Physical training of the type that contributes most to future military service is encouraged. Specific goals to be derived from it are basic physical improvement in speed, agility, strength, and resistance and the moral attributes of bravery, strong will, and personal discipline. Light sports, such as volleyball, are discouraged. Track, wrestling, and body contact sports are advised. Swimming and skiing are also considered to have military applications. It is recommended that calisthenics and physical culture activities be carried on in large groups.
Military instruction includes close order drill, crawling and obstacle penetration, storming techniques, and hand-to-hand combat. Academic courses in the military area train in the care and use of various types of weapons, the theories of military art, and the techniques of conventional and guerrilla warfare. Schools organize marches and excursions that are combined with tactical military exercises to give them a wholly military character. Most of these are designed to teach guerrilla warfare tactics. Overnight stalking exercises feature searches for intruder groups, a simulated target demolition, or some such objective. Girls as well as boys are required to participate. Tirana press photographs have shown some groups of girls engaged in mortar training, others in target shooting. In the 1969 Tirana May Day parade girls, in ranks of fifteen abreast, carried submachineguns.
When the programs have been completely implemented, students in the first and second years of secondary schooling will receive all of their physical and military training at their schools. It will be supervised by teachers and military officers assigned to the schools. Third- and fourth-year students will have part of the training at their schools, but with entire day or week periods devoted to the program. They will also spend a part of the allocated month in military units to which the school is attached for the purpose.
Facilities are not adequate in many schools, and in many areas military units are not immediately available to assist in training. It will be several years before the complete revised programs can be implemented. The first year's effort, however, involves about 10,000 university students and about 170,000 other people. The latter figure includes schoolteachers, military personnel who cooperate in the training, and others who provide miscellaneous voluntary or part-time assistance, in addition to those who receive the training. Students in the program have been compared with those in the Communist Chinese Red Guard, but the organization of the Albanian program is designed to keep it closely aligned with the school curriculum and with active military units to prevent large-scale independent action by youth groups.
Paramilitary programs of Party-sponsored youth organizations are similar in many ways to those in the school system. Pioneers take children, both boys and girls, between the ages of seven and fourteen. A group of these young Pioneers carried rifles and submachineguns in the 1968 Tirana May Day parade. From ages fifteen to twenty-five they may belong to the Union of Albanian Working Youth, frequently called the Communist Youth Movement. The Union of Albanian Working Youth had 210,000 members in 1967. Nearly all personnel drafted into the armed forces fall within the youth movement's age brackets, and its units within the services are active. Political and ideological indoctrination is intensive in these organizations and prepares the youth for possible membership in the Party in later years ([see ch. 6], Government Structure and Political System).
Military Justice
There is no distinction between the civil judicial order in general and the military order in particular, but military crimes are treated in a separate chapter of the penal code. That chapter treats those acts, committed by persons under the jurisdiction of military courts, that are directed against military discipline, military orders, and the like. They include a broad variety of violations against persons, property, or the state.
A military crime, in the Albanian system, has two characteristics distinguishing it from nonmilitary crimes. The crime is committed against regulations established for the performance of military service, and the defendant is a member of the armed forces. For criminal justice the security forces under the Ministry of the Interior and all local police are considered armed forces and are subject to military law and to trial in military courts, as are reservists or persons called to military or police duty for short periods. Also, military violations are believed to include a variety of crimes against the state that might not be classed as military in Western countries, including some in the so-called socially dangerous category. As is the case in the Soviet Union, persons who fail to report on others committing crimes are themselves liable.
Military courts are selected by the People's Assembly or by its Presidium when it is not in session. Members are military personnel and ordinarily serve on a court for three years. Each court has a chairman, vice chairman, and a number of members called assistant judges. The chairman and at least one of the assistant judges must be military superiors of the defendant.
In exceptional circumstances the People's Assembly may appoint a special court for a particular case or a group of cases. A special court may be all or only partially military. Such a court was appointed, for example, when Vice Admiral Teme Seyko, commander of the naval forces, was accused in 1961 of "having been in league with the imperialist Americans, Greek monarcho-fascists and Yugoslav revisionists." The admiral was executed.