Anti-fascism as a society-wide value lies in the foundations of European Albania

By Elisa Spiropali*
On September 16, 1942, representatives of all political forces in the country gathered in Peza and elaborated the common platform of the war against the fascist occupier for national liberation. Like many other things in Albania or the Balkans, even more so when it comes to history, it creates debate, creates contradictions, sometimes unites and sometimes divides and always brings conviction as a solution and doubts as another alternative.

Most of our parents or grandparents today were children at that turbulent time in the history of the whole world, when the whole world was involved in a battle for life and death with the Nazi-fascist plague which threatened to exterminate entire populations, threatened the way of life , the individual's freedom of judgment and the system that had the individual and his rights at the center.

Still without healing the wounds of a world war, the world had woken up again to the nightmare of another such war, but more ferocious, more comprehensive and more tragic.

The first started in the Balkans from the Balkans' bullets, the second had its first shots in the Balkans, in April 1939, when little Albania became the first victim of the global drama that would be played out with the blood, suffering and sacrifices of tens of millions of human beings, from the north, the south of Europe, from the Atlantic West to the Far East.

Our parents and grandparents had no difficulty in telling us what had happened in that bloody time.

Our children, Generation Z and the Internet, of democracy and freedom, but also of the loneliness of the individual, will find it more difficult to understand the same time, if again, a fierce battle did not take place on the edge of Europe, when fascism the young man of an autocrat, is threatening with fire and iron, rockets in the sky and tanks on the ground, the sovereignty of his neighbor.

For this reason, our children tomorrow will say that our generation, just like our parents for their fathers yesterday, made the right choice. That Albania, bigger and stronger than yesterday, has lined up again on the right side of history, choosing light before darkness, right before wild force, freedom and sacrifice for freedom based on the best values ??of humanity.

At the dawn of the Second World War, there were many dilemmas in Albania as well.

Two currents, two mindsets that neither excluded the love for the homeland, young patriots and old nationalists, despite the big differences in ideas and solutions on those ideas, found the strength to come together. Just like the survival instinct of the Albanian and the common enemy, it has brought the Albanians together against the threat of the foreigner.

Peza as a symbol and the symbol of Peza was the first front that aligned honest and patriotic Albanians; it was the great lesson that history gave you and that history continues to give today, that united with each other, regardless of differences in belief, religion and ideas, we Albanians can be successful.
Infinite respect and sublime gratitude for that extraordinary act and for all those women and men who, in return for their sacrifice and shed blood, shared that tiara of pride for our common yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Albania thus lined up on the same anti-fascist front as the most progressive part of the time. As defined by the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, in which the United States of America and Great Britain, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, confirmed their solidarity against the Axis powers, the Nazi-fascist aggressors, and announced their vision of a world in development, well-being and peace, without wars and without weapons, with collective security and the sacred right of peoples to self-determination.

This compass of the moral conscience of humanity, was the inspiration of the alliance of the three anti-fascist powers of the time, the United States of America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

This is also the compass that explains who did right and who did wrong, who was right and who was wrong in those fiery, difficult and tragic times.

The Albanians' war, like the global war against fascism, was a fierce war in the mountains, plains and valleys, in villages and cities, with incalculable costs for large nations, but also for small nations like Albania.

The embrace of anti-fascism as a good social value became a nationwide fact.

What happened next, the re-entry into war of the whole world divided into two parts as soon as the peace of the War of Arms was made, is another story. The liberators began to behave like conquerors, and yesterday's heroes turned into new thugs clothed in ideological power. Because it was precisely the ideology that raised the foundations of the wall that divided the world, continued to leave it insecure and condemn humanity to another bloody series of suffering, pain and sacrifice in Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.

Not only bad luck and chance caused Albania to be on the wrong side of the iron curtain, bringing about the temporary separation with the West that belongs to it as an aspiration, as a value and as the only choice and solution. For almost half a century of barbaric communism, Albania and the Albanians experienced the metamorphosis of the liberators transformed into the conquerors of their country, became victims of the lack of freedom, democracy and experienced the limitation and total isolation from a world they considered hostile and foreign.

The past is never judged on the consequences it brings to the future, regardless of the context in which it occurred. Our national drama under communism did not extinguish the flame that those young idealists, nationalists but also communists ignited in the fiery years of the world war.

The anti-fascist legacy they gave to the country is a universal value that still underpins the Western democratic value system. It is one of the fundamental values ??of today's European Albania.

Anti-fascism and patriotism were the foundations of Albania's unequivocal choice in 1999 when it again aligned itself with the US-EU-led political-military coalition against the last national-fascist dictatorship of Milosevic in the Balkans, in the biggest military and moral battle ever in post-World War II Europe. The product of which is the new and irreversible geopolitical reality in the region, the second homeland of the Albanians, the Republic of Kosovo.

It often happens that dreams in politics seem out of place in front of the harsh reality of our everyday life, where every day is started with calls for the final war that ends at dusk to give way to another final war that starts again at dawn. But I honestly dream of that day. Since in the daily life of Albanian politics, despite mutual divisions into good and bad, into capable and incapable, into honest and corrupt, into angels and bandits, into good police and bad police, on the left of the right, it must be identified above everything else that unites us beyond the border that separates us. What compels us to line up together in one direction, to work as a two-armed body towards a common goal? For what motive and reasons do we seem to put away our weapons and put our mind and soul to work? Why do we need temporary peace in the midst of our incessant war?

I know it will be very difficult to explain tomorrow to the generation to come why we have produced so much poison and barbed wire in politics; but I also know that even if we are not able to do it, they will: they will come together in the name of our blood, language, history and aspiration to always see that in Albania, the East is where the West is!

*President of the Assembly. The speech held at the scientific session "Albanian anti-fascism as a societal value", organized today by the Assembly of Albania, in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Albanian Studies.