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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
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