Compared with Nexhmije Hoxha, writes Dalrymple, Rosemary West was a
bumbling amateur.
Mrs Hoxha
never shrank from her duty to co-operate in the elimination by murder of those her husband, a paranoid narcissist, deemed his enemies, which was the majority of those he associated with. Many of those with whom she had once been friendly were executed; it was dangerous to know or to have known her.
On holiday with her husband
By the age of 23
she had become an accessory to the murder (on her future husband’s orders) of Anastas Plasari and other members of the resistance to the Italian occupation. The murder or incarceration in abominable conditions of those she had known and even been friendly with never caused her loss of sleep. She died with blood on her hands and a perfectly clear conscience.
She was head of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies,
whose function was the publication of her husband’s voluminous writings, notable for their vituperation against everyone with whom he had once been allied, except for Stalin, who remained his verray parfit gentil knyght.
She lived with her husband in
the utterly cut-off section of Tirana called the Bllok, closed to all mortals except the upper echelons of the party, who lived there in a state of permanent and justified terror.
After the régime’s downfall
she was charged with embezzlement — a peccadillo in the context of her life — and spent six years in prison. She wrote two volumes of her memoirs and lived the rest of her life in undeserved peace.
Hoxha loved his wife dearly. In his diary he wrote: ‘Nexhmije is unwell, and when she is ill, I feel ill. When she is well, I feel well.’ Dalrymple comments: ‘This devotion might have been touching in anyone other than an unscrupulous murderer writing about his willing accomplice’
She died aged 99 with a perfectly clear conscience
