Media : Americans Teach Albania a Lesson in Free Press : For their efforts, they’ve been kicked off campus, denounced on national TV and become a <i> cause celebre.</i>

Three young Americans from Columbia University decided last year to start up a student newspaper, not too unusual except this one is in Albania, a place once so secluded it was known as a hermit nation.

Tirana, the Albanian capital, wasn’t trendy like Prague, where legions of young Americans assembled after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, including journalists who found work for English-language papers. Impoverished and cut off from the world for 41 years by a brutal Stalinist dictator named Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Lost Generations were far from romantic.

But that suited the Columbia triumvirate just fine. They wanted to make a significant contribution in a country where the first university wasn’t built until 1957.

“Albania is the last frontier; there’s nowhere I’d rather be right now,” declared Stacy Sullivan, 25, a Malibu resident, sitting in her Tirana apartment surrounded by plastic buckets she uses to collect and save water when it intermittently flows from the faucets.

Sullivan and her colleagues, Fred Abrahams, 26, and Marianne Sullivan, 28 and no relation, received grants from Columbia, the Soros Foundation and the International Media Fund, which provided the travel expenses, stipends and desktop publishing equipment to start up the paper. But they found Albania more challenging than they imagined.

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Before moving into their office in crumbling Tirana University, the students had to fix two broken windows, replace missing tiles, fill in a ditch on the floor, hook up electricity and put steel bars on the door and windows to prevent the theft of their computers--an occupational hazard throughout Albania.

They taught a newspaper course at Tirana University, explaining basic journalistic concepts such as free speech and inverted-pyramid story composition.

After 16-hour days spent assigning and editing stories, the first issue of Reporteri--which is published in the Albanian language and distributed throughout Tirana--appeared Oct. 20.

In an editorial, the three Americans wrote: “For years, journalists were mouthpieces for the state, hiding, manipulating or exaggerating facts to serve the propaganda machine. . . . Our responsibility is to provide objective and balanced information free of political or ideological taint.”

But they soon learned a harsh lesson about Albania’s press. Enraged by the newspaper--which included a story on AIDS and an editorial denouncing the nation’s restrictive new press law that imposes fines of up to $8,000 on editors who violate its vaguely worded provisions--university officials locked the Americans out of their office.

They also confiscated the computers donated by the International Media Fund, saying the desktop publishing equipment had been given to the university, not to the students. The Soros Foundation was denounced on national TV and accused of conspiring with opponents of the government. Lastly, the Americans were told that the university no longer required their teaching services.

“It was completely frustrating,” says Abrahams, wolfing down a chow mein dinner in Tirana’s only Chinese restaurant. “You come here and try to help, and your help is rejected. You know you have something to contribute, but the conservative mentality here keeps this country from moving ahead.”

Rudolph Marku, chairman of Tirana University’s journalism department--who helped draft the press law that Reporteri attacked--declined a request to discuss the matter, saying he was too busy.

Undaunted, the Columbia journalists garnered new funds from the Soros Open Society Fund of Albania, which invited them to take up residency in its new Media Training Center and made Marianne Sullivan the center’s co-director.

George Soros, a Hungarian-born Wall Street financier, has plunged heavily into financing projects in formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

“Nobody has a monopoly on truth,” he told a recent press conference in New York. “So you need democratic governments, market economies and, above all, the rule of law, where minority opinions are protected.”

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Ensconced in their new digs, the trio continued publishing Reporteri and also launched 12 high school newsletters, training teen-agers how to write stories and use the computers. Additionally, they mapped plans for a seminar on newspaper distribution and establishing a professional video studio.

Reporteri has covered some potentially explosive stories, including the arrest of Aleksander Frangaj and Martin Leka, an editor and a reporter at the Albanian newspaper Koha Jone, on charges that have been widely condemned as harassment by international media organizations.

According to the Center for Foreign Journalists, which keeps track of such incidents, the reporter was convicted of divulging military secrets and sentenced to 18 months in prison; the editor fled to Greece. The secret revealed: that Albanian army officers must leave their weapons in the barracks when they go off duty.

Frangaj, Leka and three other Albanian journalists jailed on various charges under the state’s rigorous press law were freed recently on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, according to a government newspaper.

Nevertheless, the American mentors believe that the harassment is having a chilling effect.

“Journalists are scared,” Sullivan said. “You can notice a marked difference in the reporting now--stories are not nearly as hard-hitting. The crackdown on opposition, sadly, seems to be working.”

The state, which owns the only radio and TV outlets, controls all broadcast media. More than 50 newspapers and magazines vie for readers, including an unauthorized Albanian “Playboy” with fuzzy black-and-white pictures printed on smudgy paper. Most of the news-oriented print media are affiliated with one or another of Albania’s political parties, and the concept of an objective, Western-style independent press has not caught on.

But Reporteri has become a cause celebre in Tirana’s intellectual circles. Some say the paper and its supporters represent elements that seek to undermine democracy in Albania. Others see Reporteri as a test case for freedom of the press.

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“They’ve done a remarkable job,” says Avni Mustafaj, executive director of the Soros Open Society Foundation, Albania. “What they’re doing is extremely valuable and important for an independent press. It’s turned on the light where there wasn’t one before.”

The Albanian students are stoic about the paper’s fate on campus. “When I learned the paper was shut down, I was very angry, very disappointed,” says Altin Rraxhimi, 20, who speaks Italian, French and English as well as his native Albanian. “I believe the press has to be free, but it’s a perennial problem in our society.”

Rraxhimi says he could not have envisioned a paper such as Reporteri, which has allowed students to draw editorial cartoons, profile Albania’s first rock band and review “Waiting for Godot,” which had its Albanian premiere last fall.

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Meanwhile, his American mentors put up with Third World living and stay wired to their homes in the First World with e-mail. REM and the Indigo Girls blast from their stereo. Their apartment resembles a college dorm, with young Albanian intellectuals dropping by at all hours for story conferences, late night philosophical sessions and Albanian Merlot.

“Every day you wake up and know that even if you just go to the bazaar to buy food, something exciting is going to happen,” Abrahams says.

Nevertheless, he says, the country has been devastated spiritually and economically, adding: “If these problems didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a reason for us to be here.”