Military Academy and the Last Hanging
As seen through the eyes of Arben Braha, Albania’s 1st EOD Tech, HMA Program Founder
I entered the military academy in 1985. I chose the army because it felt like the only path that was open to me, and because I wanted to serve and to make some kind of order inside a life that did not feel like mine. In 1987 my cousin on my father’s side, Dritan, we call him Tony now, decided with a friend to escape. They left university with permission to go home and walked instead to the border at night, watched the patrols until the gap came, cut through barbed wire, crossed into Kosova, and knocked on the first Albanian door they found. The police took them to Belgrade, beat them and questioned them for months, then gave them a hotel room and watched them some more. One day my cousin ran to the American embassy who assured him that they would help, telling him to go back to his hotel and await extraction. A week later he was in New York with his friend. He learned to be a pharmacist and later he opened a very successful restaurant. He found his freedom.
The price of his freedom arrived at our door. Punishment does not need a reason, it needs a signal, and his escape was a strong signal. He had visited everyone to say goodbye without saying goodbye, he had taken a picture with me at Hoxha’s grave, a photo that we kept hidden. His sister, a teacher, was sent to a remote school, his family was cut away from any chance to rise, and I was marked out at the military academy. Only an uncle on my mother’s side, a senior officer, protected me. He kept me inside the military academy and under observation at the same time, a kind of safety that wears a uniform and handcuffs together.
In the summer of 1988, I was home from the academy and wanted to make a little extra money for the family. I filled an ice box with drinks and sweets I bought from a restaurant and stood by the road near the bus stop to sell to travelers. For some reason, the buses kept stopping farther up the road than normal, so I walked over to see why. The border police had set up a roadblock. There, tied under a triangle of rough timbers, was a teacher named Havzi Nela. He had been jailed, escaped, and was caught hiding in the house of an aunt. His own cousin betrayed him to the police. He tried to fight them off, so they shot him in the face, and that morning they hung him in public as a lesson. I was a few steps from him, looking at his head on his chest, and I felt my stomach fall. The last hanging in Albania.
When I graduated, they sent me to the north, to an Engineer Unit that built tunnels and bunkers. The worst job they could possibly give, deserved for the cousin of a deserter. I was a platoon commander, and I learned a quiet hatred for any system that uses men as tools and does not even give them a uniform. Many of the soldiers were uneducated and treated like slaves, they carried pneumatic hammers and shovels into the mountain and slept on the ground, they dug honeycombs into the rock, they poured concrete into constructed domes that looked like mushrooms. We called it fortification, the country called it safety, but it was just fear poured into concrete. They were everywhere, in the hills, under the cities, a whole nation told to fight an enemy that might be the whole world. We trained for a kind of war that never came, and we paid for it with our freedom. Many boys with bad biographies were sent to the hardest work, and some of them died down there. I led them and I tried to protect them, and I dreamed of an exit.
