PROPERTY IS STILL THEFT
Noel Malcolm discovers that in post-communist Albania, freedom means freedom to steal
Tirana If the Soviet Union was correctly described as 'the Upper Volta with rockets', then a distinction must be drawn between the Soviet Union and Albania. The difference is that Albania does not have any rockets.
I have never factually visited the Upper Volta, and perhaps I am maligning the place. Certainly there are many parts of Africa with a higher standard of living than rural Albania, the poverty of which has to be seen to be believed. To reproduce the appearance of many of the villages in this country, one would need to take the poor- est Calabrian village one could find and drop a bomb on it. But even more depress- ing than that are the shabbiness and dere- liction of some of the towns, where once-handsome ltalianate villas, reduced to crumbling shells by decades of total neglect, alternate with modern concrete blocks so badly built that they are already close to the ends of their unnatural lives. Since the collective farms were broken up 1st year, the peasants can at least grow their own food — or could, were it not for the severe droughts of the last three years. But
in the towns more than half the workers are unemployed, and those who still have jobs receive an average wage of £7.50p a week.
When Sali Berisha, the leader of the Democratic Party, addressed the crowds in Tirana on Monday (the day his sweeping victory in the general election was announced), he offered an interesting vari- ation on a familiar refrain: 'Do not ask for things which your country cannot do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' The first half of that request would seem to rule out almost anything that an Albanian could possibly ask of his country. At the moment Albania cannot even distribute basic food supplies to its own people: that task is carried out instead by the Italian army. But the second half of Dr Berisha's request is also problematical. For one of the lingering effects of 45 years of Stalinist rule in Albania is a peculiar kind of alien- ation of the people from the state — an alienation more severe than that experi- enced today by any other ex-communist country.
The most dramatic form this alienation takes is the wholesale destruction of public property. The country's entire rail system has been closed down, after mobs stripped the trains at the Tirana railway station of all their seats and fittings, and smashed all the windows. School classrooms lack seats, window panes and everything else that can be carried away, prised off or simply bro- ken. The buses in Tirana have empty sock- ets where their headlights once were; there are even reports of Albanians making off with manhole covers. In the hospitals there is a division of labour: doctors steal the technical equipment, while nurses steal sheets, blankets and medicines.
Sheer desperate need may sometimes be part of the explanation, as in the food riots which have left five dead and 120 injured over the last two months. But no one can have a very sheer need for a bus headlight, a blood-pressure gauge or a manhole cover. One university lecturer explained it like this: 'people want to have something they can sell; they think that in this way they are preparing for the free market. And if a doctor steals equipment, it's because he thinks that one day he'll set up a private clinic. This is his idea of the meaning of privatisation.' A student later put the point to me more simply: 'the state has been stealing from us for 45 years. Now it's our turn to steal it all back from the state.'
Others see more sinister causes at work. Dr Berisha and his party's spokesmen have complained repeatedly about 'dark forces in society' (meaning the Sigurimi, the for- mer secret police) pursuing a 'scorched earth' policy to discredit the move to a market economy and make people yearn for the good old days. That the Sigurimi played a part in the biggest outbreaks of violence and looting cannot be discounted; but it seems unlikely that a secret plan is in operation for the removal of bus head- lights. When I raised this subject with the Prime Minister of the outgoing govern- ment, Vilson Ahmeti, he agreed that there had been a far-reaching breakdown of authority. 'But', he said, 'I am sure that these crimes are committed by people act- ing out of their own personal interests.'
With crime rampant, and people's sense of allegiance to the state atrophied almost to the point of non-existence, the chances of holding free and fair elections through- out the country might seem to have been rather slender. If the Minister of Justice and the chief state prosecutor can be held up by armed men on a country road (as happened only a few weeks ago), what hope could there be for the ballot papers travelling to 4,900 polling stations? If ordi- nary shops now have to be protected by a surrounding of iron bars resembling a lion's cage at the zoo, what chance could politi- cians have when they went to campaign in the territories of their opponents?
And yet anyone who travelled round the polling stations last Sunday (as I did, with one of the Council of Europe observation teams) would have encountered a very dif- ferent Albania. At every voting place, even in the remotest villages, the presiding com- mittee (made up of local representatives of the competing parties) was supervising the proceedings with a diligent devotion to the rule-book. Ushers kept order at the door, voters queued patiently outside, official observers appointed by the rival parties kept their official distance of 3 metres from the ballot-box, and members of the com- mittee occasionally lent their spectacles to elderly long-sighted voters. Of course bureaucratic procedures were something that communist societies were always keen on. But still, finding such an elaborate piece of democratic machinery functioning so well in present-day Albania, I felt rather as one would if one came across an intact Meissen vase in the middle of a bull-ring. And both parties also agreed that the elec- toral campaigning of the last three weeks had been marred by only rare and minor acts of violence.
I had sensed the presence of a different Albania too at the Democratic Party's mass rally in Tirana on the last day of the cam- paign. At least 80,000 people were packed into the main square of the city; from a dis- tance the roaring of their slogans sounded like waves pounding on a beach, but inside the crowd the atmosphere was relaxed and good-natured, with whole families taking part and strangers chatting amicably with one another. They cheered emotionally at the old Albanian national anthem, and it was difficult to imagine that people from such a crowd, so eager to applaud every time Dr Berisha mentioned 'freedom,' 'democracy', or 'Europe', could go out the next day and destroy a bread-shop or loot a hospital.
But the Albania with which these people were identifying so ardently was an Albania of the mind, far removed from the real world to which they had to return at the end of the rally. Nor could they have had more than the haziest notion of how to turn the real into the ideal. The one thing which has hardly featured at all in this cam- paign is the discussion of the programmes of the parties — which, as the vice-chair- man of the now defeated Socialist Party assured me, are 'almost the same'. Very few voters, I would guess, have any idea of what the Democratic Party should do now that it holds power, or of why it should do it. Support for a party here is like being a fan of a football club: you don't support Everton because of any special policy it has on football. You want it to win because you support it, and you support it because you want it to win. Some fans may become sup- porters of a club only because they think it is going to win anyway — which may be why so many of the old nomenklatura have already come over to the Democratic Party. Albanians now applaud the idea of democratic politics, and they have shown that they can cope perfectly well with its formal procedures; but the spirit of gen- uine political debate will take much longer to acquire. Until then, Albania is the Upper Volta with ballot-boxes.
'Occupation, opinion polster: you have two minutes asking me questions, starting now!'
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