Dear participants,
Albanians, migration has a collective quality but also an indicator of their relationship with national history.
The history of Albanian migration during the period 1944 – 1990 represents an important relationship of the Albanian nation with time. It is still unwritten. This assessment comes even though historians have a neglectful tendency towards controversial truth. They want the ordering of facts to be a “prose” with positive and negative characters.
Let me begin the appearance of a controversial history with a “secret” of my family. My family was connected to the LANC. But, during the communist period, one member of the family was missing from the biography of its members. He was my father’s uncle. He was a citizen of the United States of America. Just mentioning him in passing could open unforeseen problems for the family. The claim of having a relative in the West was almost a “blemish” on the biography.
Communism in Albania was, on the surface, a long, grotesque “show.” In the end, what remained was a mirror to see oneself in.
My paternal uncle tried after the War to establish ties with the family through UNRRA and its Albanian representatives in Gjirokastra. The rupture of relations between the communist regime that was being established in Albania and the United States of America also brought about the arrest of Albanians who worked for UNRRA.
To understand my family’s horror of the “American uncle,” it is enough to say that they burned all his photos and stopped talking about him. In 1952, this was one more reason why they decided to move and settle from Gjirokastra in Tirana. Albania experienced one of the most brutal communist regimes and what is worth noting was the isolation as a conclusion. Political and social contacts with other countries, even communist ones, were severed.
During the communist regime, migration outside Albania was considered an act of treason and as such was prohibited by law. But despite the measures imposed by the communist state, there were those who dared to leave. A number of Albanians who rival the victims of the Berlin Wall gave their lives in their struggle for freedom.
The highest emigration from Albania occurred precisely in the first years after World War II. For the most part, political opponents of the new government that had just emerged from the war fled to refugee camps in Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia, before being moved to final destinations, chosen or not by the local authorities. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, a first group of migrants of this period arrived on American soil.
According to American statistics, during the years 1931-1975, there were about 2,500 (2,438) Albanians who settled in the United States of America. While during the years 1983-1990, about 300 Albanians managed to set foot on the land of American freedom.
It would be precisely this group that left in the first years of the establishment of the communist regime that would serve the anti-communist movement of Albanians in America, where until 1967 there was an influx of Albanian refugees to America from the camps of Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. According to data, the last migrations may have been those of the early 1970s, coming from the camps of Yugoslavia, to which are added those from Albanians of Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and the Valley region.
There is evidence that another category of around 400 Albanians emigrated to Australia in the first years after 1944. Similarly, another wave of Albanian refugees of 150-200 arrived in Belgium in 1956. In 1967, there were around 800 Albanian refugees in Belgium.
For those who, in the vocabulary of the time, “escaped” from Albania, the punitive measures imposed by the regime affected not only the individuals but also the families they left behind. During the years 1950-1989, around 20 thousand Albanian citizens were able to leave Albania.
The Albanian diaspora produced its own authorities. They were placed next to the names of the older diaspora such as Faik Konica and Fan Noli. From the anti-communist opposition, the figure of Ahmet Zogu maintained constant stability.
In Hamit Matjani's testimony, I read that he mentions an American citizen who knew Albanian "... About Majko... He was a civilian, I didn't get his rank, he was around 30-35 years old, average height, glasses and black hair. He was more involved in the preparation of the groups that entered Albania and elsewhere. Also, he waited for and questioned these groups when they returned from those countries. He also questioned me and my friends, both when I left and when I arrived."
When I asked my father about this individual, he simply told me to "shut up". After the 90s, I learned other details. Matjani says in his testimony that Majko was from Borova e Kolonjës (where, to my knowledge, there is no family with this surname there). Before his death, he apparently did the last service to the man he knew
I am not optimistic that life is a movie script. I know that it is complicated and often without answers to the truths that produce Communism in Albania cannot be imagined without the clone of the “border”. Just as freedom cannot be explained without the Albanian diaspora.
Thank you
