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Albania

By Rodney Hide in HideSight

"Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual." - Albert Einstein

I wish all lefty-leaning pollies would visit Albania. If they opened their eyes there, it would cure them.

Last year I finally got to go myself.

Albania is a good reminder that "hands-on" government fails to deliver on its promise. A working lifetime of government direction in Albania produced only state terror and starving poverty.

Albania's population is similar to ours but the country is only one-tenth the physical size.

Communist dictator Enver Hoxha came to power post World War II and aligned himself first with Tito, then Stalin, then Mao, and then shut out even communist China. He fell out with the other communist regimes because he considered them too soft.

Hoxha interned 250,000 Albanians in labour camps. He executed over 5,000. One unfortunate was overheard by a state informant saying that he had enjoyed a cup of foreign coffee. He was imprisoned for ten years for "agitation and propaganda".

The ration for a family of five boys was a loaf of bread a day, two kilograms of meat a month and two kilograms of rice.

You were permitted only two pairs of trousers, two shirts, two singlets. To have more was bourgeois. Your wardrobe was subject to state inspection.

To ward off attack Hoxha constructed a staggering 740,000 concrete pillboxes throughout the country and trained the population to man them. Each pillbox consumed the resources required to build a two-room worker's apartment. Hoxha's pillboxes now lie derelict throughout the countryside with their machine-gun slits staring out uselessly everywhere you look.

Hoxha died in 1985. Albanians tipped over and destroyed his great statue in the main square of the capital Tirana in the 1992 uprising.

What followed was capitalism Albanian style. Several giant pyramid schemes sucked in the half of the population that had some savings. The schemes promised through the purchase of state assets a doubling of investors' money every three months. The state assets were all useless. They were never purchased. The schemes ran out of investors in 1997. The inevitable crash lost Albanians $2.8 billion -- equivalent to six months GDP. The whereabouts of the Albanian peoples' savings remains a mystery.

Having experimented with capitalism, Albanians tried anarchy. They went on the rampage. They privatised in five days the weaponry that Hoxha had spent a lifetime accumulating.

Civilians looted one million weapons and over a billion rounds of ammunition. Soldiers and police officers stood by as army depots and police stations were ransacked along with everything else. They too had lost their savings.

School children played with AK47s and tanks were advertised on the road side for hire or purchase. There were 5,000 murders that year.

There is now a government of sorts. The 2001 Albanian-style MMP election returned Prime Minister Fatos Nano. He heads Hoxha's old Labour Party now renamed the Socialist Party of Albania. Nano previously worked for Hoxha's widow as director of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies.

He was Prime Minister at the time of the 1992 uprising. He was imprisoned for stealing foreign aid money but walked out with the other criminals during the 1997 anarchy. He walked straight back into the Labour Party, resumed his leadership, and was elected to power that same year by promising to get Albanians back their money. He appointed as his Minister of Finance Arben Malaj -- who had managed one of the pyramid schemes. Nano didn't recover any money.

Albanians may be forgiven a degree of cynicism.

Corruption is endemic. Doctors in the public health system -- such as it is -- must be bribed before they will treat you. Students must bribe their professors $US5,000 to gain university admittance.

The police pull cars and trucks over to demand money or else.

Albanians have little to be proud of -- they are proud of their medieval leader Skenderbeu who fought off the Turks for a brief period of history and they are proud too that Albanian gangsters have taken over the Italian mafiosi.

Albania's main exports now are workers, prostitutes, drugs and gangsters.

The country itself resembles a huge rubbish dump with litter spread from one end to the other. The roads are potholed and broken. Ten years ago there were just 8,000 cars in all of Albania. It was illegal to own a car. Indeed, it was illegal to own a chicken. There are now 250,000 cars. A great many of them are large late model Mercedes driven by shady characters whom you suspect of having a boot load of Hoxha's weaponry.

The Chinese-sponsored factories stand derelict and idle outside the towns. The state farms are abandoned and now grow mostly weeds. Unemployment is over 50 per cent.

Outside the major cities former state farmland has been built over haphazardly with apartments and houses. There are no roads, just tracks. The owners have no property title. They have just claimed the land by building on it. The new buildings are crumbling even as they are being built.

Albanians rightly don't trust their banks. The money they receive from their family members working overseas is simply poured into building apartments and houses that no one lives in and which never get finished.

Outside Tirana I walked through the market in one such spontaneous subdivision. Second-hand Italian clothes and shoes were on sale out of rusting van wrecks pushed into rows. Village women had walked an hour to spread a small cloth on which to sell a bagful of vegetables.

My guide surveyed the array of vegetables and clothes for sale and declared his children spoilt and unable to comprehend how bad things once were. There is now food to eat and no police checking your wardrobe for a third pair of trousers.

But Albanian entrepreneurship doesn't extend much beyond these flea markets. The communist era destroyed the economy and also the essentials of a market economy: respect for property, trust, and the belief that hard-work and honesty pay off. It's the loss of these basic values that's causing Albania such grief.

I fear it will take generations to recover. The Hoxha legacy is proving much harder to tip over than his great statue in Skenderbeu Square.

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Rodney Hide is the leader of ACT New Zealand. He publishes a regular email newsletter, HideSight, from his website.