ALBANIA THE AGGRESSOR
DALLIN, DAVID J.
East and West Albania the Aggressor By David J. Dallin GREEK GOMUNILLAS ESTIMATED at no more than 29,000 strong hare, for over three years, auccessfully sesiated a national army supported by...
...The Greek army is strictly prohibited from pursuing the guerrilla forces beyond the Albanian border...
...When I kept, repeating, "Just Fishing Village," she said: "That isn't a name...
...That was all he had...
...he has stopped shipments to Albania through Yugoslav territory...
...But their minds simply were not geared to anything so complex...
...1 ,As a loyal alBaailinte<:tb*Con3i|rform, Hoxha atoke with Ttto to IMS, arrested * number of Albanian "THaatas," and a fear weeks ago executed Koclfl Xoxe (pronounced Dzodze), Minieier 4ti the Interior and Number Xwo Albanian Communist, who "conjaasaf -to barW/yirha ygnt fa MostTow, was gxaciMteby received by StaUn, and greeted as a great "ally" by the Soviet press...
...You never stop prating about education...
...The one exception is when a specific government wages, aggressive war...
...Machinery is no menace...
...Thus Albania .has to wage war on Greece and her aRlts in virtual isolation...
...They will be just like everyone elsse...
...It fs one of the glories of our country that such a separate, special and idiosyncratic community can exist...
...The machine will getthem...
...They will lose their proud independence...
...It is proper to_ adhere to the principle of non-interference in another nation's affairs, generally speaking...
...There is something warmly primitive about the social atmosphere...
...These guerrillas are badly equipped, poorly armed and poorly fed...
...Well, sir," one of the boys said, "yon ought to've been here...
...One night we went down there with drums...
...AT THE VILLAGE STORE they told me what happened to Bob Alexander's boat...
...There is no point sending endless "aid to Greece," sacrificing men and maintaining large armies, while permitting the' aggressor to wage war with impunity...
...These people don't look up to anyone...
...Supplies for the Greek guerrillas must travel to Albania by sea (and by a miniature airlift...
...Houses which had never known paint were bright with color...
...The situation has changed in recent months...
...If they don't like you, it doesn't matter who you are—or, especially, how rich you are—you just don't count...
...Yet the civil war continues, hundreds are daily killed and k wounded, and no end is in f sight...
...You are always talking about health...
...My niece, Gail, asked me what its name is...
...In comparison with what we,know as factories, it is a small affair...
...Is it not time to revise our attitude toward Albania's Communist dictatorship...
...Under these conditions, is there any wonder the Greek government has been unable to conclude the civil war...
...Practically the whole village helped...
...To strangers they seem cold and distant...
...All this has .Jed to an admirable degree of independence...
...And then, down next to the old dock, I saw a long building such as the old huddle of houses had never known before...
...IN THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACE I have seen a telescoped version of the whole process of our civilization...
...The united front (Yugoslavia-Albania-Bulgaria) definitely broke down in March-April, 1949...
...When pressed hard, Greek guerrillas retreat to Albanian territory, where they are fed and housed, their wounded hospitalized, and the remnants are reorganized, regrouped and rearmed...
...Their antagonist, the Greek government, is staffed with welltrained army officers, and has at its disposal American and British military specialists, as well as superior economic resources...
...They will be healthier...
...Through an open door I glimpsed a shiny new electric washing-machine...
...During the war, when Tito receive^ Winston Churchill's approval to head Yugoslav resistance, the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hodzha) was Tito's subordinate and, like Tito himself, was supplied and paid by the British...
...The Athens government would certainly take such a step...
...If they like you, they will do anything for you...
...East and West Albania the Aggressor By David J. Dallin GREEK GOMUNILLAS ESTIMATED at no more than 29,000 strong hare, for over three years, auccessfully sesiated a national army supported by two great powers and supplied with the best of weapons...
...Now...
...And as to housing, you can already see things are better...
...If you insist on bad grammar and mispronunciation of the English language, maybe we can get a few of them to keep up their dialect just to please you...
...Either you are in or you are out...
...she has a bigger, cleaner deck than she had before, and she can sleep five men in her cabin...
...Soon they will all have radios...
...I asked...
...What do you care...
...But they will forget their pungent patter...
...Once, years ago, I tried to get the Fishing Village interested in cooperation...
...With pride I was quickly told: "That is the new deep-freeze plant...
...What was true of Hitler's Germany applies in miniature to Hoxha's Albania...
...The offer was rejected by the Western powers...
...but America and Britain firmly oppose anything apt to provoke "international complications...
...Gail was really ruthless...
...We raised that boat out of the water...
...MEMBERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS Commission studying the situation on the spot are in possession of all pertinent facts...
...The names of the families are the old Welsh and Scotch and English names of the countryside, but original blood has obviously been mingled with Indian and Negro...
...The whole social structure is tribal...
...But in the course of a day they can take 75,000 or 100,000 pounds of fish, put them through the mechanical scaler, clean them, pack them in ten-pound cartons, consign them to the deep-freeze and, finally, pack them into trucks which roll down to Boston or New York...
...ALBANIA IS A VERY SMALL NATION Its approximately one million inhabitants live in rather backward social and cultural conditions...
...To a lesser degree, the same situation prevails at the Bulgarian-Greek frontier...
...About nine o'clock every night, ten to fifteen trucks ¦with military supplies leave Albanian territory, cross the border, deliver the goods, and return before dawn...
...Yesterday, #when we rolled down the rough old road into the radius of the fishy smells and the raucous calling of the gulls, I suddenly became conscious of something new...
...For more than one reason, intensive fighting has been going on near the Albanian border...
...they possess neither tanks nor aviation...
...Tito has arrested Cominform adherents in his country...
...it was intended to save the prestige of the Cominform...
...We just all pitched in—and today Bob's got a bigger an' better boat than he ever had...
...After they have accepted you, they quickly grow confiding and generous...
...But that is the only designation it has ever had since the Revolutionary War...
...Not" more than 20 people tend its machines...
...So they have remained individualistic and poor...
...It is a mountainous country, with almost no industry, few roads, and a low standard of living...
...Relations between Tito and the Cominform have deteriorated so much that common action is no longer possible...
...One morning last summer an explosion of the gasoline tank blew out the whole stern and sent the craft to the bottom of the cove...
...But .they have made the momentous historical transition without distress...
...This jvas why the new guerrilla leadership as well as Moscow came out with a new, yet unacceptable peace offer...
...Their individually devised dwellings are perched on the outcroppings of granite without reference to streets or directions or points of the compass...
...THE FISHERMEN have been the men our economic planners forgot...
...These people have lived here among their rocks for well over a hundred years...
...Without Yugoslavia, centrally located between Bulgaria and Albania, the latter are separated from one another...
...iJp in Nova Scotia, the Catholic priests got-to work and helped them organize into cooperatives...
...The Home Front Menace of the Machine By William E. Bohn Latiy Cove, Malae...
...It was a shock to me to see these boys and girls, whose minds and motions have heretofore been regulated in time with the winds and the tides, standing in line and moving quickly and evenly in response to the demands of the smooth-running machines...
...Albania, Greek Communism's chief base, has thus become a Cominform island, surrounded by Greece on the east, Yugoslavia on the north, and the Adriatic on the west...
...At the war's end, the Tommies were greatly surprised to see Hoxha, in typical Balkan fashion, "liKjtddate" &e non-communists amjett LJ0a^ti-fascist forces by machine-gun an*|Ue...
...On the way out I was soliloquizing: "With their plant they get more money for their fish, and some of them have regular work and wages...
...Of Greece's three northern neighbors—Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania—the smallest, Albania, plays the most important role in the Greek civil war...
...They will have better schools...
...There was never any segregation or hoity-toity notion of racial superiority...
...he has started economic negotiations with the West which will never mature should he continue to participate in a war against the British-American-Greek coalition...
...They have painted their homes...
...most supplies reaching the communist guerrillas cross over the AlbanianGreek frontier...
...According to intelligent and informed observers oi the Greek situation, complete victory of the Greek army over the guerrillas will never be be achieved so long*as present methods of political and military warfare obtain...
...Yesterday we went down along Casco Bay to visit my old Fishing Village...
...They have their own speech, their own ways—and if the whole world disapproves, it is just nothing to them...
...Then they leave to continue the civil war on Greek territory...
...They jabber cheerfully as the fish speed along toward their frigid doom.' And they are as proud of their plant as if they had invented it themselves...
...What could Bob do...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 31
