Albania (1 )

David Binder 

Shenim per botimin e ketij veshtrimi publicistik dhe historik: 

Ish gazetari i njohur i The  New York Times, David Binder, qe punoi 23 vjet per gazeten numer nje te botes, eshte nje personalitet i padiskutueshem, jo vetem i gazetarise, por edhe i historise dhe kultures. Puna e tij e gazetarit, beri te jete i pranishem ne shume evenimente historike, sidomos te Lindjes komuniste. Shenimet e tij per Shqiperine, titulluar “ Albania” jane nje tregues i rendesishem i vezhgimeve te tij, per nje vend model te izolimit, siç ishte vendi yne.

Sinqerisht e falnderojme per kete privilegj qe na beri dhe i urojme shendet e jete te gjate!

P.J.

 My CV is:            

David Binder was a member of the Washington Bureau of The New York Times from June 1973 to his retirement in 1996. He specializes in coverage of Central and Eastern European affairs. He also reports on other events involving United States foreign policy.     

His previous assignments for The Times were: Germany correspondentfrom 1967 to 1973 and East Europe correspondent (based in Belgrade) from1963 to 1967. Earlier he worked in Washington as a diplomatic correspondent and in Berlin covering the building of the wall in 1961. In 1989 and 1990 he reported on the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Communist systems in East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia. He reported on the civil wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and on the Kosovo conflict.     

Prior to joining The Times in 1961, Binder worked for the MinneapolisTribune; London Daily Mail (Berlin correspondent); Louisville Times;Southern Illinoisan, and Quincy Patriot Ledger.      He has also lectured and published articles in Germany, Austria, theformer Yugoslavia, Albania, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Japan,Canada and the United States.     

He was born Feb. 22, 1931, in London of American parents. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of arts degree in European history and literature in 1953 and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Cologne 1953-54. He taught at the Salzburg Seminar summer session in 1953. He is the author of Berlin East and West (1962) and The Other German - The Life and Times of Willy Brandt (1976); and a co-author of  New York Times books on Project Apollo, the fall of Communism and Scientists at Work.
 

Cheers.

David

Albania

David Binder
   
   
    To enter almost hermetically sealed Albania was all but unthinkable in
1963 when I began seeking a visa. Perhaps there could be some
consolation in the fact that it was nothing personal.
    Isolation gave substance to the broadening siege mentality of its
despot, Enver Hoxha (1908-1985). He had begun with trenchant hostility
toward "imperialist" Britain and America in 1945, then expanded to
"revisionist" Yugoslavia in 1948, beyond to "revisionist" Russia after
1959 and ultimately to "revisionist" China after 1976.("Revisionist" was
any teaching interpreted by Hoxha as straying from the path of Stalinist
orthodoxy.)  Each of these countries had involved themselves in Albania
to a lesser or greater degree - most at heavy cost. 
    Who could blame an Albanian leader for being xenophobic, given
the nation's cavalier treatment at the hands of foreign powers since the
end of the 19th century? In the last months of their empire, the Ottoman
Turks even tried to denationalize them by imposing a new "Ottoman"
nationality. European powers had mocked the Albanians, then briefly
imposed a comic opera monarch on them and finally invaded their country.
In the interwar years Albania had been ruled by a volatile Orthodox bishop,
Fan Noli, and by a capable tribal leader, Ahmet Zogu who made himself king.

    Few lands were so remote, so inscrutable: The language Indo-European,
but directly related to no other. A mountainous landscape, two-thirds of it
above 3,000 feet. For practically 45 years it was a virtually unapproachable -
a fortress, bristling at the close of the Communist era with
some 160,000 pillboxes (others claim there were 700,000!) erected to
defend a backward, impoverished ideological redoubt that no one else coveted.
    My father, Carroll Binder, had preceded me by three decades as a
newspaper correspondent seeking to visit Albania. Visa? No problem
then. He went by car from Greece in 1930, the only difficulty
being the miserable roads. "This funny little kingdom (of Ahmed Zogu), "is
about five hundred years behind the rest of Europe," he wrote at the time. 
    In my case I had to go, hope against hope, to the Embassy of the Peoples
Socialist Republic of Albania on Belgrade's broad Boulevard of
Prince Milos from time to time to request a visa.
In the foyer a bust of the man Hoxha called "The Great Stalin,"
symbol of Albania's official antipathies, and safely dead, rose from a 
plinth. Diplomatic laundry was visible through the back doors of the former
bourgeois townhouse flapping on a clothesline. Invariably, a low ranking
consular official politely accepted my request saying it would be passed
on to Tirana. Invariably there was no reply.
    Or, I could have discerned a kind of response in the shortwave broadcast from Albania in accented English that started: "Good Day.This is Radio Tirana. First, the news: "The Titoist revisionist clique has attempted to deliver another blow against the true teaching of Marxism-Leninism..."
    Formal letters to Tirana over the years went unanswered (eventually my
name was placed on the official Tirana mailing list for Albanian propaganda). As late as 1984 a telephone request to the Albanian mission to the United Nations for a meeting with a diplomatic representative elicited the response: ''You cannot talk to anyone anytime.''
    Among my many attempts to gain entry to Albania the most
ridiculous took place at the official wake for Romania's President
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in the ornate reception room of the Grand
National Assembly in Bucharest in March 1965. Of the
foreign guests, for the most part second-tier Communist leaders, the
prize was China's Prime Minister Chou En-lai.
    A Romanian protocol officer guided me - his idea - to the
curiously unguarded sanctum where drinks and canapes were being served.
I went up to the Chinese premier who wore a well-tailored blue
Mao jacket and asked for an interview. This dialogue ensued.
    "Go away you, damned Yankee imperialist."
    "Could I just ask..."
    "Actually (pause) you imperialists helped us. If it hadn't been for you we would not  far."
    "My question is...
    "I'm here for the funeral, not for questions. Then I am going to Albania."
    "Take me with you to Albania."
    "There is no room on the plane." (That flummoxed me and I went silent.)
    Sure enough, a few days later Radio Tirana's English service broadcast
something like: "Prime Minister of Peoples Republic of China
Chou en-Lai is delivering a speech in the northern Albanian metropolis of Shkoder. Here is Comrade Chou en-Lai..." (followed by discourse in Chinese without interpretation, interrupted by loud cheers from his Albanian audience).
    Perhaps colleagues from the European Communist newspapers or
wire services had visited Albania and could tell something about the
country? Alas I could find only one - Denes Polgar, a witty Hungarian from the MTI press agency. He had been an official guest for ten days in the 1950s, describing the trip as wretched: "Finally, on the last day, I saw a good looking woman on a boulevard in Tirana. I said to my guide, 'That is the first woman I have seen that I would like to make love to.' The guide solemnly replied, 'Unfortunately that is impossible. That is the wife (Nexhmije) of Enver Hoxha' "

    The alternatives to setting foot in Albania were to read Albanian history and literature and when possible to meet Albanians - those who had emigrated and those few who had escaped into exile. Written pickings were sparse, given thefact that most of Albanian history had been handed down orally within the clans. What follows is a compendium of what I absorbed from some reading and from some meetings.
    Among the emigres was Stephen Peters, short and rugged, who arrived at
Ellis Island from the southern village of Treska in 1925 at age 19, graduated
from Harvard, went back to Albania to teach for three years and, at the end of World War II, joined the Department of State, which posted him to Tirana. I found him in 1985 when Enver Hoxha died. Could he tell me about Ramiz Alia (1925-), the dictator's successor?
    "I taught his future wife," said Peters, beaming, "Semiramis Xhuvani, a
delightful girl." He related that after the war, Alexander, her father,  whom he had known as the head of the Elbasan Teachers College, came to him
"broken-hearted" because Semiramis wanted to marry Ramiz Alia. She was
an Orthodox Christian, he was from a Muslim family. The father
asked Peters what he could or should do. "I told him, ‘Nothing. Things are
changing.' " Peters met Alia just as he began a Communist Party assignment
as head of the Union of Working Youth. He found him "very pleasant and
extremely friendly."
     I was astonished to find another Albanian in Washington who
knew Ramiz Alia. He was Arshi Pipa (1920-1997), a spindly intellectual
with a shock of white hair. Having earned a doctorate in philosophy at the
University of Florence he became a high school teacher of Alia in Tirana in 1943. Their paths separated after World War II,  Alia rising in the new Communist apparatus and Pipa going behind bars as a political prisoner on the charge of  "refusing to accede to the policy of the government."
    Of the Hoxha regime's many thousands of political prisoners, some
10,000 were shot, hanged, tortured to death in first 15 years of Communist rule,  according to Pipa's compilation. Even at the time of Hoxha's death,  when most Communist countries had eliminated the category, Albania still kept more than 30,000 political prisoners - one in one thousand of the population. The chairman of the Association of Former Political Prisoners, Kurt Kola, said documents showed that 5,000 political prisoners had been executed and 25,000 more imprisoned for long periods  during the 40 years of Hoxha’s rule. An additional 70,000 were dispatched into internal exile in remote mountain regions, the association says.

    Released in 1957 after ten wretched years, part of them in Vlocisht for forced labor in the malarial coastal swamps, Pipa sought out Alia, now the minister of education. "He was very kind to me," the exprisoner recalled. "He did not raise problems of the past." He arranged a teaching post for Pipa in his native Shkoder.  
    A year later Pipa escaped to Yugoslavia, made his way to the United States and taught at the universities of Georgetown, Columbia, and California before being appointed professor of romance languages at the University of Minnesota in 1966.
     Pipa explained to me the significance of Enver Hoxha's decision to create a unified Albanian language in 1968. Hoxha favored his own Tosk dialect of the south over the Gheg of the north (Pipa pointed out that Hoxha, in imposing a mainly Tosk grammar and a "Toskicized Gheg vocabulary," also had displayed "some literary ambitions"). Ironically, one of the principal scholars involved in the creation of the unitary language was none other than Alexander Xhuvani, father-in-law of Ramiz Alia - both Ghegs.
    The decision deeply affected Pipa, who published a book attacking the unified language, with "epithets" and "sarcasm," and calling it "a criminal act," another Albanian scholar noted, Besides his academic work, Pipa published four books of verse in Gheg Albanian, which was "richer in vocabulary and phraseology" than Tosk, he asserted. He was passionately devoted to Gheg literature, which had existed for five centuries - much richer than Tosk literature - and was a champion of his gifted poet contemporary, Martin Camaj (1925-1992).
    In addition, a Gheg dialect had been used as the official language of
Albania from 1909 until World War II. The Tosk-Gheg dividing line
was the Shkumbin River flowing east to west across the waist of Albania.
    Having a unitary language certainly made political sense for a
people whose tongues had been written in three alphabets - Roman,
Greek and Arabic - until early in the 20th century.Yet it was clearly hard on
Gheg literature, and by 1972 written Gheg all but drowned in the flood of
standardized Albanian texts.
    To give a flavor to the Tosk-Gheg differences, Pipa cited  Faik
Konitza (1876-1942), an accomplished intellectual who called his smooth-to-the-ear native Tosk "lively, flexible, subtle" suiting Tosk character which, he said, "contained violence, intelligence, ability, intrigue and
fickleness." Konitza contrasted this to sometimes harsh and nasal-sounding
Gheg  "slow, solid, immutable, devoid of ambiguous turns."
    There was a political dimension in the change: The southern
Tosk-speakers, had mostly resisted the Italian Fascist and later
German Nazi invader-occupiers while northern Ghegs who had ruled pre-war Albania, welcomed them. Ghegs embraced the expansion of "Albania"
under the Italians to include Kosovo, then a part of neighboring
Yugoslavia. When Nazi Germany took control, over 9,000 of
them joined Germany's 21st Waffen SS Division, formed in April 1944
and nicknamed Skanderbeg for the legendary Albanian hero.
    Nor did the Tosk-Gheg split dissipate in the post-Communist era.
It reemerged in vicious rivalry between Fatos Nano, the Socialist survivor
of the Hoxha-Alia era from the south, and Sali Berisha, the former
member of the Communist nomenklatura from the north who led the
newly created Democratic Party.
    The rivalry shadowed more than politics. While Ismail Kadare (1936- ) is
universally acknowledged as the greatest Albanian writer
of the 20th century, there were Ghegs who detested him and
his work. Part of their dislike, they indicated, was related to the fact that
Kadare was a Tosk who not only came from Enver Hoxha's home town
of Girokaster, but had also written adoring verses about the party leader.
    One such Gheg was Pipa, who wrote copiously and critically
about Kadare's work, and was, I suspect, a bit jealous of his renown.

    Like many Albanian intellectuals Pipa was also preoccupied
with the puzzle of the origins of the Albanians, including
the frequent atavistic boast that they are direct descendants of
the Illyrians, an indigenous people conquered by the Romans.
If true, this would have made them coeval with the Greeks or
even older. Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, was
reputedly of Illyrian blood, which in 1926 was enough for the Albanian
government to have coins minted with Alexander's head and his horse
Bucephalus. Of equal or even greater importance to Albanians was that proof of an Illyrian connection would mean the Albanians long predated the Slavic peoples who began arriving on the Balkan peninsula in the 5th century. The
boast appeared all over the place in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1983, an immigrant in Port Chester, N.Y founded an "Albanian League of Prizren," purporting to revive the original League of Prizren formed a century earlier.
He sent me his group's introductory statement with the claim that it
"originates from the early Illyrian civilization, that is the civilization
of the earliest inhabitants of the Balkans and Europe itself."
    However tenuous the Illyrian link (no Illyrian texts have ever been
found) many Albanians commemorated it by naming girls Teuta,
after a redoubtable Illyrian queen, and boys Ilir, as in "Illyr".
    Yet even the official version of the Illyrian connection
acknowledges that it is difficult to prove. In 1982 Professor Aleks Buda,
president of the Academy of Sciences, formulated it this way:
"The problem of the formation of the Albanian people, of the
Albanian nationality in the Middle Ages on a very ancient ethnic Illyrian
basis and on their historical territory, constitutes long since one of the
basic problems of Albanological sciences." Buda went on to
acknowledge "the temporary silence of written sources" on either
Illyrians or Albanians "at the beginning of the Middle Ages."
    No less a patriot, Pipa also pointed to the conclusion
of an Italian scholar, Vittorio Pisani, that too little was known about spoken
Illyrian, that it remained "a phantomatic language."  As for the more
general claim of Illyrian protogenesis, Pipa dealt coldly with the 900-year gap between the total disappearance of the Illyrians and the emergence of Albanians: "With respect to the Illyrian origin theory, for a period of time from the second to the eleventh century, history is mute, and archeology is not vocal either.''
     Elusive as the basis for the Illyrian hypothesis is, what is one to make of the six reasons listed in 1960 by the Bulgarian linguist, Vladimir Georgiev, for his conclusion that the Albanians were originally Dacian rather than Illyrian and thus related to the Romanians? (One of his six reasons was that "the maritime terminology of Albanian is not their own, but is borrowed from different languages" which seems suspicious when considering Albania's location on the eastern shores of the Adriatic.) 
There was still another claim - that the Etruscans were the forefathers of Albanians. Then there is the matter of their very name. Nationalists claim that the designation "Albania" (and "Albanians") is derived from the name of an Illyrian tribe, called Albanoi, which was mentioned in the geographical work of Ptolemy of Alexandria in the second century. Albanians use variations of "Albania" when dealing with foreigners. But among themselves they call their language Shqip and themselves Shqiptari (the word is related to Shqiponje - eagle).  
    The regions Albanians traditionally inhabited or later spread to
had been dominated by successive empires of the Byzantines, Serbs
and Ottoman Turks. As the Ottomans consolidated their rule, the journalist
Altin Raxhimi points out, Albanians noticed that beyond the repressive
nature of the Ottomans, their administrative system constituted a
meritocracy. Albanians rose to great heights in their administration. No
less than 26 of the grand viziers from the 1500s on were Albanians, including all of the viziers of the 17th century. It was as if Albanians said to
themselves, why bother to rule your own small nation when you can
run an entire empire! 
    When nation-states began to take shape near and even among Albanian
settlements in the 1800s, Albanians found themselves constituting sizeable minorities in northern Greece, western Macedonia, southern Serbia and southern Montenegro. Ottoman overlords were in retreat, leaving behind pitiful minorities of Turks among the accommodating Albanians..
    In their stumbling and relatively late national awakening at the end of the
19th century there were few indications of an inherent urge for or of coherent planning to create a state, despite ardent appeals for Albanian independence and unity by political leaders and poets. Pavil Qesku, an Albanian intellectual, explained this apparent aversion to the very concept of statehood this way in 1997: "As long as the state and the foreign invader are identified as one, in simple terms, the state in the eyes of the Albanian archetype is the source of evil." In the view of Altin Raxhimi', a Tirana journalist, the nation state "was forced upon them by the shifting of the balance of powers in the 19th century and the European social upheavals following that."
    The first national initiative came June 10, 1878 from a mosque in the ancient city of Prizren (it had been the Serbian kingdom's capital in the 14th century). There 300 Albanian leaders from four Turkish administrative units in the region convened with the aim of creating a unified state. Their meeting came after the end of the Russian-Turkish war, much too late.         Already the great powers had divided up vast Ottoman lands,
including those inhabited by the Albanians, among aspirant nation-states - Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. A month later Abdul Bey Frasheri, chosen leader of the League of Prizren, sent a letter to the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin, asking for recognition of and settling the Albanian issues resulting from the Turkish War. The Congress ignored the appeal. Indeed, after examining it Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
replied admonishingly: "But you haven't even gotten an alphabet or a written language. How do you expect to create a state?" 
    More than half a century later Faik Konica (1876-1942) Albania's ambassador in Washington prior to World War II, wrote of powerful beys who had preserved their land holdings following independence. To them he touted the idea of a constitution. "Fine." they told him, "but what is a constitution?"     
    A unique fact of their nationhood: As old as Albanians
claimed their race to be, they were last in the region to
achieve statehood - in 1912. Even that happened only through artificial
insemination administered by a coalition of  Italy, imperial Germany and imperial Austria, then called Great Powers. They installed a German Protestant prince as the monarch in the port of Durres in March 1914. Wilhelm zu Wied fled six months later.
  In fact when the Albanian state was finally constituted there were at least as
many Albanians living outside it as there were inside (something
Enver Hoxha took note of in 1981 boasting, "We are six million."
At that time, someone wryly noted that Albania itself had more goats -
3 million - than citizens).
    For a time Albanians couldn't even agree on where their capital should be.
    The birth of the Albanian Communist Party itself under Enver Hoxha in 1941  - with scarcely 130 members - could be compared to a Caesarian. The operation was performed under the aegis of two Yugoslav Communists, Dusan Mugosa and Miladin Popovic. As was the creation, in 1946, of the new Albanian Communist state which took place under far from benevolent guidance by reconstituted Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito.
At that time Tito was testing the possibilities of practicing hegemony
not  only in Albania but also  in Bulgaria and maybe even Greece.
   
    The desire for cohesion among the vast majority of Albanians culminated
at the level of their tightly organized clans. (I had first encountered
Albanian clan customs in the Serbian province called Kosovo-Metohija
in the 1960s, but more of that elsewhere.)
    In 1989 Gjek Gjonlekaj, a former Voice of America broadcaster, led me to the lodestone of Albanian clan clan material - a splendid bilingual work entitled Kanuni i Leke Dukagjini, The Code of  Leke Dukagjini - just printed by his publishing company in New York. These were laws and customs transmitted orally from generation to generation of Albanians for more than five centuries. It was named for Lek Dukagjin, a 15th century ally of the national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg in struggles against the Ottoman Turks. (Skanderbeg was at least partially of Serbian origin!)
    The Dukagjini kanun was one of several such codes, but it boasted the
widest acceptance among northern and eastern Albanian clans. It is
a compilation of  strictly defined rules of conduct based primarily on
related concepts of blood relations (gjak) and of oaths of honor (besa).
Under the code Albanians have obligations to their family (shpi), their
brotherhood (vllazni), achieved by drinking a drop of each other's
blood and their clan (fis), which includes family and blood brothers. At
its grimmest the kanun can oblige one to take part in a blood
feud (gjakmarrje), including obligatory killing to avenge a transgression.
As a reporter, my favorite stricture was the beginning of the code's
chapter entitled messenger (lajmtari): "The messenger does not incur guilt."
    Despite an official ban of the code under the Hoxha regime and
annual Communist party campaigns against "old customs" starting in 1968,
Albanians continued to observe many of its strictures especially in
rural areas. As soon as Communist rule ended, blood feuds
burst open again, some of them fulfilling thirsts for vengeance
that went back three generations. Hundreds of killings occurred,
mostly in traditional Gheg areas.
    Awareness of the somber rules of the kanun stretched
well beyond the frontiers of Albania to the widespread diaspora.
An Albanian-American employee of the U.S. Government
once complained to me so bitterly and at such length about
a superior that I remarked in jest, "Why don't you kill him?"
    "He has too many relatives," he replied gravely as if to imply
that he had seriously considered the idea, but also evoking
the kanun's requirement - amounting to a threat - that a killing must be avenged in kind by a blood relation.          
                
    Despite its omnipresent pillboxes and bunkers, its continuing hostile
propaganda toward foreign powers (which went mostly ignored) Albania
was reaching out more and more beyond its borders. By 1983 Tirana
boasted diplomatic relations however tenuous with
almost 100 countries, excluding only Britain and Germany
among European states. That year for the first time in
decades freighters shuttled several times a month
between Durres and Trieste. Two new border crossings
with Greece were opened. A railroad link to Yugoslavia
was begun. Trade (more precisely, barter) was expanded,
despite the crippling effect of a ban on any form of foreign
loans, credits or investments.
     In February 1988, nearly three years after Hoxha's death, 
Albania participated in a conference of Balkan foreign
ministers in Belgrade. This was noteworthy because
a whole generation of Albanians had grown up having it drilled
into them that "Balkan" meetings might provide a pretext for
neighboring Yugoslavia to impose its designs on them.
    In this gradual opening Austrian, Swiss and Italian journalists
were being granted visas to travel in and write about the country.
But in the case of Americans and Russians Albania made no
distinction between government officials and journalists. Manush
Myftiu, a deputy prime minister, declared, "Albania does not want
relations with the Soviet Union and the United States." That stance
lasted just two years. In February 1990 Deputy Foreign Minister
Sokrat Plaka said his country might consider resuming relations
with Moscow and Washington and three months later President Alia made an offer of "friendship" to both superpowers.
  
    On May 1 1990 I was issued an Albanian visa at the embassy
on Prince Milos Boulevard that I had visited in futility 27 years earlier.
It was stamped Republika Popullore Socialiste e Shqiperise - Albania having
held on to the designation of a “Socialist Peoples Republic” years
after other East European countries happily had dropped it. The passport
was handed me by Ambassador Kujtim Hysenaj, a
handsome and cultivated career diplomat in his early
forties whom I had befriended several years earlier. (He was

appointed chief of the Albania Intelligence Service a decade later.)
Hysenaj explained that my visa was granted in conjunction with the
upcoming visit to Tirana of the U.N. Secretary General, Perez de
Quellar, a diplomatic first for Albania.
    The prospect of filling in the last blank spot on my
Balkan map delighted me, certainly more so than my
editors in New York. Then and later Albania 
merited something between a nod and a yawn from them.
I booked a plane ticket to the Montenegrin capital, Titograd
(soon to revert to the name Podgorica), where I rented a car to drive
the 15 miles to the border crossing at Han i Hoti ("The Inn of the Hoti clan")
and the 90 miles on to the capital.   

    A cold rain fell on the approach to Shkoder across a rock-strewn
moonscape of a plain. Only a few farm houses were visible
There seemed to be no traffic signs. Why? There was
no Automobile Age traffic. Private cars were banned by the state.
There were estimated to be no more than 2,000 automobiles in
the entire country. Concerned I might lose my way, I stopped
in what appeared to Shkoder's main square. A young man on a bicycle
balancing an umbrella paused by my window. "Tirana?"
I asked and pointed ahead, "rruga? (road?) He gestured that I should
follow him and began to pedal. On a roughly cobblestoned street
just past the Shkoder soccer stadium we came to a low-set
house. I was waved, somewhat perplexed, to the door by the
bicyclist to father, a middle-aged man in a cardigan who
greeted me, led me inside and introduced himself. He was
Asim Gruda, a mechanical engineer who had studied in Prague.
His wife Makbule bustled about serving tiny cups of coffee and
home baked cookies. Soon gathered were the bicyclist, Akill, his
brothers Astrit, Artan, Adnan and some of their girl friends.
I excused myself briefly to go the car for some fruit and candies
to give as presents. Bouncing between fragments of various
languages including Serbian, French, Italian and English
I explained what I was doing in Albania. Asim Gruda said,
"But we know who you are. We have heard you on the radio, on
Voice of America." I was dumbfounded. Humbled, too
by this surprising introduction to the traditional warmth of Albanian
hospitality. It soon emerged that the Grudas (Muslims although other
Grudas were Catholics) had like many other Albanian families,
undergone persecution by the Communists. I worried that my visit might cause them trouble with plainclothes officers of the powerful Sigurimi. Much later I learned that agents had come to ask who was the foreigner with the car. At the time 64-year-old Asim said he was unafraid. To underscore this he told a joke about a man who caught a fine fish in Lake Shkoder and proudly brings it back for his wife to cook. She says
the stove doesn't work because power has been cut off.
How about a fire? No coal. No wood. In resignation
the husband trudges to the lakeshore and throws the
fish back in. The fish leaps up and shouts, "Long Live
the Party of Labor!"
    We discussed Ismail Kadare, some of whose novels I
had read in translation and admired. Asim Gruda said he disliked
Kadare because he had written verse tributes to Enver Hoxha.
    Years later it dawned on me that the name of the Grudas' street, Oso Kuka, was symbolically powerful, especially in the Gheg context. For Kuka
was a real life figure eulogized as the hero of  "The Highland Lute" by
Gjergj Fishta (1871-1940), perhaps the greatest work in Gheg literature.
His epic of the Albanian independence struggle begins
with bloody skirmishes between (Slav) Montenegrins
and the Gruda and Hoti clans in the 1860s. It is set
in the very region where Asim Gruda and I were sitting.
    One of the verses goes:   
                                           So it is with the Albanians,
                                           Under foreign yoke unwilling
                                           To be slaves, pay tithes and taxes.
                                           Always have they wandered freely...
    The Communist regime banned Fishta's work soon after
it came to power calling it "a hymn to patriarchalism and
feudalism, to religious obscurantism and clericalism."
A factor more fundamental but unmentioned was that
some party officials apparently deemed The Highland Lute "anti-Slavic"
at a time when Albania depended heavily on support first by the
Yugoslavs and then by the Russians. His very bones
were dug up and cast into a river. Fishta, a Catholic, remained
anathema even in the months when I first visited his still Communist
country. He was not officially celebrated until 1991. Only then
could his dictum "We were born in hatred of the Slavs" be
recited openly. Ignorant of Fishta then, I could not ask
Asim Gruda about him.
    Heartwarming as it was to get acquainted with the Grudas
that first day, I was running late and started for Tirana to get there
by nightfall. I promised to return.   

    Working and living in Communist countries during the
previous three decades I thought I recognized the face of destitution.
But I was unprepared for its breadth and depth in Albania:
The narrow highway potholed every few yards. Driving
faster than 35 miles per hour was too jarring to attempt. Scarcely
any motor traffic. Some 70 horse carts, 30 drawn by donkeys,
3 taxis. Now and then a battered farm tractor or a 1950s vintage truck, once in a while a three-wheel vehicle cobbled together with braces and wire and powered with something like a lawn mower engine - but no passenger cars at all for 70 miles. The few hitchhikers I stopped for apologetically declined a ride when I said I wasa foreigner. In the dingy towns and villages hardly any shops were visible.
    In rock-strewn fields groups of women wearing trousers, aprons and
white kerchiefs wielded hoes, shovels, forks and picks while others guided
plows behind horses whose ribs showed sharply. But no men were
visible doing farm labor. Statistics showed 46 percent of  Albania's work force were women. From that first day onward I never noticed a single overweightAlbanian, much less an obese one. Explainable doubtless by the fact that most walked rather rode as much as by a spare diet.
    On distant mountain ledges were the Communist Party's
equivalents of capitalist billboards: the political slogans
in the tall letters in white paint: RROFTE SHOK ENVER!
(LONG LIVE ENVER!  (he was already five years dead)
and LONG LIVE PARTY OF LABOR! (the party had but
a year to live under that name).
    All Communist countries promoted this form of political advertising,
calling it "agitation-propaganda". But how effective was it? Most people
were so indifferent to the party that they hardly registered its messages.
    The approach to the capital eastward through the outskirts was not promising. Rows of hovels gave way to more substantial structures, apartment buildings none higher than four stories, but almost all of them drab or in disrepair. Only the broad Skanderbeg square seemed to have some style to it - the well-proportioned Ethem Bey Mosque, the new national museum, the new Hotel Tirana (1979), an equestrian statue of Skanderbeg (1968). That was kitty corner to a gilded non-equestrian statue of Hoxha
installed immediately after his death in 1985.
    Tirana, by Balkan standards, was a fairly young city. Founded
in 1614 by Suleiman Pasha Mulleti (a Turkified Albanian) at the foot of
Mount Dajti, some 20 miles inland from the Adriatic shore, it was chosen
as the capital in 1920 mainly because it was less vulnerable to
foreign invasion than others proposed. The population then was 10,000,
smaller than Shkoder in the north or the eastern city of Korce. By 1990
the population had reached 220,000.
    Turning south on the capital's broadest boulevard, Heroes of the Nation, I
came to the Hotel Dajti, "one of the oldest in Tirana" meaning it was built in 1943, during the Italian occupation. Now the Dajti was owned by the state and run under the supervision of the Sigurimi. Given the paucity of accommodations for foreigners I was probably lucky to have one of its 120 less than luxurious beds. 

    "You are the first American journalist permitted to visit Albania
in more than 30 years," one of the welcoming officials told me. In fact,
Harrison E. Salisbury, the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times,
had visited Tirana in August, 1957. At that time when Soviet relations
with Albania were still friendly he had managed to wangle an
interview with Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu.
    Shehu had learned English in Tirana's American School in the early 1930s, studied at a military school in Naples and fought in Spain from 1937 to 1939 in the Garibaldi International Brigade. After internment in France he returned to Albania and was instrumental in creating the Communist Party's partisan units. In the interview he told Salisbury that "In principle our doors are open to United States and other journalists when they want to come."
    Enver Hoxha was at that moment on vacation in the Soviet Union. When he returned there was no more talk for as long as Hoxha or Shehu lived
of American journalists being welcome in Albania. In December 1981 after
four decades side by side, Hoxha denounced Shehu as a traitor -  secretly
working for the United States - and had him, aged 68, and some of his
close relatives shot. The story Hoxha spread then and later
was that Shehu committed suicide. Not until Hoxha was on his death
bed in spring 1985 did the Albanian Communists disclose in the party
newspaper that Shehu had been slain.
    Now the government laid on a program for the dozen of us foreign journalistsinvited in connection with the de Quellar visit: bus excursions to the elaborately restored fortress of Skanderbeg at Kruje 20 miles to the north and to the lofty citadel of Berat, 50 miles to the south, where we were serenaded by the costumed national folklore ensemble. (I purchased a tape cassette from them as a souvenir only to discover later that it included hymns to Enver Hoxha.) Ten miles north of Berat was a town still named Stalin. A plainclothesman from the Sigurimi, suddenly appeared and politely told me to move on.
   A feature of the roads despite their poor condition was that some were lined with plane trees, making them pleasant avenues. A year later in the anarchy that followed, the trees were gone, sawn down by locals for firewood.
     Accompanying us were several Albanian journalists, the seasoned Shaban Murati and the young Shkelqim Beqari, foreign affairs reporters of Zeri i Popullit (Voice of the People) who spoke quite good English. They were companionable but painfully restrained, shying away from discussing contemporary Albanian politics. Ferment had bubbled in the days before our arrival and more was to come: Parliament had just enacted laws permitting citizens to travel abroad for the first time in more than 40 years and to practice religion for the first time since 1968. The number of capital punishment offenses was reduced from 34 to 11 and a justice system of courts with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys was created.
A struggle was under way behind the scenes between reformers around President Alia and Hoxha loyalists. There were reports of a demonstration in the industrial town of Kavaje and of student protestors denouncing a Hoxha son in the capital. The Sigurimi was doubtless keeping a close eye on Shkelqim and Shaban as well as us visitors.
    As in the Soviet Union where mementos of Stalin remained in prominent places long after his death, so signs of Hoxha's 40-year rule were still abundant. His compound, a few blocks from the Dajti was inhabited by his widow, still sealed off from public scrutiny. Across the boulevard was a large museum commemorating his life and work, a modernistic structure of white marble, glass and red steel in the shape of an eagle in flight. It was opened three years after his death. Facing north across the boulevard next to the Dajti was a statue of Lenin. Directly opposite was a statue of Stalin. Indeed, the eastward extension of the boulevard beyond Skanderbeg Square was still named Stalin. A year later neither Stalin nor Lenin  remained and the Hoxha museum was being transformed into a public meeting hall.
    That first night in Tirana in the midst of those trappings of triumphant socialism the sounds of farm animals came through the open window of the Dajti - donkeys braying, horses neighing, roosters crowing and sheep bleating. 
    Shkelqim and Shaban introduced me to friends and so the circle widened. The Albanians I was meeting constituted perhaps my mirror image. They devoted many hours to reading, listening to radio - if they were lucky watching television - about the world outside their prison-country. I had spent many hours scratching together what I could learn about Albanians inside that penitentiary. We both burned with curiosity, we both moved
gingerly on stepping stones of knowledge through our swamps of ignorance.
    One new acquaintance was Remzi Lani, the reed-thin editor of Zeri i Renise (Voice of Youth) who was not afraid to talk about the changes under way, although only in generalities: "In democracy someone wins and someone loses. Those who will lose here are the bureaucratized administrators, the routiniers, the mediocrities, all those who are not interested. Time will leave behind the obsolete." At that point Remzi, aged 32, supported Ramiz Alia.
    Another was Gramoz Pashko, a wavy-haired professor of economics at Tirana University. Astonishingly he invited me to his house. Being invited into private homes was a rarity in Communist societies and I was surprised also that he resided in his own house (later I learned it belonged to his parents who had been partisan heroes). Gramoz astonished me again by pouring a welcoming glass of Scotch, which he had purchased on a recent and rare trip abroad. He then introduced me to his wife, Mimoza, a raven-haired beauty.  It seemed Gramoz liked to surprise, even to shock visitors. He told me that faculty members were sent to the countryside to work in the fields for a month each year. ''It is sort of a vacation,'' he said. ''We do only half the planned target of a specialized worker and we also have closer, sometimes more intimate relations with the students, so that our wives ask, 'What were you doing this last month?' '' Under Ramiz Alia, similar changes in public conduct were occurring. Hand-holding, short skirts on women, shorts on men even bluejeans could be seen during the evening strolls of young people. These were sharply discouraged even at the end of the Hoxha era, as were beards and mustaches. On this first visit I saw none. Gramoz compared the new mood to a charge of electricity ''running from the top to the base.''
    Remzi Lani knew Ismail Kadare. He had just published a provocative interview with the remarkable author of 10 novels and 3 volumes of poetry. Gramoz knew him, too. On the telephone Kadare agreed to an interview at his apartment a block east of Skanderbeg Square. The building was modest. A bicycle was parked next to trash cans in the dimly lit foyer. Ismail and his wife, Elena, welcomed me warmly to their comfortable third-floor flat where he had a word processor and other electronic equipment, a television set and an exercycle. With the traditional hospitality of the country they offered me coffee, brandy and one of his novels, which he inscribed. But he wanted to talk politics, not literature. Speaking French in a soft voice he said he supported the Alia campaign "against the forces of evil." These were "not just the security police or bureaucrats, but also people in education, in
agriculture and in literature.There are writers who are forces of evil." He also provided an insight into the Hoxha era: "Enverism was never a cult. A cult is in the head not on walls."
    With a broad forehead, heavy brows and thick glasses, he retained a somber mien even as he said "there is great joy" about the changes under way in his country. He pointed out that when he made remarks attacking the security police in Remzi Lani's interview there was no response. ''That means that they are in retreat. Actually, I would have liked a response.
It would be better if the forces of evil come out in the open.''