Around 25,000 people were executed and tens of thousands of others sent to labour camps./
Late Albanian dictator’s 95-year-old widow, Nexhmije Hoxha – giving her farewell interview – said her husband was a sensitive soul who regretted executing people.
Nexhmije Hoxha, 95-year-old widow of Albania’s late communist dictator Enver Hoxha, on Monday made her an on-air farewell to Albanians, declaring that this would be her last recorded talk.
During the interview, she again justified the crimes committed by her husband’s regime, saying Hoxha probably felt pain in his soul about sending so many people to their deaths, but considered it his “statesman’s duty”.
“I always imagined that Enver made the most difficult decisions such as executions like a statesman – obliged to do his duty – but in his soul he was very soft and sensitive and might have suffered,” she said.
Nexhmije Hoxha used the French saying, “C’est la raison d’Etat, que même la raison ne comprend pas” [“Reasons of state cannot be explained by reason”] adding that Hoxha never made any real mistakes in his decisions.
Quizzed about the countless murders, detentions and persecutions and the work of the old secret police, she dismissed them as “legends created by others” and blamed most errors on people in the field acting without central direction.
“Enver was the First Secretary of the party, I can’t now say that he didn’t know that some things were happening but for me they [the complaints] are just legends and denigrations,” she said.
She said the problem was that some “people in the field” were “coming from the villages and from the war, with a low cultural level”.
Hoxha told the journalist Rudina Xhunga about her life and childhood in Bitola, in Macedonia, the pedagogical institute in Tirana, her later life as a Partisan fighter in World War II and her life as wife of the Communist leader.
Hoxha admitted that she was a key political adviser to her husband. “I cannot deny that he talked with me. I was his old friend from the war, with political experience, so we talked about internal and external political issues,” she said.
She emphasised that she did not discuss security issues with him.
Her interview has predictably sparked a lot of debate in public.
Some people on social media said it was highly inappropriate for the widow of the dictator to be treated in the interview like a celebrity, saying it insulted the victims of communism system.
Some also said that in this, her last interview, they had expected her to apologise for the regime’s crimes.
The Albanian communist regime lasted for 45 years and is widely considered one of the cruellest in Europe, if not the world. Around 25,000 people were executed and tens of thousands of others sent to labour camps.(Balkaninsight)
It is disgusting and disappointing to read an interview that shows no remorse for the atrocious acts committed but rather seems to ask for sympathy for a man who was actually “brave” because he fought through his pain and perserved to go on and kill tens of thousands of people. It is despicable that an interview like this would be allowed. Apparently, highlighting communist heroes takes priority over shedding light on the decades of suffering endured by so many. I would like to suggest a follow up to this article- “Being Killed By Enver Hoxha Caused Decades of Pain to the Families and Victimss”… I take solace in my catholic faith knowing that she will be reunited in hell with her husband.. I would also caution future articles which spit on the memories of the victims of Communism.
A country built on the blood of innocent people, like Albania, is a disgrace to mankind especially considering that it refuses to atone for the sins of its communist past. The point made in this unfortunate article is that it is OK for a deranged men to kill thousands of people, in order to create a personal dictatorship that denies essential human rights, as long as he is pained by his crimes. So would it would be OK for Edi Rama to start pulling opposition political figures out of their houses, in the middle of the night, accuse them of being enemies of the people, shoot them at break of down,against a cemetry wall after a scripted process and bury them in unmarked graves, as long as he claims that he is doing so reluctantly and painfully? The “reason of state” advocated by his accomplice and instigator in crime Nexhmije, to justify the genocide proportions of Enver Hoxha’s killings is esaily, if not painfully, understood: Enver Hoxha was eager to give away all ethnic Albanians regions outside its 1913 borders and even the Great Dibra region which was part of Albania to neighbouring Slavs and Greeks. He was eager to kill, jail and condemn to lifetime labor camps ten percent of the population in order to establish a ruthless personal dictatorship that he, in a perverted way, called liberation”. Certainly the last farwell of Nexhmie Hoxha sounds like the most Idiotic, abusive and insulting excuse that she could have come up with to justify the horror that her family inflicted, over a period of four decades, to an impoverished, enslaved and dehuminized albanian population. Albania still suffers from the horror of the tragic communist past and its legacy yet to be rejected and condemned. In addition to the horrors inflicted on the albanian people Enver Hoxha and his closest, arrogant and remorseless accomplice, Nexhmija, carry on their criminal shoulders the blood of tens of thousands of albanian Kosovars killed abused, raped and torture by Rankoviç first and by Milosheviç later. It was Hoxha who rejected Kosova abandoning it to Serbian subjugation. Again, he called that “liberation”