Beqir Balluku

Beqir Balluku (born February 14, 1917 in Tirana - † November 5, 1974 ) was an Albanian colonel general , politician of the Labor Party of Albania and long-time defense minister , who was deposed by Enver Hoxha in 1974 for an allegedly attempted coup and executed shortly afterwards .

Life

Confidante Enver Hoxhas and promotion to Minister of Defense

After attending a technical college , he joined the armed forces ( Forcat e Armatosura të Shqipërisë ) and participated in the communist anti-fascist war of independence during the Second World War from 1942 to 1944 . On 20 May 1943 he was appointed commander of the partisans - Battalion Krujë Ishëm appointed and a few months later on 18 September 1943, political commissar of the 3rd Brigade , before he later became commander of the 2nd Brigade.

After the founding of the People's Republic of Albania, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces as the successor to Mehmet Shehu on January 28, 1948 and elected a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the PPSh at the 1st Party Congress of the PPSh in November 1948 , the he was a member until his arrest on July 10, 1974. He was also a member of the People's Assembly ( Kuvendi Popullor ) between 1948 and 1974 , in which he represented the constituency of Shkodra .

Between 1952 and 1953 he was also a graduate of the General Staff Academy of the USSR Marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov in Moscow . During this time, the State Broadcasting of Yugoslavia and the daily Politika reported in December 1952 that he had been murdered and that his family had been interned. During this time, in March 1953, he belonged to the delegation at the state funeral of Josef Stalin , along with Liri Belishova , a member of the political bureau , the long-time finance minister Abdyl Këllezi and the education and culture minister Ramiz Alia .

On August 1, 1953 Balluku was promoted to lieutenant general and appointed minister of defense.

Balluku was considered a close confidante of Enver Hoxha, the 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the PPSh, and led a party conference in Tirana in 1956, when Hoxha's opponents around Generals Panajot Plaku and Dali Ndreu and his wife Liri Gega overthrew Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu planned. At this meeting, numerous delegates also requested information about the fate of Koçi Xoxe , Tuk Jakova , Bedri Spahiu and other prominent party members and their rehabilitation .

After Balluku Hoxha's wife, Nexhmije Hoxha , informed them of the coup attempt, Enver Hoxha managed to maintain control of the party. The intervention of Balluku and Shehus then ushered in a political cleansing , which began after Hoxha's return to Tiranas with the arrest of party critics of the regime .

The then troika was described by the First Secretary of the CPSU Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev as follows:

“The Albanians are worse than beasts - they are monsters. Only later did we learn how the Albanian communist leaders punished and eliminated members of their own party. They had a kind of troika: Hoxha, Shehu and Balluku. These three brought someone to trial, and Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu sentenced the accused himself to death without ever having written anything; then they looked for an opportunity to secretly murder their victim, and Balluku carried out the execution himself. It was all very similar to the system of Stalin and Lavrenti Beria . "

- Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev

Nevertheless, Khrushchev attempted rapprochement with Albania as part of the defense policy of the Warsaw Pact and signed an agreement with Balluku in June 1959 on the Vlora military base .

After the break with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with the People's Republic of China , he gave a speech at the Congress of the Communist Party of North Vietnam in 1960 , in which he took a strong pro-Chinese and anti-Soviet position. In the following years he also met Mao Zedong several times on trips abroad .

Loss of confidence, disempowerment and execution

In July 1974 Balluku was now to Colonel-General conveyed, even after more than twenty years of uninterrupted activity as defense minister of Hoxha inciting revisionist ideas and accused before a military court because of an attempted military coup and treason accused.

A little later he was sentenced to death together with the chief of the general staff Petrit Dume and the chief of the political headquarters of the armed forces Hito Çako .

Political analysts and political scientists seem to agree that Hoxha feared the desire of the military leadership to limit the influence of the PPSh on the military and the economy and a coup designed to do so . Their attempt to downgrade Hoxha's concept of a people's war led to the dismissal of the entire leadership of the armed forces around Defense Minister Balluku, who at the time of his dismissal was fourth in the hierarchy of the PPSh after Hoxha, Shehu and Central Committee Secretary Hysni Kapo .

Balluku's removal from the Politburo became known in a Yugoslav report on September 11, 1974. Nearly two weeks later told the US - Ambassador in Italy John Volpe that Balluku and other senior military personnel may have been relieved of their posts.

Reasons for the disempowerment were, in addition to the differing opinions of Hoxha and Balluku on the defense system of Albania and the desire of the People's Republic of China to be dismissed as defense minister, since he too often demanded arms deliveries to Albania, also a possible planned coup with the approval of the USSR. After the PPSh's ideological break with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1979, Enver Hoxha wrote in his memoir that the "hostile groups" of Economy Minister Abdyl Këllezi and Defense Minister Balluku justified their hostile plans at the suggestion of then Prime Minister of the PRC Zhou Enlai .

In the elections to the People's Assembly on October 6, 1974, Balluku was the only leading politician who was not re-elected. On October 29, 1974, Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu also became Minister of Defense. Less than a week later, Lieutenant General Beqir Balluku was executed by firing squad on November 5, 1974 .

After the collapse of communism, his body was exhumed on July 18, 2000 at the request of his family and buried in a secret grave in Horë-Vranisht in the district of Vlora together with Generals Dume and Çako, who had been convicted with him at the time .

Web links

• SHEKULLI: Enveri: Për tradhti të lartë, Balluku, Dume e Çako në gjyq ushtarak! ( Memento of February 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) November 3, 1974.
• : Beqir Balluku dhe Abdyl Këllezi, dy ministrate që janë ende pa varr. In: THE TIRANA OBSERVER. Albanian, July 16, 2010.
• Politburo of the PPSh 1944–1991 ( Memento from April 22, 2007 in the web archive archive.today )
• The Governments of the Socialist People's Republic of Albania 1944–1991. ( Memento from November 24, 2005 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Profiles: Beqir Balluku
2. ^ Owen Pearson: Albania as dictatorship and democracy: from isolation to the Kosovo War 1946-1998. Center for Albanian Studies, London 2006, ISBN 1-84511-105-2 , p. 482.
3. ↑ Ministers of Defense of Albania (1953–1991) ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Albanian Ministers (rulers.org)
5. ↑ Hoxha on Shehu , pp. 8, 18 and a. (PDF file; 142 kB)
6. ↑ Hoxha on Shehu , pp. 8, 18 and a. (PDF file; 142 kB)
7. ^ Owen Pearson: Albania as dictatorship and democracy ... p. 505f.
8. ↑ Christian F. Ostermann: The Warsaw Pact: from its foundation to its collapse: 1955 to 1991. 2008, ISBN 3-86153-504-1 , p. 35.
9. ^ Owen Pearson: Albania as dictatorship and democracy ... p. 572.
10. ^ Wilson Center: Conversation Between Mao Zedong and Beqir Balluku. January 10, 1968.
11. ↑ Hoxha on Shehu , p. 23 ff. (PDF file; 142 kB)
12. ↑ Ilir Berisha: General Veli Llakaj on Kosova- Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Sehu. Kosova aktuell, March 17, 2010, accessed on November 9, 2015 . 
13. ↑ Anita Niegelhell, Gabriele Ponisch: We are always on fire: reports from former political prisoners in communist Albania. 2001, ISBN 3-205-99290-3 , p. 63.
14. ↑ Teresa Rakowska-Harm Stone: Communism in Eastern Europe. 1984, ISBN 0-253-20328-7 , pp. 226f.
15. ^ JC Kun: Defense Minister's Lengthy Absence Points To Possible Purge. ( Memento of the original from September 6, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 5th September 1974. 
16. ↑ Anita Niegelhell, Gabriele Ponisch: We are always in the fire ... p. 177.
17. ↑ Koha Jonë : Si u zhduk Beqir Balluku. ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. October 25, 2007. 
18. ↑ see also: THE SERIOUS ECONOMIC PRESSURE ON THE CHINESE HAS BEGUN, BUT WE WILL NEVER BEND. 17th June 1975.
19. ↑ TSCHOU EN-LAI AND HIS GROUP ARE STEERING A HOSTLY COURSE AGAINST ALBANIA June 25, 1975.
20. ↑ THE CHINESE BEHAVIOR TO US. 5th August 1975.
21. ↑ Rifles are never allowed to give orders. Bonapartism in the Eastern Bloc - Generals and the Party. In: DER SPIEGEL. No. 52/1981.
22. ↑ Hoxha on Shehu , p. 23 ff. (PDF file; 142 kB)