Albania Chief to Form New Government After Protests

VIENNA —  The leader of Communist Albania, responding to unprecedented protests that toppled monuments to Stalinist founder Enver Hoxha, said Wednesday that he would take direct control of a new government.

“I have decided to take the government into my hands and create a new government and a new presidential council,” Ramiz Alia said in an announcement broadcast nationwide on state television.

Alia, who succeeded Hoxha after his death in 1985, gave no details of who would be represented on the new council but said he met Wednesday with leaders of all opposition parties and political organizations.

The move appeared to be an attempt by Alia to distance himself from the unpopular legacy of the Communist government and to use his personal appeal, even among anti-Communists, to pull the country through a period of turmoil.

It was unclear whether Alia intended to form a coalition government. The Communists will face their first competition in free elections next month.

In a related development, Premier Adil Carcani announced that he was bowing to demands by about 700 hunger-striking students and professors to rename Enver Hoxha University in the capital, Tirana. The state news agency ATA reported that the hunger strikers ended their fast late Wednesday after hearing Carcani’s statement.

Anti-Communist demonstrators in two cities toppled Hoxha statues Wednesday, unleashing decades of pent-up wrath against the late dictator.

Police, some with dogs, at first fired into the air in an attempt to keep thousands of people from a 30-foot-tall bronze statue that dominated Skanderbeg Square in the center of Tirana, state television reported.

But the police then began to embrace people in the jubilant pro-democracy protest, television and witnesses said.

The statues toppled in Tirana and the port city of Durres symbolized decades of repression and poverty for many in the isolated Balkan nation of 3.2 million people.

In December, Alia reversed 46 years of Stalinist rule and began accelerated reforms. Despite the reforms, which include free elections scheduled for March 31, Alia has refused to dismantle the cult of personality erected around Hoxha.