TIRANA: Nexhmije Hoxha, the wife and loyal defender of the former communist dictator who ruled Albania for more than 40 years, died on Wednesday at age 99, her family said.
She passed away at home in the modest Tirana apartment where she lived with her daughter and her niece, her daughter-in-law told AFP by telephone.
In a statement to the media, her son Ilir Hoxha expressed his “sorrow” and said his mother “dedicated her whole life to the liberation of the homeland and the construction of a new Albania, to progress and the emancipation of Albanian society.”
Hoxha, who outlived her husband Enver by more than 30 years, never showed any remorse over his reign of terror.
After Albania’s communist regime collapsed in 1991, the widow served five years in jail for embezzling public money.
She was also personally implicated in the executions, deportations and arbitrary arrests that marked her husband’s regime.
But she never missed a chance to praise her husband, once calling him “not a dictator but an ideal leader who knew how to defend his country from foreign and local enemies threatening Albania’s existence.”
“What should I be ashamed of? Why ask for a pardon? I do not regret anything and there is nothing I should feel guilty for. We only respected laws in force at the time,” she told AFP in a 2008 interview.
During the regime’s 1945-1991 rule, 5,577 men and 450 women were executed, more than 26,000 people were imprisoned and 32,000 deported, while 77,000 perished in labor camps.
Born into a family of ethnic Albanian Muslims on February 8, 1921 in the Macedonian town of Bitola, Hoxha met her future husband, 13 years her senior, at a clandestine meeting of the Albanian Communist Party in 1941.
They married a year later and she embraced his revolutionary ideas based on the teachings of Marx and Lenin, reaching the top ranks of the communist party herself.
Under her husband’s reign, Albania broke off links with other communist states after World War II and was for decades completely isolated from the outside world.
Hoxha spent her later years living in a Tirana suburb, where she wrote her memoirs “My Life With Enver,” surrounded by books, pictures and memorabilia.
She will be buried in a public cemetery on Thursday, her family said.
Nexhmije Hoxha, widow of Albania’s communist dictator, dies at 99
https://arab.news/6n967
Nexhmije Hoxha, widow of Albania’s communist dictator, dies at 99
- Nexhmije Hoxha passed away at home in the modest Tirana apartment where she lived with her daughter and her niece
- Hoxha, who outlived her husband Enver by more than 30 years, never showed any remorse over his reign of terror
UK interior minister insists asylum reforms ‘fair’ amid blowback
- Mahmood argued in a speech that she was “restoring order and control” to Britain’s borders
- Amnesty International called the latest measure a “punitive blow”
LONDON: Britain’s interior minister doubled down Thursday on her tough stance on immigration despite criticism from charities and unease within the ruling Labour party that it is shedding left-wing voters.
Shabana Mahmood announced that asylum seekers who break the law or work illegally will be thrown out of government-funded accommodation and lose their support payments.
The policy forms part of a major overhaul of migration rules announced late last year and modelled on Denmark’s strict asylum system that aims to slash irregular migration to the UK.
Mahmood argued in a speech that she was “restoring order and control” to Britain’s borders and that her overhaul of the asylum was “firm but fair,” adding she would open new and safe legal routes.
But Amnesty International called the latest measure a “punitive blow” that “risks forcing people into destitution, homelessness and exploitation while they wait for their claims to be decided.”
Mahmood’s reforms are widely seen as an attempt to stem support for the hard-right Reform UK party, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage.
It has topped opinion polls for a year, in part because of the government’s failure to stop thousands of migrants from arriving in England from northern France on small boats.
But her stance has also been credited with contributing to Labour losing support to the progressive Green party, which won a local election in a traditional Labour heartland last week.
Mahmood said there was a middle path between Farage’s “nightmare pulling up the drawbridge and shutting out the world” and Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s “fairy tale of open borders.”
Her reform that makes refugee status temporary, including for accompanied children, came into force this week.
The status will be reviewed every 30 months, with refugees forced to return to their home countries once those are deemed safe.
They will also need to wait for 20 years, instead of the current five, before they can apply for permanent residency.
She also announced earlier this week that the government would stop issuing education visas to nationals from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan.
It said there had been a surge in asylum applications by students from those countries and almost 135,000 asylum seekers in total had entered the UK using legal routes since 2021.
