Albania: Benighted Nation

Albania is the most wretched country in Europe. Hardly anybody wants in, and most of its people, given half a chance, would like to get out.

Still, to earn desperately needed hard currency, the country’s Communist bosses maintain an official guide service, Albtourist, which boasts of “incomparable Adriatic beaches” (all guarded by cruising police boats) and “centuries-old ruins.” Business has been a little slack for Albtourist in the other satellite countries since Albania’s quarrel with Khrushchev. Albtourist has even hopefully sent its tourist folders to a small West German travel agency in Cologne. TIME Correspondent Edward Behr decided to apply as a tourist. He had to wait six weeks for a visa, at last entered Albania on a once-a-week Hungarian flight from Budapest to have a look at the country whose regime was described as “more bloodthirsty and retrograde than that of the czars” by no less a connoisseur than Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.

Counting Socks. Separated from its only friend in the world, Red China, by 3,000 miles, Albania lives in an isolation both defiant and pathetic. More than 70% of its 1,700,000 people scratch a living from the collectivized soil; most of Albania’s farm villages and mountain towns have changed little in the last century. Garbage flows through an open gutter cut in the middle of narrow streets; hawk-nosed men sip Turkish coffee in dim cafés while their women shoulder heavy loads of wood and barrels of scarce water. Along with the traditional poverty are Communist posters plugging Dictator Enver Hoxha’s slogan: “Build socialism with a pickax in one hand and a gun in the other.”

Even before the break with Khrushchev, internal security was the strictest in the world; since then it has become an obsession. Foreign visitors must fill out forms specifying the contents of their baggage down to the number of shirts, handkerchiefs and socks they are bringing into the country. Decent blankets are so rare that they must be listed separately under “valuables.” So isolated are Albanians from the outside world that they are convinced that such restrictions are the normal practice everywhere.

Upon arriving in Tirana, Correspondent Behr was firmly taken in hand by a state guide from Albtourist, who accompanied him everywhere, tried to take him sightseeing in locked buses. The guide went through the motions of passing along requests for interviews with government officials, actors, even local journalists; invariably, they were said to be sick, on vacation, or in mourning for suddenly deceased relatives.

Since no foreigner can hire a taxi in Albania, the government guide was a necessary companion. More helpful was a Japanese reporter, who teamed with Behr, was regularly saluted by Albanians, who took him for a Chinese. Outnumbering the man from Albtourist, the two newsmen occasionally split up and deliberately got lost to enjoy a few minutes on their own. These escapes never lasted long, thanks to the ubiquitous secret police, the Sigurimi, and other troops (onefourth of the nation’s adult manpower is in uniform). Furthermore, officials cautioned the visitors that if they did not behave themselves, they might not get an exit visa to leave the country−and that in Albania is a pretty effective threat.

Walled Beach. A special machine-gun-toting detachment in Tirana patrols what the handful of remaining foreign diplomats call the “ghetto”: the comfortable residential quarter in which the Communist elite have their villas. Even on the beach at Durres, Albania’s chief seaside resort 25 miles west of the capital, a wall extends across the sand and into the Adriatic to keep an area reserved for the privileged separate from vacationing workers whose families share dingy tin huts on the wrong side of the barrier.

Proletarian swimmers cannot go beyond a line of buoys about 30 yards from shore; if they do, a police launch waves them back to prevent a possible escape to an occasional Greek or Italian ship that puts in at the Durres harbor. When a West German ship arrived carrying badly needed Canadian wheat−paid for by Peking−it was not allowed into the harbor at all; the cargo was laboriously transferred by launch. Although Albania has 250 miles of Adriatic coastline, fish are scarce because the regime permits only a handful of politically trustworthy fishermen to venture out, since Italy is only 50 miles away.

But Albanians are not starving, and benefit from free education, medical care and other social services. Behr saw no evidence that they were in a mood to revolt. Even if they were, Hoxha’s successor would probably be no better; in a demonstration of nepotism that outclasses even Hollywood, the party’s top leaders are almost all related to Hoxha or Premier Mehmet Shehu.

Combined with the tight police control is an incredibly complex government bureaucracy that requires official permission to buy everything from drugs to hotel meals. Pedestrians, at least, have it easy in Tirana. There are only 400 cars in the country (ancient Russian and Czech models, except for a fleet of Mercedeses owned by the Chinese embassy); roads are still places where people talk, embrace and occasionally sleep. Nevertheless there are as many as three traffic cops at major intersections, all carrying little black-and-white batons.

Status Symbols. As a shopping center, Tirana looks like a flea market somehow expanded into a town. In the almost completely nationalized shops, a shoddy suit costs 7,000 leks, $140 at the official exchange rate, or a little less than twice what a laborer makes a month. Attempts to industrialize Albania ended abruptly when Moscow abandoned its half-finished embassy, pulled out several thousand experts last year. The country’s only large cotton plant was idle for three months; blueprints for new factories faded on the drawing board. Of the 22 Russian MIGs in Albania last year, only five can now fly because of a lack of maintenance crews. Communist China, North Korea and North Viet Nam have sent about 500 technicians, and most of these are agricultural workers who are teaching rice cultivation and establishing cottage industries along the Peking model.

Off duty, the Chinese keep strictly to themselves. They eat in a separate dining room at the Italian-built Dajti Hotel, live in a parklike embassy compound that is constantly surrounded by guards. The latest status symbols in Tirana, worn by Albanian Communist officials who have journeyed to Red China, are a plain beige cloth cap of the type preferred by Mao Tse-tung, and aviator-type dark sunglasses, also the rage in Peking.

The dreary poverty, political repression and compulsive suspicion of foreigners do not make a trip to Albania pleasant or even fascinating. When the time came to leave, Correspondent Behr’s plane was an hour late, and even the Albtourist guide realized how happy visitors are to get out. “All good things come slowly,” he shrugged, and waved goodbye.