Where Time Has (Almost) Stopped

Albania is Europe’s hermit nation, stagnating in self-chosen isolation. For 40 years its unashamedly Stalinist regimes have forbidden Albanians to travel abroad. For more than 30 years all churches and mosques--about 70% of Albania’s 3.1 million people are Muslims--have been shut tight. Alone on the Continent, Albania has rejected membership in the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the principal East-West forum for talks on security and human rights. Not long ago its leaders dismissed the significance of the changes sweeping Eastern Europe. Now “newly created circumstances”--e.g., a sudden interest in joining the security conference--are supposedly producing some human rights reforms in Albania. Thus only 11 felonies instead of 34 will merit the death penalty, religion will be considered a matter of individual conscience, and Albanians have been told they may soon apply for passports--a gesture that stops short of assuring a right to travel.

These are minimal reforms indeed, worthy of note only because of their Albanian context. Is this benighted land finally about to venture into the world of more open frontiers and disparate ideas?

It would be nice to think so, but don’t bet on it yet. Leaders who just the other day regarded religious practice as a crime and flight from the country as a capital offense still have much to do to prove that they have become converts to human rights.