European Document/A Balkan Basket Case

...Support source for Medecins sans Frontieres and others risking their lives to bring in help...

...College professors THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 37...

...When Catholics were convinced they belonged to "the one" and "the true," they undertook the difficult disciplines of priestly celibacy, indissoluble marriage bonds, regular practices of Mass and sacraments, with little complaint...

...Then you cruise in for a pop or two at Harry's...

...The Vatican, beginning with Cardinal Ratzinger, will have no choice but to call it schism...

...From the start the country was ruled as a virtual autocracy until the (totally unjust) peaceful death last April of Stalinist strongman Enver Hoxha...

...Strategically positioned statues and busts of the moustached Georgian are to be found in every city and town, and in its suppression of individual freedom and excision of cultural diversity the country adheres to Stalinist principles of rule like no other...

...Nothing...

...I found precious little to admire...

...Hoxha then nestled up to Mao, until Mao's heirs turned "reformist" in 1978, when he again wrote off huge debts to China...

...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT A BALKAN BASKET CASE by Feliks Polonski The only American citizen formally permitted to visit Albania is a Jack Shulman, who from New York apparently edits an admiring periodical called Albanian Report...

...Of course people are utterly exhausted with the lack of food, the incredibly high prices...

...If indeed that essential conviction was lost during the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, the matter would seem to have been worth looking into by such a comprehensive body of churchmen as met in Rome in November...

...Nothing like that," she said...

...The military is scarcely less ubiquitous, as scruffy and down-at-heel as the rest of the populace...

...But if you get the urge to rub elbows with a guy who has a snake tattoo on his arm or watch the fifth game of the Douglas Bartholomew is The American Spectator's Chief Saloon Correspondent...

...All such religious sites are totally banned for Albanians...

...He left behind a country of no taxation, no private automobiles, no religious practice, no freedom of travel and self-expression, no inflation, and no acknowledged foreign debts...

...I can only point to a few changes that outsiders wouldn't notice...

...Ostensibly, there are three ways one could get to Harry's, which is located in the lower, or swamp, level of the ABC Entertainment Center in a place known as Century City, smack in the middle of Los Angeles...

...While the winning entries, judged so by such literary lunas as Ray Bradbury and Hemingway's son Jack, often evoke a chuckle, they more often border on the cute...

...Except that Harry's is still around after thirteen years...

...As the ladies in their gowns and the gents in their black ties waited for the sleek vehicles behind me, one of the white-jacketed valets leaped up on my bumper exclaiming, "No taka trucka, no taka trucka...

...However estranged Albania remains from the Kremlin, it continues to venerate Joseph Stalin...

...Perhaps he isn't interested in building himself a cult...

...When the barman sees me scribbling in my notebook, he asks if I'm writing my entry for this year's contest, which is Harry's Bar and American Grill's claim to fame amid a city littered with the stuff: the Eighth International Imitation Hemingway Competition...

...The resistance to the fascists in World War II was a chaotic affair, and the only group with sufficient internal discipline to wage a consistent guerrilla war—the Communists—emerged in 1945, ready to seize power...

...Each of the country's administrative districts has its own work camp...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 International concluded that the human rights situation in Albania has if anything grown worse...

...Hoxha's picture adorns every available wall-space, his "immortal" thoughts clutter communal noticeboards, his people live in apartment blocks where huge slogans announce "Lavdi Enver" and "Rrofte marxizm-leninizm"--"Glory to Enver" and "Long live Marxism-Leninism...

...I asked her if Alia would change things...

...Almost inevitably, poverty, illiteracy, premature death, and peasant ignorance bred like worms in a cadaver...

...I asked if there had been any strikes, any signs of a Solidarity-type movement that could be felt on every street corner...

...For more information or to send contributions, write to: Afghanistan Relief Committee, Dept...

...Or you could fly...

...But in 1967 religion was outlawed after "pressure from youth organizations...

...Those few Western tourists—less than 3,000 a year—who are allowed in will be taken to padlocked mosques and, if they are fortunate, to the Byzantine church in Apollonia, a unique relic fast decaying for lack of proper attention...

...In the capital, Tirane, milk is on sale for only half an hour each day...

...At Harry's, parking is a big deal in the way that design was a big deal to the Edsel...

...A report published in 1984 by Amnesty AFGHANISTAN Since 1980 the Afghanistan Relief Committee has been sending medical aid, food, and support for schools to villagers inside Afghanistan...

...And it can mean a dramatic turn for the oppositemarginal group, the traditionalists...

...If you get borracco, you can cling to the high front bar, your elbows propped at roughly the level of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's right armpit in mid sky-hook...

...Things are desperate for many of them...

...is getting a raw deal—no Soviet visitors are allowed in either...

...Now, twenty years later, it could be asked how post-conciliar statistics might read had the attempt succeeded...

...Suite 4100, 345 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10154...

...Each January, Harry's places advertisements in magazines, including the New Yorker, that state, "You must face The White Bull That Is Paper With No Words On It...

...Or you can get to Harry's by automobile...

...Many factories now work only two days a week, no electricity—when they don't work, the workers don't get money...

...The country has had an inter-nal history that freezes the marrow: As late as 1920 blood feuds accounted for one in every four adult male deaths...

...His forty-year tyranny dragged Albania—scarcely kicking but certainly screaming—into a distorted version of the twentieth century from which it will take at least as long to recover...

...Formally in-dependent in 1912, it was then literally sold by its inept ruler, King Zog, to the Italians for $20 million just before the last war...

...Most of them are derelict, the site of bonfires for children and useful stopping-off points for drunks who can't make it home...

...Let's hope so...

...Inasmuch as the Albanian constitution forbids foreign loans, officials are proud to tell you that the country owes nothing to any-one...

...Meat, flour, cooking oil, coffee, and other staples are severely rationed...

...Concomitant with the fact that this ability is not a salable trade, the prize is a trip for two to Florence, and dinner at Harry's there (no relation...

...According to a well-placed source at Radio Tirane, the Albanian state radio, many villagers in remote regions (where foreigners never set foot) are close tostarvation...

...For example, you see all the slogans praising Hoxha, yet nothing about Alia...

...What if Alia proves to be just another Hoxha...

...It can't go on like this...

...Despite the official view that the economy is doing well, a recent six-month drought has dealt a devastating blow to a country still largely dependent on agriculture, and where irrigation and machinery remain primitive...

...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES HARRY'S OF CENTURY CITY by Douglas Bartholomew If you get lonely, the Playboy Club is one flight of moving stairs up...

...Everywhere you travel in Albania military defenses sprout like some belligerent fungus—gray concrete domes, dug into the earth, ready to be occupied by troops...

...But with Hoxha dead many Albanians argue that things have to improve under his successor, 59-year-old Ramiz Alia...

...Not that the secret police and party elite don't live well...

...reported that 80,000 men, women, and children had served time in these camps since the end of the war, and 16,000 of them had died...

...Some have even sent collective letters begging Alia to help them...

...Some radicals will probably conform, some will leave the Church...

...I don't know," she said...

...If you get intimidated by the freeways, a switch to a bottle of something less potent than the old Bushmill's—a beer, perhaps, or a Levissimo's—will help allay your fears of the labyrinthine journey to home or hotel...

...But no need to feel that once again the U.S...

...And I don't wish to be unkind to Mr...

...I can talk about my true feelings to only three people in Tirane...

...Only old people and those who leave their families behind—but it's something...

...Archbishop Lefebvre, now 80, in company with Archbishop Castro Mayer of Brazil, has indicated that, should the November meetings turn out to be a non-event, he intends to do what traditionalist Catholics have been urging him to do for ten years and that is to consecrate a bishop or bishops to succeed them both...

...at a kindergarten childrentreated us to a song in which they lamented the death of "Comrade Enver" but then comforted themselves with the knowledge that he had "left the party red"—on that phrase, flinging their right arms up in a gesture reminiscent of the Hitler Youth...

...Transportation is no less backward, as twenty-year old trucks struggle along dirt-track roads, and the railways battle against lack of basic raw materials...

...There's no alternative anymore...

...Or as my source put it when I asked her whether she was happy in today's Albania, "Only the ten politburo members who have a Mercedes and a whore are happy here...

...Then again, the only new slogan he has approved since Hoxha died is `Better Times Are Ahead For Albania.' That slogan, suggesting that things have not been perfect in the past, would have been unthinkable under Hoxha...

...series while putting down a few ales, don't come to Harry's Bar and American Grill...

...Such things seem stupid to you, but to us they are the grains of hope...

...Albanian history is the messiest of that profoundly troubled region, the Balkans...

...Hoxha turned a nation of 3 million, living in an area the size of Maryland, into the most isolated spot on earth, and one of the most sinister...

...But in the last few months, since Hoxha died, people have been allowed to go to Greece to visit relatives...

...My arrival Saturday afternoon as I queued up behind a Jaguar, a BMW, and a Mercedes-Benz in my decade-old Chevrolet camper was uneventful until my turn came for valet service...

...If the affirmative means the hierarchy is going to pursue conciliar reforms with new and systematic vigor, progressives should be encouraged, conservatives tested in the virtue of obedience...

...The peasants have been brainwashed for forty years, they don't know any different...

...Seventy percent of the population is Muslim, with an equal distribution of Catholic and Orthodox among the minority...

...Harry's, in fact, is the opposite of the neighborhood saloon...

...But the most pressing problems facing Alia are internal and economic...

...Since then priests and practitioners have been imprisoned and in some cases executed...

...Each year the ads bring more than 2,000 people out of the prep school woodwork or wherever Hemingway imitators work to show their skill at what Harry's is fond of calling "good bad Hemingway...

...No doubt I did not see the front-line troops, who reputedly receive everything they could wish for, including an 80 percent rise in defense spending since 1982...

...As you would expect, the prisons and forced labor camps work overtime...

...But on a visit to the country's largest textile factory, I noticed that all the equipment was from China, most of it dating from 1963...

...The personality cult that Hoxha developed for himself remains in full swing...

...As for the intelligentsia, those who disagree with the state are quickly eliminated...

...It's atiny step towards realism...

...Taka my advice: Come to Harry's when you're flush, when you're hot, when the steam billows from your wallet...

...Harry's is the kind of place you go after you've hit it big at Vegas, driven all morning in a brand new Maserati with a blonde you met the night before...

...Squashed between Yugoslavia and Greece, with only 40 miles of the Adriatic separating it from Italy, Albania has suffered centuries of humiliating invasion at the hands not only of those three, but also more distant Turkey and Germany...

...The official wage is 600 Lek a month (about $90), but in villages many work for a quarter of that...

...If you get conversational, the man behind the bar, a Scotchman who goes by MacMillan, will engage obligingly in a run of banter...

...Unlike Tito, Hoxha remained loyal to Moscow until 1961, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin—Hoxha denounced Khrushchev in turn, and happily wrote off billions of rubles lent to Albanian industry...

...But Cardinal Ratzinger is clear: "Catholics have lost the conviction that there is one truth and that this truth is definable in a precise way...

...Things have got too bad to just go on as before...

...Walking is one way to get there, though this is not recommended, since it is uncertain if anyone has ever walked (successfully) in L.A...

...Hoxha initially looked for good relations with Yugoslavia's Tito, but Tito's real interest in Albania was as a future seventh republic for Yugoslavia...

...In particular there is growing hope that Alia will move to end the country's insane isolationism...

...Either Alia will be Hoxha II or a superman...

...People don't drive to Harry's, they "arrive"—often in Rolls Royces and Ferraris...

...Shulman, particularly as I've never read his journal, but when I visited the country last fall Feliks Polonski is the pseudonym of a writer on Eastern Europe...

...In 1955 the U.N...

...ARC is the primary U.S...

...He has put a stop to the bizarre military-bunker construction program launched by Hoxha in the 1960s...

...Most folks probably couldn't afford the parking...

...The inquiry would haveserved as well to arouse more than 600 half-dozing journalists who had come primed for a battle only to find "unanimous affirmation...

...A personal helicopter would be most fitting...

...If you get hungry, get thee to a table...