Albania Leader Pledges ‘Free and Democratic’ Election : Reform: Despite political and economic promises, thousands of people continue to flee to neighboring Greece.

Albania’s Communist leader pledged in a New Year’s message that the nation’s first open election Feb. 10 will be “completely free and democratic, pluralist and secret.”

“I am confident that the year 1991 will mark a turning point,” Ramiz Alia said on state radio Tuesday morning.

The address looked back on a month of unprecedented reforms in the tiny Balkan state, including Alia’s decision to allow opposition parties to exist for the first time in four decades of hard-line Communist rule and to let them compete in free elections in February.

His decision to tolerate other parties and the foundation of the opposition Democratic Party on Dec. 12 sparked violent anti-Communist unrest in many parts of the country.

About 2,000 Albanians, skeptical of the Communists’ pledges to reform, “voted with their feet” in December and defied armed border guards and heavy snow to flee to neighboring Greece.

Meanwhile, the Communist government decided to permit people not related to each other to jointly run private businesses, the Albanian news agency ATA said in a dispatch monitored Tuesday in Vienna.

The move expanded on a government decree promulgated in July that permitted small-scale private business for the first time in decades of Communist rule, but restricted the operations to members of one family.

But refugees continued to flee the Balkan country despite the pledges of democracy and economic reform. Albanians by the thousands flooded into Greece on Tuesday after trekking over isolated mountain passes joining the two countries.

The total who fled was not known, but a Greek police official at the border said Tuesday that more than 3,500 Albanians had arrived overnight.

The Albanian government denied that the border had been opened, but the refugees said Albanian border guards allowed them to pass freely.

Greek officials expressed fears they would be overwhelmed by the exodus. Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis held an emergency meeting Tuesday night with his foreign and interior ministers and the chairman of the joints chiefs of staff.

Mitsotakis said his government would dispatch senior officials and relief crews to the Greek-Albanian border to coordinate efforts to assist the refugees.

Greek state-run television suggested that Albania may be allowing ethnic Greeks to flee in order to get rid of dissidents and alleviate problems with the ethnic minority.

The Communists have been in power in Albania since 1944. They began the slow move away from Stalinism and self-imposed isolation partly in hopes of receiving foreign aid for the moribund economy.