of the criminal Barabbas. For this, God cursed them, a curse which the Jews have supposedly endured for approximately 2,026 years and continue to endure.
I have invoked this example in order to turn to our own people. It must be acknowledged that, even if Albanians have not been compelled to wander “like the Jews in the wilderness,” from the Roman occupation to the present day they have, for much of that time, not lived but merely survived, confined among the “Accursed” mountains or within the “tower of confinement.” Certainly, this situation has arisen not merely from the “legendary curse” pronounced by the mother who died of thirst alongside her children, but also from subsequent actions which, on occasion, have resembled those attributed to the ancient Jews.
In the twentieth century, Albanians, like many other peoples and countries, received the message of communist ideals. With these ideals in their minds and hearts, the Albanians rose as one in the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War to liberate their lands from the nazi-fascist occupiers and the country’s traitors, securing, for the first time in two thousand years, the genuine Freedom, Independence and Sovereignty of their country. Nor was this all: with communist ideals in their minds and hearts, they also built Socialism, the antechamber of Communism, a social system that peoples could previously have envisaged only in their dreams. The architect of these achievements was the Communist Party and Enver Hoxha. By fortune or coincidence, the leader of the communists and the Albanian people proved majestic not only in the achievements he realised over half a century, but also in his stature, appearance, voice, conduct, love for the people and hatred of the people’s enemies. It was precisely these qualities that led the people, in their estimation of him, to transcend the bounds of the human, elevate him into legend and call Enver Hoxha the saviour of the country. One need only revisit today the immense rallies attended by Enver Hoxha and the incomparable acclamations of the people who followed him, dedicating thousands of tributes and songs to him in all their many dialects.
Even when Enver Hoxha, as a mortal man, passed away, the people gave themselves over for days to weeping and lamentation on a scale never witnessed for any other national figure or, indeed, beyond. Neither of these two “gestures” — the acclamations and the weeping and lamentation — can be imposed unless those who express them carry such feelings in the deepest recesses of their hearts and souls.
The Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou said of the Albanian leader ENVER HOXHA: “You can force a people to applaud its leader, but you cannot force them to weep for him!”
* * *
Yet a considerable proportion of Albanians, including particular social groups such as the veterans and descendants of veterans of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War, the families of the Martyrs of the Homeland, members of the former People’s Army, former communists who subsequently joined the parties of the bourgeoisie and prominent intellectuals educated during the socialist period — who together constitute the overwhelming majority of Albanians — still do not dare, even today, forty-one years after Enver Hoxha’s death, to mention his name or the socialism they enjoyed for half a century. Indeed, some of them have joined the chorus of the Ballists and wartime collaborators, whether solely for the sake of material enrichment or because they have inherited in their blood the treachery of their fathers and grandfathers.
Why this repudiation of the history of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War?! Why this distortion of the truth within such a short period — merely thirty or forty years — when the protagonists of that period are still alive among us?! Does such conduct not lead towards a curse?! Certainly, among us there are many a “Judas” and “Peter,” like those from the time of Jesus Christ: the former betrayed Jesus and the latter denied him before the “cock had crowed three times”! But the people are not, and cannot be, either “Judas” or “Peter.” They are manipulated by the “priests” of bourgeois propaganda.
We must save the people from these “priests” so that they may proceed along the path of truth. And this responsibility lies in the hands of the people’s intellectuals, who must place themselves at the forefront of the struggle to defend the people and the country from the “Accursed” and the “Curse”!
(Translated by The Voice of Albania from the Albanian original)
Published in:
