In the shadows - Albania

National Review, July 14, 1989 by Anthony Daniels

TRANA-In 1982, Albania's Party of Labor suffered a serious electoral reverse. According to the Directory of Statistics of the State Planning Commission, its share of the vote plummeted from 100 per cent in the elections of 1979 to a mere 99.9 per cent in 1982.

Needless to say, it is not easy to gauge the precise state of public opinion in a country where a vote of 99.9 per cent represents a decline. Aside from language difficulties (Albanian is the unique descendant of the ancient 11lyrian language), the authorities do not exactly encourage spontaneous conversations with foreigners. To speak of political matters in any but the officially sanctioned way, one must meet at night, in the dark shadows of illlit streets. If anyone approaches, you change the subject to something innocuous like soccer and move on (to another shadow). The few passing cars are viewed with suspicion, for there are less than a thousand cars in Albania, and the use of one signifies membership in the political elite.

Is Albania as peaceful as it seems? Every evening when the weather permits, people pour out of their apartment blocks and stroll in true Mediterranean fashion down the main streets. They go arm in arm, chatting and preening as they pass the statues of Stalin and Enver Hoxha. Army officers, dressed in olive-drab uniforms without insignia that look like costumes for a Hollywood totalitarian nightmare, mingle amicably among the crowds, nodding to friends and acquaintances. "Albania," reiterate the official guides proudly, "is a country without crime." "We are already dead," say the men in dark shadows.

Albania is the only country in the world where religion has been completely outlawed. The mosques and churches were closed in 1967 ("by the decision of Albanian youth," according to the official explanation). The mosques have been turned into shops or warehouses, most of the churches demolished. The crosses have been removed from the cemeteries, and an atheistic equality now pursues people to the grave: there are only standardized headstones, giving name and dates of birth and death, as though the Grim Reaper had signed the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. In the town of Elbasan a young man took me to see an Orthodox church, permitted to stand because of its age and architectural importance. His manner was that of a salesman of dirty pictures in the days before pornography was respectable. We picked our way through the rubble (the church was under restoration, and I suspected it always would be) to the iconostasis. Behind it was a cupboard and a chest. When we opened the cupboard, ancient volumes in Greek tumbled out, their covers torn, exuding the smell of must. The fading goldand silver-braid copes of Orthodox priests had been stuffed into the chest as if at a theatrical costumer's gone out of business.

But if religion has been killed, the impulse behind it has been carefully nurtured and transferred to other objects. Chief among these is Enver Hoxha, founder of the state and therefore an authority on virtually everything. It is difficult to convey the extent of this secular worship. The year of Hoxha's birth, 1908, is inscribed in white stones on hundreds of hills throughout Albania. Every factory, every institution, has what amounts to a shrine to him. Even the hotelsthat cater to foreigners have a Hoxha corner, with photographs of him in every phase of his life: his arrogant youth, his years as a leader of the partisans against the Nazis (from which he emerged surprisingly sleek and plump), his dotage. The cathedral of his cult is the gleaming white pyramid of the Enver Hoxha Museum in Tirana, in which there are glass reliquaries enclosing the Greatest Genius of Mankind's homburg, his pen, his light grey suit, and his shirts (with their capitalist labels torn out). One of his speeches is repeated without pause over a loudspeaker-an eternal fury of vehement self-righteousness-and there is a film of him approaching a bookcase for something good to read in a moment of relaxation. Ever the literary critic, he gives the problem a few moments of deep thought and then selects Volume VI of his own Collected Works.

Those who have doubts are bludgeoned into belief by statistics. In 1938, life expectancy in Albania was 38; now it is 72 (a lie, said a doctor in the shadows). The production of nickel has increased in the same period by 56,800 per cent, that of chromium by 28,200 per cent. Etc., etc.

OF COURSE, a vast increase in the output of non-ferrous metals is not quite the same thing as happiness, It is impossible to measure the level of discontent, but the regime takes no chances. Along the whole of the Adriatic coast of Albania, for example, I saw not a single small boat in which citizens might leave their paradise for the imperfections of Greece. Similarly, there were no boats on the lakes between Albania and Yugoslavia. A searchlight sweeps the coast of the channel between Corfu and Albania at its narrowest, and it is not searching for fugitive Greeks desperate to reach Albania. A man in the shadows told me that if anyone succeeds in escaping the country, his or her relatives are condemned to long internal exile in conditions that make eventual return problematical. Everyone stands hostage for somebody else.