WORLD : Albanian Leader Urges Reforms

Albanian President Ramiz Alia has called for radical constitutional reform that would curb his party’s power in Europe’s last orthodox Communist state and could reopen mosques and churches shut for two decades.

In a blunt speech that also painted a picture of economic woes, public disaffection and hard-line opposition to change, Alia warned a Communist Central Committee plenum in Tirana that the party must become more democratic to survive.

His speech, carried in full by the official news agency ATA today, gave no hint that Albania will legalize opposition political parties and was tempered by a warning that reform has to be cautious to avoid “haste, passions, anarchy.”

But Alia’s call for constitutional change that would redefine the party’s leading role and scrap bans on religious worship and foreign investment marked his boldest departure yet from the rigid legacy of his Stalinist predecessor Enver Hoxha.