Paradox: Albania’s 100-year-old republic has no official date of birth

By Hamdi Jupe

Albania is a parliamentary republic. So says the Constitution. Article 1: Albania is a parliamentary republic. Every official document and letter of our state carries at its head the magical phrase “Republic of Albania”. No argument there. In 1997 the country held a national referendum on the form of the regime: monarchy or republic. The republic won.

Everything is clear. But this is precisely where the paradox begins. The Republic of Albania still has no official date of birth. When was our Republic founded? What is its “birthday” that should be celebrated and respected, as all the cultured peoples of the world do with their republics? Which institution proclaimed our country a republic? When, where, who proclaimed it? Who decreed it, who ratified it? Nobody says it, nobody remembers it, nobody celebrates it. Only that we all worship it, the Republic, from morning to evening. And our republic, so dear to us all, has been left without a date of birth, without a birthplace, without paternity and without maternity. We have an official national holiday even for Ashura Day, but we have no holiday for the Day of the Republic. This is the paradox. This is deplorable.

Who should decide what the date, month and year of the proclamation of our republic is? Naturally, the Parliament of Albania. It is the institution that represents the people. But to this day, after 35 years of democracy, it has not done such a thing, and that does not honour it. Here the devil then looks for the reasons why Parliament has not bothered its head about its own Republic, sidestepping the problem to this day.

One of the reasons, I think, was the fear complex of being accused of raising this and lowering that earlier event or decision, and so on. So better not to touch that topic at all. Leave it as it is, in silence, without a date of birth. It’s fine as it is — what do we need a date for. The Republic has no mouth to complain, it asks for neither bread, nor water, nor light. It cannot sue us in court for leaving it without a birthday. Let us carry on as we are, in smoke, in informational darkness. Even Jesus Christ is known by neither father nor date of birth. But this is no solution. This is ignorance and, forgive the term, hypocrisy. On the one hand to worship daily in your work the word “republic”, and on the other not to dare decide what the date of its proclamation is! Deplorable.

Naturally, there is work to be done in this direction, first by historians, to clarify certain questions that belong to their field. It is known that the Albanian republic has its own history like every other phenomenon in this world, and this history goes beyond 100 years, regardless of what nature it was in its content. The Republic was not proclaimed for the first time in 1998, when the country’s fully democratic Constitution was approved, to which we now pay homage. It existed years earlier. In 1991 the first pluralist Parliament approved the constitutional law “On the main constitutional provisions”, where it is clearly sanctioned. Article 1: “Albania is a parliamentary republic”. But can it be said that our republic was proclaimed for the first time in 1991? Absolutely not. That would be a denial of the 114-year history of the Albanian state.

On 11 January 1946 the Constituent Assembly elected by the people decided that Albania would henceforth be a People’s Republic. Beyond the communist political baggage of that decision, it is known that for 45 years it blocked the road to the restoration of the monarchy in the country, just like the 1997 referendum. The entire communist period was not a monarchy. It was a “people’s republic” on paper and a dictatorship of the proletariat in practice, declared loudly by the regime. In the historians’ work to find the date of the first proclamation of the republic, this period too cannot be ignored, with all its political baggage. At least that regime commemorated 11 January every year, while today we behave totally like “uneducated folk” on this matter. So here we have three dates so far that should be the object of the historians’ work.

The Provisional Government of Vlora (4 December 1912) rose and functioned as a representative democracy. It was led by a prime minister and was republican in its essence. The Eldership of Vlora consisted of 18 men and did the work of a Parliament. At that time there was no talk of “monarchy” or “republic”, because there were other great headaches before the still-swaddled institutions of the new state. Can that period serve as a basis for saying that it was the time of the birth of the Albanian republic? Hardly believable — so dig, Tare, dig!

The Albanian republic emerges for the first time officially under this name on 21 January 1925. The Constituent Assembly elected by the people in December 1923 proclaimed Albania a “parliamentary republic” on precisely that date. The republican form of the state was legitimised through the Assembly’s approval of the Statute of the Albanian Republic. This republic functioned until the establishment of the monarchy in 1928. So in this case we have both the formal, legal aspect of the proclamation of the republic, and its existence and functioning in practice for a period of about four years.

Is this event a solid basis for proclaiming it as the date of the first founding of the Republic of the Albanian state? Why not. But it is not the journalist who decides this. The Academy of Sciences must say it, after consultations with historians. It will then have to recommend to Parliament the approval of the decision recognising the historic date of the founding of the Republic of Albania. Naturally the Academy would enter the game at Parliament’s request. Had this date been approved earlier, it would have meant that in January of last year the 100th anniversary of our republic would have been celebrated in grandeur. This did not happen for the reasons we mentioned. But there will be other anniversaries for celebrations.

We have an example that inspires and teaches us: the portrait of Ismail Qemali in the offices of the Albanian state. We all knew that Albania’s independence had been proclaimed by the distinguished Malo Qemali and that the first government of the independent state had likewise been led by the white-haired old man. But it took one hundred and one years (as long as now with the Republic) for someone to come along, Prime Minister Edi Rama, and place his portrait at the head of the offices of the Albanian state. Previously those offices rotated every five years the not-so-likable faces of successive presidents, whereas now things have changed.

I do not believe that, when the socialist government changes, the new one that comes will dare to replace the noble portrait of the Old Man of Vlora with some other mug of our time, which does not come close even to the Vlora man’s toenail. It would be a true farce with that new fortune-teller portrait. There has been no contestation over thirteen years about this matter. So here we return to the saying: it is never too late to do good deeds — in the concrete case, in officially setting a date for the founding of the Republic of Albania, even after 101 years, as was done with Ismail Qemali.