Albania: Love It or Leave It!

...Friend Anver As a winter fog encased the city, I stood before the gates of the former Hoxha residence, a sprawling complex that anywhere in Eastern Europe could be a People's Hall of Friendship...

...Until Communism fell in 1992, Albanians were barred from the neighborhood, lest they glimpse the leadership—a bit like Boo Radley— living in their gated mansions...

...He got his start as a Party functionary, but only reached power as the agent of the Yugoslav general secretary, Marshal Tito...

...At one time there was a popular Kosovar expression: "The streets of Tirana are so clean because the Albanians have nothing to throw away...

...None of the ministers I met mentioned American largesse, and aid projects like the north-south highway are in the same state of idle disrepair as Hoxha's bunkers, which in their own way sound notes of caution about foreign entanglements...

...During the war billions were pledged for Balkan reconstruction, especially for front-line states like Albania that contained Serb aggression...

...Both the Yugoslav army and its leader, Milosevic, ended the war unscathed...

...He dated his fear of imperialism to the betrayed 1949 covert actions...

...In Betrayed, Lord Nicholas Bethell, the English historian, describes the hapless missions launched by Britain and the U.S...

...Similarly, Kosovo has never been an easy issue for Albanian governments...

...But on many hectares there is the work-in-progress of stillborn Villas: incomplete three- and four-story houses that await either a family conference, the return of a construction team, or the next remittance from Milan...

...At war's end many of the 800,000 Kosovar refugees (who fled NATO's blitz as they did Milosevic's goons) returned home...

...But after 1992—to the country's credit—the directors posted a roll call of those killed during "the Communist occupation" from 1949-1992...

...MATTHEW STEVENSON Albania is one of the riddles of the Eastern Question...

...When I raised it in conversation, I generally got a standard answer that Albania has few problems with nearby countries, save for Serbia...

...Nor did they welcome those Albanians who fled into Kosovo seeking the prize of a Yugoslav passport, on which they could flee Hoxha's regime...

...On this clear January afternoon, the Jumbolino crossed the spine of the Italian Alps and flew down the Dalmatian coast...

...But the British liaison officer in Washington was Harold "Kim" Philby, and he betrayed the missions...

...The cost to rebuild Yugoslavia is estimated at Sao billion, that for a country that is now the poorest in Europe, still embargoed in the West, and without foreign reserves—thus insuring regional instability for the next generation...

...After the war, Friend Enver sublet the economy to Mao's theories of industrial self-sufficiency...

...None of the ministers mentioned American largesse...

...But Ahmed Zogu's royal pretensions— he proclaimed himself King Zog I in 1928 — and the work of Italian architects transformed it into a regional capital...

...Toward the end of 1999, 2,1o8 Kosovar war dead had been found, not many more than the numbers of Yugoslav civilians who were killed by the NATO air campaign...

...On my invitation it was noted that I was there to fish from the pool of state assets, stocked for privatization...

...Following the Italian and German occupations of World War II, when an Albanian division fought ruthlessly for the Nazis, Tito made it an autonomous region within Serbia, both to weaken Serbian influence in Yugoslavia and to placate Albanian separatist sentiments...

...Unless the international community has hidden its aid in the trunks of stolen cars, most of the checks must still be in the mail...

...One morning, for example, it took us four hours to drive 70 miles south, and thus we had to abandon our hope to inspect either the tourist potential of Vlore or a refinery at Ballsh, both of which were only another 20 miles down the road...

...Near downtown, the university looks like 31 a warehouse district, and most apartment buildings, in several ways, appear held together with clothesline...

...Thus what might be one of the finest countries in Europe, is left in a condition such as nowadays disgraces few Central African tribes...

...Hoxha suppressed religion, fearing Catholic encroachments or Orthodox hegemony...

...Albania needs a natural gas pipeline, an airline, a road system, increased oil production, a tourism infrastructure, and investment in the financial system...

...T1ic tie udir A/G Waiting for the flight home at Rinas Airport, where much American weaponry was staged for the attacks on Serbia, I recalled the after-action reports, few of which justify the press notices of the Clinton administration that Kosovo was a splendid little war...

...The president himself made a cameo in Pristina, to promise the Albanians that the world would not forget their suffering...

...He led an opulent lifestyle but went by the epithet Shokut or Friend...

...With our breath misting over the conference table, we reviewed the privatization as though discussing a five-year plan...

...For a while Tirana was the Brasilia or Canberra of the Balkans...

...Today several guards, with the air of forlorn retainers, patrol the grounds...

...Otherwise 32 the house is dark, save for the security lamps, which glow in the mist, as if it were still darkness at noon...

...Alluring deposit rates blinded customers to the reality that their investments were worth little more than Dutch tulips, and before long the shareholders had skipped town, leaving clients to ponder a future without either toasters or deposit insurance...

...As well, like many U.S...

...The country has 13 banks and about S3oo million in foreign reserves...

...The attendants and guards never stirred from their corner space heaters, so I walked alone among the marble busts of Albania's Greek, Roman, and Byzantine past...

...The American Spectator • April 2000 covies.9 14/bonio for TurFish Pckyhis As striking during the week in Albania was the absence of an American presence...

...After the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Albania's only patrons were in China, Hoxha ordered that 400,000 bunkers be built around the country...

...It was natural causes that dispatched him to his tomb, an enormous marble wigwam in downtown Tirana that, after the Communist liquidation, some wanted to convert to a disco...

...Waiting for the passengers to board, the pilot threw a stick for the dogs that idle on the tarmac...

...Some 10,00o bombs, scattered across Yugoslavia, never exploded, to create future havoc for farmers or curious children —the same group at risk to run across the depleted uranium dropped to revive the Prizren League...

...It could easily be the modern story...

...Before climbing the stairs, I tried to glimpse the heavy pods brought in to keep the Apaches from sinking into an airport pothole...

...I paid $45 for a visa, but the man behind me paid $55...

...The frontier floated on blood...

...Albanian roads, which have seen little improvement since the Italian occupation in the 1930's, are rivers of potholes...

...Petroleum production reached two million tons a year, far below the country's requirements, so he banned The American Spectator • April 2000 o.o.Ftiy for Wor4 in o .23/0/ The premise behind Albania's pyramid schemes differed little from the asset and liability management of an Arkansas savingsand-loan...

...The Greeks have a long simmering claim to southern Albania, which has a largely Greek population...

...But the air campaign over Serbia, which took out 44 percent of Yugoslavia's industrial capacity, consolidated his power better than any Communist purge...

...But the army had left no trace of its encampment, and as I stood looking up at the snow-capped mountains, I thought of how the American alliance had paid $4 billion to inherit the mantle of the Ottomans, who came to measure the state of their empire by its ability to dictate events in the Balkans...

...In remote valleys he used the country's limited foreign aid to build Chinese oil refineries and power stations...

...In driving the Serbs from Kosovo but leaving the province as part of Yugoslavia, the NATO forces —like some Turkish garrison—suppressed a nationalist uprising on a remote frontier...

...In the mid-1990's, for example, the ruling Democrat Party did brisk business in fuel oil, girls, cigarettes, drugs, and weapons, not to mention running one of the many Ponzi schemes whose collapse in 1997 brought down the government of Dr...

...Nor could the Clinton administration prove its Holocaust charges against the Serbian government...

...As the borderers themselves described it...

...Hoxha followed up the incursions with executions and show trials, to strengthen his power, and later as a pretext to seal Albania from imperialist designs...

...Elsewhere in the countryside are the concrete igloos of Hoxha's -civil defense plan...

...Elsewhere what defines the city is trash, as if garbage men were swept away in a purge as revisionists...

...The 78-day air campaign killed about 600 Yugoslav soldiers and, depending on whose figures you believe, disabled either 13 or 93 enemy tanks—which for Gen...

...Baggage claim meant chasing down a free-lance handler who had a prior lien on the luggage trolleys...

...Between checking into an Austrian-run hotel and my first meetings, I had both a car and driver and time to explore the city...

...Albania has few commodities to export, and lives on the remittances of overseas workers, who send in about $1 million a day...

...Throughout the 1990's the United States has thought it could impose peace in the Balkans by drawing Wilsonian borders around the feuding nationalities, even though an ethnic map of the region looks like a Jackson Pollock painting...

...Despite the economic three-card Monty, the central bank has recently maintained the lek as one of eastern Europe's more stable currencies, even if most foreign exchange dealers crowd the sidewalks outside the bank rather than the desks of its trading rooms...

...The exhibit also re-creates a prison cell of the secret police—further testament to the Albanian obsession with concrete bunkers...

...Tirana lies 35 miles inland, at the head of a broad valley...

...The closest NATO came to deposing the Party stalwart was blowing up his empty house...

...When arms sales and barter put this weaponry in the hands of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the dream of rebellion became a reality...

...On the battlefield he is noteworthy for campaigning with his catamite...

...Turkish for 500 years, Kosovo was a spoil of the First World War, awarded to Serbia after it lost a fifth of its population fighting the Central Powers...

...So far investments have been limited to Greek and Italian companies, many run by Albanian expatriates...

...International oil corporations have not tried to colonize the off-shore oil acreage, despite whispers of reserves exceeding a billion barrels...

...In fact, of the 11 million Albanian gold francs budgeted between 1928 and 1938, 75 percent went on the construction of public and other residential edifices in the capital, which then had a population, of around 25,000...

...At the city's center is Skanderbeg Square, which mixes Stalinist urban planning with a few Maoist sensibilities...

...In 1908, after traveling through Albania, the English writer, Edith Durham, described the futility of setting policy by Balkan borders: "The frontiers drawn by the Treaty of Berlin were so impossible that in many places they could not be defined, much less enforced...

...On the shore, in fields, on hillsides, almost everywhere, you come across these crumbling pillboxes—the People's Maginot line—now as difficult to comprehend as the mathematical equations that show up in Iowa cornfields...

...What sends most transactions to the dustbin of deals are the terms...

...When his master, Tito, broke with the Soviets, Hoxha supported Moscow...

...As I was met by a car and driver, I was spared jostling for a taxi among the huddled masses yearning to breathe dollars...

...The Ottomans clung to power by violently dividing and conquering their subject nationalities, as in Kosovo, where in the seventeenth century the Turks treated the remaining Serbs as later would NATO's Janissaries, the KLA...

...1905 travelogue t the turn of the millennium, on the assumption that it lay 4 beyond the computer horizon, I spent a week in Albania —my first look at the country for which, in Kosovo, the Holy NATO Empire fought its savage war of peace...

...Although both Zog and Hoxha avoided irredentism to cultivate better relations with Belgrade, the post-pyramid governments had to support insurrection in Kosovo, lest they find themselves the target of the looted guns that were eventually aimed at the Serbs...

...Sali Berisha —adding Albania to the footnotes of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds...

...In short, Albania spent most of the twentieth century devouring its own—resources or otherwise...

...In turn, with its large Albanian minority, Macedonia fears a rerun of Kosovo...

...I made the mistake of taking off my overcoat and, during the presentation, my mind wandered to warmth and dinner instead of the case the minister made for an Albanian investment...

...Until it merges with an industrial suburb, the road into the city snakes across dust bowl farmland, notable for the absence of tilled soil and for its crops of architectural folly...

...When I interrupted one meeting to ask what investors would get if they invested $6o million in a certain project, everyone fell silent, as if in warming my hands I had, by accident, given the Zogist salute...

...As best as I could tell, Albania is one of the few countries outside Africa that missed the economic revolutions of the twentieth century...

...A city of open sewers, sidewalk bazaars, and idle throngs, Tirana has the forlorn look of a city in Soviet Central Asia, a hub of dust and socialist realism...

...But pitching among the potholes are the latest Mercedes and BMWs, part of what a World Bank report might call invisible imports...

...More than a million guns and rounds of ammunition were hauled off...

...Never mind that the NATO stealth bombers could no more correct the injustices of the Balkans than could they locate Private Ryan on the outskirts of Pristina, or that our Albanian allies were in league with our enemies—the Islamic fundamentalists—who helped write checks to the KLA...

...But most of the mosques look as forlorn as the shop windows...

...The North Atlantic allies had sought to detach Tirana from the Soviet orbit, which with little opposition had established satellites in Poland and Czechoslovakia...

...Only after the war did he consolidate his reign of terror with Yugoslav backing...

...r4/bunion Zonks: Where the Money isn't" My first business meeting was up a dark flight of stairs at the April 2000 • The American Spectator Albania needs a natural gas pipeline, an airline, a road system, increased oil production, a tourism infrastructure, and investment in the financial system...

...A consequence of the pyramid-scheme collapse in 1997 was the government's fall, during which the stores of the Albanian army were looted...

...But the Allies turned a cynical eye to the cleansing of 15o,000 Serbs from Kosovo—much as in 194 they went to war to defend violated Belgian neutrality, but nine months later promised to partition Albania to entice Italy to the Allied side...

...Like Washington, Tirana covers the trade deficit with easy money from abroad...

...The average Albanian wage is between $ioo and $200 a month, and judging by the throngs of idle men in most town squares or those selling roadside soda, unemployment is the highest in Europe...

...But the suggestions of Khrushchev, among others, that Albania's future lay as a Soviet banana republic pushed Hoxha into the arms of the Chinese, who littered the countryside with now decaying industrial works...

...Just to position the squadron at Rinas Airport, Albania is one of the few countries outside Africa that missed the economic revolutions of SA060 Mitosemc the twentieth century...

...In the transition from Communism to capitalism, governments became impossible to distinguish from hedge funds or crime syndicates, where a perk of office is to leverage influence in cornered markets...

...But times have changed, and today if rubbish were an economic indicator, Albania would find itself in the growth tables of Singapore...

...Before 0-1-,Iviess-a,,641 the war, King Zog had franchised the economy's few assets to Rome's interests...

...in the late 1940's to overthrow the Hoxha government...

...Around a space about the size of Red Square is a Palace of Culture, the central bank, and a national museum, including a fresco of Albanian peasants on a long march toward the new world order...

...But it was by Allied design that Kosovo was Serbian for most of the twentieth century...

...As at the Vietnam Memorial, the names are listed on stark tablets, and maps show where each fell, including those whose blood remains on Philby's hands...

...d ro//op.s-c_s- on Kosovo The Albanian economy as the province of pyramid schemes and stolen cars would have no more consequence than Hoxha's paranoia, except that it was the country's domestic anarchy that set in motion the events that led to war in Kosovo...

...But few beyond the Clinton administration have banked on Albania's future, and even then Washington has put little into the country aside from its displays at the air show over Kosovo...

...Much of the domestic state budget went on public buildings during Zog's reign," British historian Miranda Vickers writes in The Albanians...

...Even today a tribal fault line divides Albania between Ghegs in the north and Tosks in the south, and—in a country where guns are everywhere—it was estimated recently that 6o,000 people still had a stake in a blood feud...

...8} 35...

...In the words of Robin Okey, who wrote about the Ottomans but might well have been describing the Clintonians: "The Porte made up in terror for what it lacked in efficiency...

...Serbia ruled the province by oppression and fiat...

...Vacant lots, roadsides, parking lots, and even window sills at important ministries bear witness that Albanians have joined the ranks of the disposable society...

...MATTHEW STEVENSON (matthewstevenson@compuserve.com) is a frequent contributor to TAS and lives in Switzerland...

...But even if I was reluctant to bid for a stake in the Karl Marx hydroelectric plant, I did want to fulfill a lifetime dream to see what remains of Enver Hoxha's brave old world...

...C‘Acork ac-, LEFT MOVED N0ADORESs the private ownership of cars and rationed the balance to Party stalwarts, who proved as demanding as the king's courtiers...

...Kosovars have often dismissed the Albanians across the border as poor relations and feared unification, much the way many in Northern Ireland want nothing to do with the Republic...

...Since the ban on the private ownership of automobiles was lifted in 1991, Albanians have made up for lost time by building up a fleet in which—as even ministers acknowledge-6o percent 33 of the cars are stolen, most from Western Europe...

...3 4 April 2000 The American Spectator Unless the international community has hidden its aid in the trunks of stolen cars, most of the checks must still be in the mail...

...But before clearing for our final approach, we circled above the Adriatic, and I caught a glimpse At Rinas Airport arriving passengers walk from the plane to the terminal along a palm-fringed promenade, a pleasant respite from accordion jetways, although inside, the arrival hall has the feel of a Balkan bus station...

...I liked each that I met and admired their optimism...

...Behind the capital is a long white line of snow-capped peaks, over which NATO fighters flew their missions into nearby Kosovo and Yugoslavia...

...George Patton would have been an afternoon's work...

...In the damp chill of the national museum, I was the only visitor...

...In its lavish ways, the U.S...

...During the war Hoxha was just one of many Partisan officers who fought both the Axis occupation and their domestic foes, real or imagined...

...Many were trained abroad and used phrases like "foreign investment" and "joint-venture" as easily as those earlier, perhaps in this same meeting room, had quoted the theorems of Marx and Engels...

...Vickers recalls one chapter: "In 169o, unwilling to convert and fearing a massacre if they remained [in Kosovo], the Orthodox Patriarch of Pec, Arsenije IV, led some thirty thousand Serbian families to migrate from Kosova to Hungary...

...Albanians cling to their Ilyrian origins, in part to distance themselves from neighboring Slays, but also to stake the earliest possible claim to Kosovo...

...Even by Hollywood standards, so dear to the administration, the Kosovo production was a sequel to Waterworld...

...More recently the Pope has described Albania as an emerging market, perhaps in keeping with a local expression: "Where the sword is, there lies religion...

...But few have banked on the country's future...

...A subsidiary of Swissair flies daily from Zurich to Tirana, the Albanian capital...

...Nominally Albania is a Moslem country...

...As Charles Simic writes in the New York Review of Books: "As for the much-praised 'humanitarian intervention,' no matter what Ms...

...It seems incredible that a fine country, with at least two harbors possible ofdevelopment, and within a few hours' steam of Italy, should be the most uncivilized land in the Balkan peninsula, and that for centuries no European power should have made any serious attempt to acquire it as a colony...

...After some meetings, we would drive into the countryside as part of the due diligence...

...state capitals, it was a geographical compromise...

...of the Karaburun Peninsula, whose unknown chapter in the Cold War I was reading on the flight...

...But no sooner did the war end than we abandoned it to the misery and wretched life it's always known...

...Army alone paid $480 million to move its Apache helicopters to Albania, where they never fired a missile in anger...

...But since its creation in 1912, Albania has been at odds with its neighbors...

...Fields may lie fallow, the sad harvest, first of central planning and now a capital shortage...

...Perhaps one reason the Clinton administration was so eager for the studio rushes over Kosovo was that, if the missiles fell on either Serb militiamen or Moslem fundamentalists, the Pentagon could take credit for a direct hit...

...In the fifteenth century, Skanderbeg led an uprising against the Turks, and his mounted bronze reincarnation bestrides a corner of the plaza, although his Viking helmet makes him look like a Norse god on Pegasus...

...Aid projects have collapsed...

...Such was Hoxha's paranoia that his food taster worked overtime, as apparently did others in his retinue...

...Car rides feel like descents into white water...

...But such are the city's borrowed metaphors that a 1930's travelogue, Dead Puppet's Dance, could describe the Parliament as looking "like a Methodist Chapel transplanted from a London suburb...

...Just as quickly, a divide-and-rule occupation had resumed and, one suspected, the sultan had retreated to the pleasures of the harem—leaving only a legacy of violence, not the answers to a 600-year-old problem...

...Ministry of Public Economy and Privatization, in an office the temperature of a meat locker...

...In some corners of Tirana, minarets are all that is distinctive on the monochromatic skyline...

...During Hoxha's curatorship, the museum celebrated the heroic people's struggle...

...Albright says, the NATO bombing was a form of collective punishment in which innocent Serbs were made to pay the full price for the sins of their leaders who, of course, remained well protected in their shelters...

...according to the Washington Post, required an escort of Mi Abrams tanks, 6,200 soldiers, 42 support vehicles, and another 37 Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters...

...At Karaburun and elsewhere, the operatives found it was the secret police who were waiting, not the rebel cry of freedom...

...Prior to 1939, when he fled the Italian invasion to the Ritz Hotel in London, King Zog had franchised the economy's few assets to Rome's interests, and his ministers took the rest, giving rise to a popular expression: "True, there are no brigands in Albania, because all of them have gone to Tirana, where they rob with authority from behind their desks...

...According to the BBC's Audit of War, it cost NATO $4 billion to drop 23,000 bombs on the remnants of Yugoslavia...

...The American Spectator • April 2000 42ccadnia/acti 12onee in Vrono Until the 1920's, Tirana was a sleepy Balkan village...

...One of the ironies of Kosovo is that Moslem Albanians often took better care of the Serbian Orthodox churches than did their parishioners...

...In searching for the causes of war, the NATO alliance only found reasons in Belgrade: Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's 1974 autonomy and flouted the diktats of Rambouillet...

...But after two Apaches crashed during training missions, the armada returned home to base, save for the equipment that later turned up in Albania's used car market...

...Even though, during Hoxha's time in power, a leading Albanian export was his collected works, not many can recall particular details about the Communist dictator...

...Most of the men running the Albanian economy are in their thirties and forties, as if the government were an Internet company...

...The idea was to land covert operatives in Albania who would then lead the call to arms...

...without intervention, the Serbian predilection for ethnic cleansing would bring another Holocaust to the region...

...But when his dream of a Communist Balkan federation, incorporating Bulgaria and Albania, faltered, Kosovo became yet another minority stepchild, caught between Serb nationalism and Hoxha's bunker mentality...