The Bush family’s visit to Albania
In August 1996, former United States President George H.W. Bush, together with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, would make an unofficial visit to Albania with their families. They came to our country as guests of the then President Sali Berisha and were welcomed in Vlorë, where they had moored the former American president’s yacht. During the discussions, outings and time they spent with the Berisha family (at a difficult political moment, of course, when Albania was going through a profound political crisis whose effects were also strongly felt in the economy, where the pyramid investment firms were encountering their first liquidity problems), the wives of the two American statesmen had the opportunity to spend time with the then First Lady, Liri Berisha.
As Barbara Bush and Alma Powell were visiting a former communist country for the first time, they are said to have asked Mrs Berisha to satisfy their curiosity by telling them about Albania under communism. Around 9 years after this meeting, Barbara Bush would publish her memoirs, including, among other things, memories of her visit to Vlorë. She would write about our country (as Mero Baze puts it)[1] horrified by Liri’s account, according to which “when three friends got together, one was a spy”; “when three families got together, one was spying”.
The myth of the State Security service
Unfortunately, this description by Mrs Berisha was not an invention of hers. Turned into a myth, this account of conditions in communist Albania often found a place in discussions about that period. These discussions drew on individual and collective experiences; over time, they influenced the social imagination, giving rise to the idea that the so-called State Security service, the Sigurimi, had extended its control by recruiting 1/3 of Albanians into its operational services for “harvesting” information.
In other words, one in three Albanians was “with the Sigurimi”. It all arose from the paranoia surrounding the Sigurimi’s so-called vigilance, a vigilance that meant spying, and spying that meant punishment. In his book “Përkulja dhe rënia e tiranisë shqiptare” [The Bending and Fall of Albanian Tyranny], Spartak Ngjela says that the number of agents may have reached 200 thousand[2], although the exact figure was never known.
This “not knowing”, then, worked to the advantage of this secret service’s aims. Not knowing meant that citizens were condemned to be mere spectators. Condemned to watch the same “performance”, their senses, as spectators, were controlled by this institution, whose message in every “performance” was the same: “deviant behaviour is punishable; it must be fought, and for this the help of the people is also necessary. They must be vigilant, otherwise they too are the enemy; there is no mercy for the enemy, and popular justice always triumphs over them”.
Through this relationship, the State Security service also created its own myth. Freud describes myths as “distorted remnants of imaginings, the age-old dreams of humanity”,[3] and so we still encounter the “distorted remnants of imaginings” from this “nightmare” today. Many believe that the Intelligence Service (today’s post-Sigurimi) is everywhere, including among their neighbours; some even suspect their relatives. You encounter the myth in telephone conversations too, where you frequently hear the phrase “my phone is being tapped”.
So we still carry and experience the State Security service as a myth; we still believe that our State is listening in and that another ear lies beyond our telephone receivers. This is the subject that will be explored in greater depth in this category of studies on communism.
[1] Mero Baze – Viti ’97 Prapaskenat e krizës që rrënuan Shtetin [The Year ’97: Behind the Scenes of the Crisis That Brought Down the State] pp. 64-65
[2] Spartak Ngjela – Përkulja dhe rënia e tiranisë shqiptare [The Bending and Fall of Albanian Tyranny] p. 197
[3] Adem Jakllari – Leksione për Antropologjinë kulturore [Lectures on Cultural Anthropology] p. 161