New World Opens for Remote Town

A prophet looking at this border town might say it this way: If Kukes will not come to the world, the world will come to Kukes.

During the Cold War, isolated by steep mountains and a paranoid Communist dictatorship, Kukes did not see Westerners for 40 years. Even the few Marxist-Leninists allowed into Albania during those times resisted making the eight-hour trek north from the capital, Tirana.

Over the next decade, the town of 25,000 Albanians struggled to connect with the 20th century through iffy telephone lines and television satellite dishes. But still it received few visitors.

Until war broke out a few miles to the north.

The conflict in neighboring Kosovo province has brought not only a flood of ethnic Albanian refugees to this frontier outpost, but a migration of more than 1,000 international aid workers, journalists, soldiers and spies.

The foreigners, in turn, have brought myriad languages, newfangled technology and new ideas to this forgotten corner of Europe. They have created a sense of excitement in town and a wave of opportunities.

In other words, it’s a whole new world in Kukes.

“Until now, we were a very remote area. We were skeptical of foreigners and thought the world did not like us,” said Kukes historian Nazif Kokle, 53. “Suddenly, we have found ourselves in a bigger community. I believe we have started to think differently.”

Kukes has received the foreigners with a mixture of curiosity, warmth and skepticism. Some of its children stare unabashedly at the newcomers toting digital cameras and sputtering walkie-talkies, as if observing rare animals in the zoo. Others run out to the street waving wildly at U.N. and NATO convoys that are maneuvering between cows and open sewers.

“Hello, what is your name?” the children shout in newly acquired English. “Ciao,” they finish in Italian.

Kukes particularly likes the Italians, who were the first foreigners to make their way to northern Albania after the collapse of communism in 1990. Like most of the country, Kukes did not plant crops in the twilight of the dictatorship and had no industry or food. The town was hungry and the Italians brought them corn, grain and bread.

“People were surprised to see them,” said Jonuz Kola, a local businessman and interpreter. “[Italians] were supposed to be very poor, having suffered under the capitalist system. They were supposed to have lost their identity. But we saw their fit appearance and realized we were the weak ones. . . . We thought they were God.”

After the Italians came those who presented themselves as the real messengers of God--Christian missionaries. They put on free concerts and preached religion to a town raised on atheism.

“At the beginning, people went to the concerts,” Kola said. “But then they saw it was all morals and no money and didn’t go anymore.”

The Christians departed and the Muslims arrived. They bought houses, built a mosque and sent dozens of children abroad to Muslim schools. But they apparently had little more success than the Christians.

“One of my brothers went to Pakistan to study in a Muslim school for four years,” Kola said. “We transferred him to the American school.”

German engineers also came to Kukes in the early 1990s with water projects. They expanded the town’s waterworks, but not before taking a cut of the development pie. They inflated bids and faked receipts, Kola said, showing the residents of Kukes that corruption was as much a part of capitalism as it was of their old communist system.

Foreigners, it turned out, were just like everybody else.

“We started to see they were not gods but human beings. They came to make money,” Kola said.

In the last few years, this farm community has made money two ways: by sending its sons abroad to work and by smuggling embargoed gasoline across the border to Yugoslavia. But with no investments and few examples to go by, they were learning business by the seat of their pants.

“People have tried to make business by intuition but without knowing the rules,” Kukes Mayor Safet Sula said. “Now with the foreigners here, they are learning the rules of business. They are beginning to understand it has to be win-win for the seller and for the customer too. Both partners have to profit.”

The arrival of so many foreigners has meant a huge influx of cash to the local economy. They are renting houses, eating in restaurants, exchanging currencies and hiring drivers, translators and warehouse workers. Sula welcomes the income in his town but said it is not a real base for economic growth.

“We cannot say the economy of this city has started to move because there are still no investments,” he said. “People have cash, money in their pockets, but we don’t know how they will use it.”

Avdi Zhubi, 49, is one who has profited from the foreigners and plans to use his earnings wisely. The owner of a newsstand, Zhubi was quick to see that the foreigners wanted their newspapers. Now it’s possible to buy day-old Italian, French, German, English and Arabic newspapers in this town.

“Some people came and asked for them, and I thought, Why not? Better a day late than not at all,” Zhubi said. His sister buys the papers in Tirana and puts them on a bus to the border. “It’s a good business. It would be even better if I could bring them on the same day.”

Zhubi, who never saw a foreigner until he was a 40-year-old father of four, now sends his youngest son, Granit, out after school to sell papers in the restaurants and cafes frequented by foreigners.

Armed with La Repubblica and Le Monde, the Guardian and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11-year-old Granit moves with ease among the foreigners dining on the Gjallica Hotel terrace. He makes small talk in English and French and dreams of going abroad.

“He has many friends--especially women friends,” Zhubi said with a laugh. “We are impressed with how quickly he is picking up the languages. But I am afraid it means he will leave us. He wants to make a better life, to be more independent and learn about the world.

“I tell him Albania will be prosperous one day and that he will have a chance to work and live here, but he doesn’t believe me.”

Meanwhile, Zhubi plans to use his windfall from the newspaper business and from renting his house to foreigners to expand his business with a photocopy machine.

“I am trying to decide whether to buy color or black and white,” he said.

Not all contacts between locals and foreigners are so rosy, of course. The well-to-do newcomers have inflated food prices in the market by at least 10%. Their cars, trucks and convoys have created new potholes and unheard of traffic jams in a town with about half a dozen paved streets. And they have brought something Albanians had never experienced in their own country before--discrimination.

Many foreign agencies prefer hiring Kosovo Albanian refugees, who they think are more educated and honest than the Kukes locals. And at least one of the restaurants that caters to the foreigners, the Bar America, has been known to shoo away Albanian drivers and translators looking for work.

“They think we’re going to bother the foreigners. They think this is going to last forever, but they are making a mistake,” said one clearly humiliated resident.

This treatment serves as a reminder that the foreigners came to Kukes not to help the local Albanians but to observe the war across the border in Yugoslavia and attend to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have poured in here. When the war is over and the refugees return home, the foreigners also will pack up and go.

“We will be sad when everybody leaves. We have gotten used to working at this pace,” interpreter Kola said as he rushed off for another day of work with a journalist from USA Today.

But many Kukes residents think the foreigners will leave behind more than memories.

“We were very intolerant,” historian Kokle said. “We are more open now. These new relationships have taught us about cooperation and understanding. I think this will be reflected in private relationships even in our own community.”