the Party and attended by the
Party leaders, who at that time paraded as patriots and vehemently
denied in public that they were Communists, and by a number of
nationalist resistance chieftains. The National Liberation Movement was
dominated from the beginning by the Communists, as were its military
formations, known as partisans.

The movement was further strengthened in July 1943 at the Conference of
Labinot, when the General Staff of the Army of National Liberation of
Albania was created, with Enver Hoxha as chief commissar. Thereafter,
under the guise of the National Liberation Movement, the Communist
leaders devoted all their energies to obtaining complete control of the
partisan formations and to preparing the ground for a seizure of power
as soon as the Axis powers should be defeated. Their prime objectives in
the 1943-44 years were to immobilize the nationalist elements who were
still in the movement by surrounding them with loyal commissars and, at
the same time, to try to annihilate other nationalist groups that had
refused from the outset to collaborate with the movement. There was a
full-scale civil war in the country from September 1943 to November
1944.

The civil war was fought between the partisan formations and the two
principal anti-Communist organizations--Balli Kombetar (National Front)
and the Legality Movement. The Balli Kombetar emerged as an organization
soon after the National Liberation Movement was founded; it was led by
Midhat Frasheri, a veteran patriot who had formed a clandestine
resistance movement during the early days of Italian occupation. The
Balli Kombetar extolled the principles of freedom and social justice and
championed the objective of an ethnic Albania; that is, the retention of
the Yugoslav provinces of Kosovo and Metohija, which the Italians had
annexed to Albania in 1941. For some time it made efforts to collaborate
with the National Liberation Movement, but to no avail.

In July and August 1943 representatives of the two movements finally met
at Mukaj, a village near Tirana, to try to work out an agreement of
collaboration against the Axis forces. The chief obstacle to an accord
was the disposition of Kosmet. The Balli Kombetar refused to consider
collaboration unless the movement joined in the demand that Kosmet
remain a part of Albania after the war. Finally an agreement was reached
for collaboration, with the provision that the question of Kosmet be
resolved after the