Albania Shows Signs of Easing Up as Last of Stalinist Strongholds

The government of Albania, Europe’s last Stalinist bastion, is under siege.

Economic necessity and fears of following other East European Communist governments into oblivion are forcing the country’s reluctant leadership to open what may be the most closed of Marxist societies and undertake limited domestic reforms.

Rarely since the Communists seized power in 1944 has the government appeared more vulnerable to unpredictable domestic and foreign forces, in the view of diplomats and analysts who are speculating about when--not if--the government here will fall.

A five-day visit to Europe’s most reclusive, repressive and impoverished country, a land of 3.2 million people on the mouth of the Adriatic Sea flanked by Yugoslavia and Greece, suggested that the Albanian government is becoming defensive about the hard-line, isolationist philosophy under which it has governed.

As a result, the Albanian leadership, which long ago distanced itself from other Communist powers and insists that it will not follow other East European countries down the road of reform, is trying to impose gradual change from above, out of fear of being swept out of power from below. As one diplomat put it, Albania is experimenting with perestroika-- Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s name for his restructuring efforts--”without calling it perestroika. “

But diplomats and other analysts say the changes being made by the country’s leaders are likely to accelerate demands for change from a people said to be tired of the secret police repression, lack of basic freedoms and shortages of meat, milk, soap, toilet paper and consumer goods.

“This time something is brewing,” said a foreign visitor with extensive knowledge of Albania. “People are ready to explode.”

In December, students at Tirana University protested a lack of adequate heating as well as other living conditions, according to reports. Then, in mid-January, a student-led demonstration erupted in the northern city of Shkoder, according to reports accepted as accurate by foreign governments.

The crowd’s attempts to tear down a statue of the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin sparked speculation about a nascent democracy movement in this country, where dissidence in the past has been met with ruthless repression. As many as 400 arrests were made in Shkoder, according to specialists in the West who follow Albanian affairs, and about 100 people are believed still in custody.

Some specialists speculate that pro-democracy sentiment here could be focused in Shkoder, with a long Roman Catholic record of anti-Communist resistance, and in the increasingly restive ethnic Greek community. Together, the Christian minorities make up about one-fifth of the population in the atheist state.

Traditionally, the ruling Communists have kept the population in line through a mixture of repression, nationalist pride and fear of foreign invasion.

But now, the government faces dangers for which the thousands of concrete bunkers scattered across the land serve no practical purpose. Ingredients for turmoil are at hand despite the reputation for effective repression of the Sigurimi, the pervasive and dreaded secret police.

For one thing, Albania is strapped for hard currency. Furthermore, insufficient rains this winter point to a third successive bad harvest, and the government recently announced cutbacks in hydroelectric power. Albania’s ill-maintained and obsolete industrial plant is nearing exhaustion.

Because of the collectivization of farming and sizable food exports for hard currency, the government is barely able to feed Europe’s poorest--per capita annual income is estimated at under $900--and fastest-growing population, which increases by about 60,000 people every year.

People’s expectations also appear to be rising. Because of access to Greek, Italian and Yugoslav television, Albanians are aware of events abroad, and some indicated in conversations here that they are impatient for a consumer society. An English-speaking Albanian university student in Tirana spoke knowledgeably about CBS, NBC and American serials broadcast in English on Yugoslav television.

Meanwhile, party propaganda sounds increasingly defensive. “We could have been a second Switzerland,” said a Communist Party tour guide, “but we preferred our independence and feel proud that we did not hold out our hands to anyone for aid.”

In the past, such appeals to nationalist pride have struck a deep chord among Albanians for whom the last 45 years of Communist rule represent their longest unbroken period of independence. Albanian history has been marked by five centuries of Ottoman occupation, neighbors’ efforts to partition the country after formal independence was declared in 1912 and an Italian invasion during World War II. It is not at all clear if such an appeal will have the same effect now.

So far, Communist leader Ramiz Alia has reacted cautiously to the growing pressures. In late January, the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labor, as the Communists call themselves, adopted potentially significant reforms. But they stopped well short of following Communist parties in other countries that abolished their guaranteed leading role in society and introduced multiparty democracy.

Key measures approved here included decentralizing political and economic decision-making, introducing production incentives, developing private home ownership and improving Albania’s much criticized human rights record.

Under consideration is penal code reform, including a reduction in the long list of infractions punishable by death, and re-establishment of the Justice Ministry and the right of a defendant to have a lawyer, both of which were abolished in 1967. Such changes would eliminate the people’s tribunals that human rights organizations abroad have criticized as allowing condemnations on the basis of little more than hearsay.

In the first, if indirect, response to charges of failing to provide official information about political prisoners, the government said in March that 83 of the country’s 3,850 prison inmates were detained for seeking to overthrow it “by violence.” Other sources said there may be 15,000 to 20,000 political prisoners. The last annual report of Amnesty International, the London-based human rights monitoring group, said, “It is impossible to estimate their numbers.”

Overall, the reforms appear to reverse trends toward greater agricultural collectivization and centralized industrial planning. But so far, no enabling legislation has been adopted, despite repeated promises in recent weeks by high-placed Albanian officials that the rubber-stamp Parliament will act this year.

The delay has sparked speculation that Alia and his pragmatic allies are being stymied by old-guard Stalinists grouped around the widow of Enver Hoxha, the government’s founder who ran Albania with an iron hand for four decades by liquidating rivals.

Five years after his death, Hoxha’s influence is still felt, thanks to a personality cult featuring billboard exhortations from 69 published volumes of his writings, statues, photographs and an expensive memorial in Tirana.

Underlining Alia’s inability to put his personal stamp on domestic affairs is the fact that the ruling People’s Assembly has been unchanged for the last six years. He has, however, encountered less resistance in foreign affairs.

Even before what Alia recently called “the tragedy” of the fall of East European communism, Albania sought to improve long-spurned relations with foreign governments and international institutions as a way out of its economic and financial predicament and self-imposed diplomatic isolation.

Despite a constitutional clause outlawing foreign debt, the government has signed important deals with Western firms based on “buy back” provisions paying off foreign investment with products.

An Italian firm is interested in offshore gas and oil prospecting rights and provides agricultural machinery and a regular truck ferry service to Trieste. West German firms are renovating chrome and nickel plants, and France recently signed an important contract to supply hydroelectric turbines.

Business sources also have reported that Albania has streamlined its once cumbersome bureaucracy since the East European order collapsed in 1989.

This winter, the government also signaled a desire for accommodation with the United States and the Soviet Union. In what diplomats called a characteristically Albanian rewriting of history, Deputy Foreign Minister Sokrat Placa told the Associated Press in February that the lack of relations with Washington is “not our making” and that “the ball is in their court.”

Perhaps even more surprising has been Albania’s improved ties with its southern neighbor, Greece, which persuaded Tirana to join a foreign ministers conference with four other Balkan powers.

Only late last year, Greek Foreign Minister Antonis Samaras and the Greek Orthodox Church complained about human rights violations of the Greek minority, including a case involving four brothers caught trying to escape across the border and allegedly tortured and dragged through their village behind tractors.

But early in April, Albania gave way in a landmark case involving a 28-year-old ethnic Greek who jumped over the Greek Embassy fence and sought asylum. The man, who had been imprisoned repeatedly for his religious beliefs, was issued a Greek passport and flown to Athens nine days later.

Albanian determination to improve long-spurned relations with the rest of the world now centers on a visit scheduled this month by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. Although Perez de Cuellar is expected to raise human rights violations, his presence will help build Albania’s self-image as a member of the world community.

The government has proved adroit in suggesting that it will tolerate greater liberalization than it in fact does. For example, direct dial telephone service initiated and paid for by the U.N. Development Fund opened with 54 countries recently, an advance in telecommunications that elsewhere could be construed as opening yet another major window on the outside world. But few telephones, public and private, exist in Albania, and those that do can be easily monitored.

Nonetheless, visitors said they note a relaxation of suspicion and a greater tolerance for once-taboo foreign influences.

Greek visitors, previously obliged to sleep in government-owned hotels where surveillance is assured, are now allowed to stay with Albanian relatives. Until last year, only Albanian emigres were allowed to enter on U.S. passports, but two American journalists were allowed to visit Albania with no more ado than an admonition to “write positive articles.”

That is a far cry from the days when dollars sent by emigre Albanians were returned as tainted capitalist money. Dollar shops are now located in major towns and offer refrigerators, television sets, tape decks and other consumer goods in exchange for family heirloom jewelry sold to the Albanian Central Bank.

What is more, running shoes, T-shirts, tape decks and pop music cassettes can be found among the young with families abroad who can provide them with once-banned Western imports or other ways to procure them.

And starting this spring, more Albanians are expected to be allowed to go abroad on group visits to Greece, Italy and Turkey. In the past, few Albanians were allowed to travel abroad--mostly party and government officials, university professors and other members of the Establishment.