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)