'Against a Wall': Albania’s Women Political Prisoners’ Struggle to be Heard

Shannon Woodcock

doi:10.5130/csr.v20i2.4093

Abstract

Between 1944 and 1985, Enver Hoxha ruled socialist Albania as an isolated and paranoid Stalinist state. The regime held power through total party control and continual purges at all levels of society, persecuting approximately twenty per cent of the population (which stood at 3.4 million in 1990) as ‘enemies of the people’. Women and men were punished with internal exile, forced labour or prison, yet even now, twenty years after the communist rulers instituted neoliberal reforms as re-branded ‘democrats’ (in 1990), the victims of communist persecution are socially and structurally marginalised. Through the testimony and experiences of one anonymous woman who survived the communist prison system, this article examines the political, social and psychological factors that silence the voices of Albanian women who were politically persecuted.

Highlights

I first lived in Albania during the period 2003 to 2005, teaching history at the state universities in Tirana, Albania’s capital, and Elbasan, another major city
There were many similarities between the two former communist states in southeast Europe, culturally and historically, but one striking difference was in people’s attitudes towards their country’s past. In both countries people discussed the recent past with great sadness over long coffees, but in Romania ‘communism’ and the atrocities it had involved seemed separated by a decade of new things and people had discursively distanced themselves from the actions of that time
I returned to Albania for a few weeks every year between 2005 and 2009, and I realised that both people I knew well and strangers wanted to tell me about what they had lived through under communism

Summary

Introduction

I first lived in Albania during the period 2003 to 2005, teaching history at the state universities in Tirana, Albania’s capital, and Elbasan, another major city. It is generally supposed that women were imprisoned as political enemies, but I doubt that the name of a single female inmate from the era is known to anyone other than their fellow inmates, their immediate family and the prison staff who oppressed them on a daily basis.[11] With the silencing of this history comes a denial of the gendered nature of the torture of women in communist Albania.[12] Here, I use the testimony of my anonymous friend to explore the vital ways that political persecution was always gendered, starting with a brief account of what happened before she arrived in the women’s prison in Kosovë.

Results

Conclusion