Memorie.al publishes some rare photos from the visit to Albania of the Prince of Cambodia, Samde Norodom Sihanuk and his wife, Monika, who at the official invitation of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Albanian Labor Party, Enver Hoxha, visited five times our country, in the period 1972 – 1985.
Unknown images of the pompous reception reserved by the communist regime in Tirana for the Sihanouk couple from faraway Cambodia on their first visit in 1972, starting with the official ceremony at Rinas Airport where they had come out to meet him. Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, Speaker of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly, Haxhi Lleshi and his deputy, Shefqet Peçi, reception at the ‘Palace of Brigades’ by Enver Hoxha and Nexhmija, who look on in amazement at the gifts of the royal couple, talks with’ leadership comrades ‘, such as: Mehmet Shehu, Ramiz Alia, Hysni Kapo, Kadri Hazbiu, etc., to the banquets in their honor, where at the main table, next to the Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu who gives the occasional speech welcoming friends from Asia distant, there is also Adil Çarçani, Fiqret Shehu, Kadri Hazbiu, etc.
Samde Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monika, were the only senior representatives of a royal authority that Enver Hoxha’s communist regime would officially expect in almost four and a half decades of its existence.
And this for the very fact that the royal Sihanouk couple, in the early 70s, would be forced to live in political asylum in countries like France, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. They were expelled as unwanted by exponents of the Khmer Rouge-led Red Pot criminal regime.
Official Tirana, under the pressure of great international pressure from both western and eastern countries, which after the genocide that the communist formations of Pol Pot exercised on the Cambodian people, was “forced” to accept the royal couple.
The crimes committed in Cambodia were so brutal that Enver Hoxha himself would label the Khmer Rouge as an “illegal terrorist regime”. The Sihanouks would return to Cambodia in the early 1980s./Memorie.al
