By Artan Lame
Durr쳬 1915. Execution of the leaders of the 1914 rebellion. Musa Qazimi, the Myfti of Tirana and Haxhi Qamili, illiterate peasant. The anti-national and reaction uprising of the years 1914-15, which seriously endangered the existence of Albania, as an independent state, remains one of the darkest and, on the other hand, one of the most distorted episodes of our recent history. In the sixties, for ideologial purposes, this rebellion was distorted and was transformed into a “progressive movement,” of the peasants led by the “courageous and intelligent peasant,” Haxhi Qamili, who rose up against a foreign monarch and the big land owners, for freedom and social justice!! In fact, not one of our writers or patriots of the time mention this rebellion positively, but merely note it as a reactionary movement, pro- the Sultan by his fanatical followers in Tirana, Kruja, Shijak and Kavaja, peasants who supported the Sultan, as ignorant as they were, bandits, and who, under the obscurantist slogan, “We love the Father,” pillaged, looted and imprisoned, and in many cases, killed, many patriots and schooled individuals they came across. The escalation of the rebellion and the lack of any possibility of reaching an agreement with them, due to their intransigency, was one of the important reasons thar led to the departure of Prince Vid from the country, who, in despair, failed to find the logic in such an absurd movement of these socalled insurgents, who fought against the interests of their own country for a power that had surpressed them for four hundred years. The rebellion was put down in June-July 1915, its leaders were captured by Esat Pascha Toptani, they were tried, condemned and executed by hanging.
The first corpse hanged, in the photo is that of Haxhi Qamili, the third is of Musa Qazimi. They had instilled such profound terror in people that to acknowledge their deaths, this photograph of their hanging was produced as a postcard. This one for example was sent from Fieri to Vlora. Today, this gesture probably seems babaric, but if you go back in time to those years, you would perhaps change your mind. Five years later, after he had hanged Haxhi Qamili, Esat Pascha Toptani was also assassinated, this time by Avni Rustemi, who himself was assassinated five years later by Ahmet Zog, a nephew of Esat Pascha Toptani…. Europe hd been through stories like this in the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare about four hundred years earlier, to which he devoted tragidies. In Albania, these stories happened in the time of electric power, and even today they do not make all that much of an impression on us. Is it our fault is that we are outside of the times, outside of Europe that is galloping ahead?
