The "Mandela of the Balkans"

In these times of ours, dominated by "absolute relativity", one realizes that it’s not that there aren’t any more heroes, but just that people are no longer capable of recognizing them.

The fact that the death of Peter Arbnori, the Albanian statesman known as "the Mandela of the Balkans", in September 2006, did not make front page headlines or hardly even any waves at all, the fact that he was not commemorated the world over with the magnitude that the ethical and moral dimension of his life’s commitment to freedom would have rated, the fact that it isn’t even easy to come by a good biography of his on the Internet, clearly show how slanted the world of globalized information has become: a world so utterly conformed to harboring a partial view of things that it is, today, barely even aware of it.

Nelson Mandela is famous all over the world for have endured 27 years’ confinement for opposing apartheid in South Africa; while still alive he is mentioned in school books everywhere as one of the greatest heroes of our times. Why, then, won’t the world tribute the same awe and admiration to Peter Arbnori, who endured over 28 years’ confinement for opposing the most ferocious Stalinist dictatorship in history? Why the indifference? Why the silence? A silence that calls to mind the silence muffled his country under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, the same deathly silence that enveloped his long imprisonment, as well as that of so many other victims, like him, of the Communist utopia.

The Freedom Committees, who hosted Peter Arbnori at our General Assembly Meeting in 2003, will not allow him to be forgotten; we will not allow his profile to be diminished out of wilful or careless indifference. The least we can do now, in accordance with our battle to establish a "Memento Gulag" International Memorial Day for the victims of Communism, is to dedicate this space on our website to Peter Arbnori, statesman and anti-Communist resistance hero, hoping it may a source of information to the scholars and researchers who undertake to record the history of Albania, and of the Balkans in general, before nature takes its toll and the eventual lack of eye-witnesses ends up by wiping out all traces of the truth.

A Biography

Peter Arbnori, the Albanian statesman dubbed "the Mandela of the Balkans" because of the length of his internment - over 28 years - in an Albanian gulag, was born in Durres, on the Adriatic coast, on January 18th, 1935.

Orphaned at the age of seven, when his father was killed fighting Enver Hoxha's partisans, during the civil war that underlay World War II, Peter underwent much hardship during his childhood, and often went hungry. Nonetheless, he managed to graduate from high school with a gold medal, which, however, was not enough to earn him the right to go on to college. This was due to his early early affiliation, while still a boy, with the resistance fighters struggling against the communist regime, together with his mother and two older sisters.

When he was 18, after graduating from high school, Arbnori found a job as a teacher. In a matter of a year, however, he was fired for political reasons. His sister Antoinette also got into trouble at this time, and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for distributing information opposing the regime. Once having completed his military service, young Peter roamed the mountains in search of a living, and started to labour in the fields as a farm hand. Although this took up 10 hours a day, six days a week, he succeeded in finding a way of enrolling in the Humanities Department of the University of Tiran, under fake documents, and actually finished a five-years correspondence course in half the time. Thus, in 1960 he was ready to become a Literature teacher, and began to work at a school in the city of Kavaja. Again this was not to be for long, as Peter Arbnori soon gathered together with other intellectuals to form a Social-Democratic movement in the hopes of edging forward towards pluralistic society. The Secret Police got wind of this and arrested seven of them. Here came the beginning of Arbnori’s ordeal, due to last over 28 years. It started with two years of a trial, interrogation and torture, ending with his being sentenced to death. This verdict was subsequently converted to 25 years’ imprisonment, as the authorities hoped Arbnori would eventually lead them to catching other ringleaders.

In prison Peter Arbnori continued his struggle, organizing the inmates’ protests and resistance and ever watchful of maintaining his reason intact over the years. One of the ways he preserved his sanity was to write, every chance he got. He would write in the tiniest possible lettering along the margins of the newspapers allotted to the prisoners to read. In this painstaking way he managed to put together a novel and many short stories, some of which have since been published.

When his time was almost over, his jailers added ten more years to it. The detention eventually ended in 1989. He was 26 when they arrested him. He now found himself free to begin life all over again, but at the age of 54. His first job on being released was as an apprentice to a carpenter. It was in this last portion of his life that he married and had two children.

Yet he was not subdued. Enver Hoxa was long dead, but Albania was still not free. Peter Arbnori immediately took part in the grassroots movement that was defying the regime, participating, less than five months after his release, in the anti-communist demostration in Skodra that overturned the statue of Stalin.

With the first free ballot, Arbnori was immediately elected to Parliament. He was re-elected three more times, and was elected twice to the position of Speaker of Parliament.

In 1997, his party lost the elections to the Socialist Party led by Fatos Nano, following the turmoil caused by reckless schemes that had caused the financial ruin of thousands. From the benches of the opposition, it soon became clear to Arbnori that the Socialist Party, made up of many ex-communists, intended to restore the censorship that was customary under the old regime. When the State-owned television station refused to broadcast the statements and initiatives of the opposition party, he did not hesitate to go on a hunger strike. It was here that the fame of "the Mandela of the Balkans" claimed the attention of many governments of the Western world, whose support forced the majority coalition in Parliament to review its stance and approve a formal guarantee of the independence of the press from State interference. This became known as "the Arbnori Amendment".

Peter Arbnori died of a brain hemmorhage in 2006. Then man who had survived internment at Burrel prison, sacrificing his entire youth to his principles, left two orphaned children, still in their teens. The government of Albania, which has since reverted back to the Democratic Party, tributed an official ceremony of State to its legendary freedom fighter.