In Albanian City Once Named ‘Stalin’, a Base for NATO

NATO says the upgrade will bring the base - once home to Soviet- and Chinese-made MiG fighter jets - up to alliance standards by renovating the runways, taxiways, and storage facilities.

It marks the latest incarnation of a base built with prison labour in the 1950s as a central tool of defence against enemies the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha saw all around. Communism collapsed three decades ago, the fleet of MiGs was retired in 2005, and Albania joined NATO in 2009.

"We thought that we had the best military planes then," recalled Guri Pashaj, an engineer who worked at the base between 1968 and 1990, "but during a trip to Morocco while studying international relations in Rome in 1995 I saw MiG-15s and MiG-17s kept in a museum."

Adrian Shtuni, a Washington-based foreign policy and security specialist, said the upgrade was positive news for the region.

"The transformation of the Kucova base into a deployable NATO tactical air base is good news for the security and stability of Albania and the Balkan region in very turbulent times in terms of security in Europe," Shtuni told BIRN.

The NATO air base in Kucova. Photo: BIRN

'We had many enemies'

According to historian Kastriot Dervishi, around 2,000 prison inmates - among them political prisoners - worked on construction of the airbase in the early 1950s.

Secrecy was paramount, and the pilots and support staff kept on high alert against an enemy attack Hoxha always saw as imminent.

Asked how many planes the base once hosted, Kucova taxi driver Ali Hasani, who once worked as a driver at the base, told BIRN: "These were military secrets".

"We had many enemies, but we didn't get to see who the enemies were. They used to tell us...