By Dodë Melyshi
Memorie.al / In the summer of 1993, during the summer holidays, I went and worked for three months as a laborer in Greece. It was the first and last time I set foot in that country. To be honest, I had tried it once with a cousin the previous summer, that of 1992, but we were caught by the Greek border army, along with at least a hundred other unknown Albanians, just as we had crossed the border at night. They stopped us at midnight with automatic gunfire in the air, and the sensation of the bullets whizzing past my ears was not at all pleasant. The next day, not without hardship, they returned us to Korçë.
But the journey in ’93 was more successful. It was long and tiring, perhaps lasting more than 4-5 days and nights. We traveled mostly at night…! Only the youthful recklessness and the mass despair that engulfed us could push a person towards such adventures!
I don’t know how many kilometers we walked, maybe two hundred, maybe three hundred, but I do know that in the end, I ended up in Thessaloniki, with only a single interruption of about 20-30 km by bus. In the outskirts of Thessaloniki, a friend helped us find work for two to three months.
We mostly traveled at night so as not to draw attention. There were about twelve to fifteen of us, all friends or at least acquaintances. The oldest was around twenty years old, the youngest was perhaps not even sixteen. During that first emigration adventure, there are at least two things that I will remember and will never forget, and neither has anything to do with the Greeks, but with ourselves.
The first pertains to one night while we were passing through the outskirts of Kostur, in a small apple orchard that was wonderfully cultivated and maintained, equipped with an irrigation system using tubes and small sprinklers. Some of us, or rather some from our group, couldn’t resist the temptation during our travel and ended up damaging those tubes and the irrigation system with our feet. Vandalism for free and with no gain whatsoever!
The Greeks, during our journey, fed us bread and food with heartfelt generosity (we were simply beggars, in every sense of the word, poorly dressed, tired, and unwashed, or very dirty and ragged, as someone among us would say), and we repaid them this way!
The second thing concerns the last night of our journey, somewhere after the city of Veria, along the railway, a group of armed Albanians, even to the teeth, had ambushed and were robbing other Albanians traveling without knowing where they were going, searching for their fortunes in that foreign land.
Their action could have been successful, naturally taking advantage of the element of surprise and the fact that it was the first time for almost all of us to go to Greece, and we did not know the routes or the dynamics and hardships of the journey. But, what could they do? None of us had money with us! Those “patriots” of ours had nothing to rob!
In the early ’90s, therefore, Albanians who had gone in search of fortune, like treasure hunters, and only as treasure hunters in Greece (I apologize for using this term, but I do so for the ease of understanding the situation), hoped that fortune would help them with vandalism and robbery!
The new system that we call “democracy” and call mediocratic ally in the years ’91, ’92, ’93 had no physical possibility, precisely because of the time, to form, or deform the morality of Albanian society and youth. And so far, there has been no responsibility! Not a single responsibility!
Everything we were at that time was a product of the formation and mentality we had received from the period of dictatorship. And it was precisely at that time that many Albanians were convinced that not only the civilized West but also our “hated” neighbors, the Greeks, Serbs, or Turks, were far ahead of us in all respects!
Not only in terms of the economy, not only in terms of the standard of living and development, not only in terms of nature, not only in terms of beauty (at first, the “Europeans” seemed terrifyingly unattractive and beautiful, terrifyingly well-maintained), but what is more important: in culture, mentality, and morality!
And it was precisely in the formation of the “new man” (a product of Albanian communism), in the formation of the society that that regime before the ’90s had its most “spectacular” failure.
And it couldn’t have happened otherwise. During the dictatorship, when we were children, I remember well that an individual’s merits were generally measured by their ability to steal! To steal as much as possible: we were stolen from as children in schools (pencils, notebooks, bags, balls; if you weren’t attentive, your sweater would be stolen), and then as adults: in cooperatives, in agricultural farms, in state enterprises (since there were no private ones), on trips, on trains, in buses. Even socks, shirts, sheets, and underwear were stolen from the drying clotheslines after washing!
Stealing happened everywhere and everything, and all those who did not steal did not refrain from it out of morality and conscience, but only out of fear. The poor stole with their own hands, while the rich, or more precisely the officials, had their fridges (one in a thousand had a fridge at that time) full, due to the merits of the bribes they collected from those in need. Thus, the system was based on: violence, theft, nepotism, bribery, wickedness, and cliquishness!
The extreme and primitive measures that the state took (there were cases where the death penalty was applied for theft, according to the Penal Code, which happened when the amount stolen exceeded 2000 new lek) had no effect whatsoever! The best indicator that the last way to form a society is through violence and bullying!
In fact, society did not need to be formed; it was enough to preserve and perfect that formation, which with great effort and sacrifice had been consolidated over the centuries, but no! Everything was deformed! The meaning of being CIVIL was destroyed!
The last anchor also collapsed, where civil and social morality was preserved: Religion! And along with it, also the teachings: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to you,” and “Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet the goods (wealth) of others,” etc., etc.
A violent and unjust system, which at its core could do nothing but engrave a society with violent and unjust morality and mentality!
And the greatest damage of that system was perhaps not during its existence but will be during the decades that follow. From the moment it formed an unworthy and incapable society to live in a free world with democratic norms and laws.
Thus, all those who delegate blame to the democratic system for the failures in Albania, and who are generally the most nostalgic for the dictatorship:
– Either they do not have real understanding, or they reason in wickedness and distrust! A system that works in Denmark and Sweden can and should work in Albania too. It is another matter that an Albanian is an Albanian and is neither Danish nor Swedish!
“Now that we have formed Italy, we must form Italians,” is a phrase from the famous Italian Massimo D’Azeglio, which has entered history a century and a half ago, when Italy was united geographically and physically.
Adapted to the current Albanian context today or thirty years ago: “Democracy came, but the Albanian was not ready to coexist with it!”
“We must form the Albanians to live freely, not to have nostalgia for the dictatorship,” D’Azeglio would say!
In the early ’90s, anyone who had two cents worth of sense in their head was aware that Albania’s path to democratization, civilization, and prosperity would be long and arduous, precisely because of the traumatic dictatorship we had passed through and the deformation and genetic manipulation that had affected social morality during it! Memorie.al
