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ALBANIA

Albania is peppered with tens of thousands of squat concrete bunkers … enough it’s thought, to accommodate the entire population under former communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Albania feared an enemy but now - just as it was amid the post war paranoia – it’s hard to discern precisely who the enemy is.

It seems, after all, that Albania itself is it own worst enemy.

Fractured and deeply disorganised, it’s the poorest nation in Europe.

It was a measure of just how much trouble the kosovars faced when they fled to sanctuary in Albania during the height of their troubles at home.

It’s an inhospitable place at the best of times that can’t seem to rise above the worst of times -- here’s Chris Clark …

Albanian Seaside

Music

12:00

Clark: Of all the things you’ve heard about Albania in recent years, I’ll bet you haven’t heard much about its tourist industry.

12:09

Saranda Montage

This is not entirely surprising -- in fact it’s a more of a shock to discover tourists here at all.

12:20

What most of the world does know about Albania is nearly all bad. It’s Europe’s poorest country . And while the country’s prisons are full, law and order remains fragile – it is a society which is quick to violence.

12:29

Saranda is about as far south as you can go in Albania - the Greek mainland lies over the hills - the island of Corfu, a short boat ride off the coast.

12:50

And that’s where the tourists come from -- Corfu, on day trips. There are some fine ruins from the ancient world dotted hereabouts, but people are just as curious to see the ruin that is modern Albania.

13:04

Tour guide: So ladies and gentlemen, now we are about to begin our visit of the town.

13:17

Clark: A quick spin round Saranda does give a pretty good thumbnail sketch of the country’s recent history . There’s the madness of the communist dictatorship, which outlawed religion and proclaimed an atheist state.

13:25

Tour guide: During the atheistic campaign, the church was completely destroyed.

13:41

Clark: And the madness of just three years ago, when Albania’s first experiment in capitalism ended in violence and chaos after millions lost their savings in pyramid schemes.

13:50

Tour guide: The building there was a library. It was burned accidentally during the pyramid scandal. Now we are reconstructing a new library in the town.

14:02

Clark: Albania is a country which has been going backwards. The place has some infrastructure - there are a few trains.

14:19

Like the rolling stock and the track Albanians too are worn out. These are people who’ve known little except disappointment.

14:28

Clark

Super:

Chris Clark

Clark: Nobody here has much faith in politics, given the failures of the last ten years or so. The problem goes deeper still. For fifty years before that, Albania was arguably the most authoritarian and one of the isolated countries in the world. And it’s left generations of people here without any clear idea of where individual rights and state responsibilities start and finish, and very few skills to fashion a modern state that can possibly balance the two.

14:37

Singing

15:09

Clark: Albania’s communist dictatorship was as ruthless and bloody as anything in the 20^th century. What was once a museum to honour the dictator is now a memorial to the thousands who were tortured, imprisoned and killed under Enver Hoxha’s rule.

15:19

Gusho

Gusho: We’ve got lots of photos of Hoxha during the war, during the building of socialism, during congresses. This is about something else, this is about dictatorship and terror.

15:38

Clark: So, with heavy-handed irony, the only image of the dictator Hoxha is a negative.

15:51

Gusho: Kadri Hazbiu and Beqir Bulluku both served as Deputy Prime Ministers in the sixties and seventies. In the seventies Beqir Bulluku was executed and in ’82 Kadri Hazbiu was executed.

15:57

Singing

16:13

Clark: The show trials, the forced labour camps, Albania had them all. Hoxha built a society where children were taught to denounce their parents, where a joke against the leadership or listening to foreign radio could land you in prison.

16:16

Fatos Lubonja

Fatos Lubonja was a young student when the secret police discovered his diary in which he wrote of ‘the idiots’ running the country.

16:32

Super:

Fatos Lubonja

Dissident

Fatos: They quoted something I had written from my diaries, against the party, against ‘these idiots’ who are these idiots ruling us, they ask me. In this moment I understood that I was dead.

16:42

Clark: Not dead but he spent 17 years in a prison camp and he defiantly kept writing – an entire novel on cigarette papers.

17:02

Fatos: This is to be hidden, like this in the spine of a book.

17:13

Clark: Discovery would have meant further punishment but he thought he was in for life anyway.

17:18

Clark: And what would have happened if these had been discovered in prison?

Fatos: Maybe they’d have arrested me…

Clark: Again.

Fatos: Again. And charged me again with agitation and propoganda, ten years.

17:25

Clark: Fatos Lubonja has rebuilt his life but around him he sees a country and a people still struggling to throw off the legacy of a system where the state decided everything.

17:35

Fatos: They don’t have confidence because they never tried to build their own society, their own community, for their own sake, for their own interests.

17:47

Clark: This has created a vacuum in Albania -- where once the state ruled now people take the law into their own hands. Albania’s gaols are full of people who’ve killed for honour or less. People like Arijan Hima who’s serving 16 years for murdering the man who killed his brother.

18:00

Arijan

Arijan : We were neighbours and we’d been good friends since we were small. He was my age, it’s not as though we’d never had arguments before but this was something that happened in the heat of the moment. It wasn’t planned. If he’d behaved differently I wouldn’t have killed him.

18:21

Clark: Arijan’s brother was stabbed during an argument that began on the football field, but the courts made his killer serve only four months in prison.

18:44

Arijan: After what happened at court and the way he was offending me, I couldn’t take it any more.

18:52

I went home and got my automatic, not far from his house. I found him where he’d been before and shot him from about 3 or 4 metres away.

19:00

Clark: Arijan will be forty by the time he gets out of prison but at least he’s escaped the next stage in Albania’s cycle of violence – the blood feud.

19:12

The blood feud is based on a centuries’ old code, involving entire families, often stretching across generations.

19:21

Man in Prison

Man: In 1997, I revenged the killing of my first cousin in 1996.

19:30

Clark: The blood feud is a matter of honour. Far from showing any remorse, this 18 year old, who didn’t want to be identified, was proud to have killed.

19:43

Man: He killed my cousin. It would have been a crime if he hadn’t been killed. I did my duty.

19:53

Siren/music

20:01

Clark: Blood feuds thrive because Albanians don’t expect justice from the state. In a place where police and courts are easily corrupted people deliver their own punishments. And there are tens of thousands of men in Albania who are literally prisoners in their own homes because of blood feuds.

20:10

Mekshi

Mekshi: People are prisoners in their own houses because the state doesn’t exist. If the state took action against criminals so they were sentenced, either an execution or a life sentence, we could eliminate most of the private imprisonments.

20:32

Clark: Gjin Mekshi tries to resolve blood feuds. He took us to meet Shane Gazuli who’s been imprisoned in his apartment for four months since his 19 year old son killed a man after an argument in the street.

20:52

Shane

Shane: You could call this house a prison, this window is closed, this one here and the balcony which is closed. It’s just four walls. What to do?

21:10

Clark: Shane Gazuli is scared to go out -- he fears he’ll be killed in revenge if he does – even though he had nothing to do with the killing.

21:26

Shane: My child did it but what does it have to do with my child’s uncle, his uncle and his father’s uncle. What about the others who are locked-up in their houses, not only me.

21:38

Clark: All the men in his extended family are in the same boat, even his wife’s brother who’s a policeman – his badge offers no protection.

21:58

Shane: A police officer is locked up in his house in Shkoder because of this, her brother.

22:08

Music

22:15

Clark: So having endured the labour camps of communism, Albanians have fashioned a new prison entirely of their own making. And like most prisoners, they dream of escape. Escaping the violence and hardship of daily life – the grinding poverty and the lawlessness. What Albania needs is jobs, but many have simply given up trying to find work here.

22:21

Car horn

22:46

Clark: A lot of people looking for work escape to Greece. That means queuing-up at the Greek consulate to try to get a visa. There are several hundred thousand Albanians working in Greece.

22:48

Women in Street.

Woman: In general, we do whatever job’s available. Some people work in houses, some in shops. Some are mechanics, there are tailors, people work in the areas they’re qualified for.

22:58

Albanians Swimming.

Clark: Albanians working abroad send back around 800 million dollars a year. It’s how many people survive and it produces some weird results. Young men spend their days preening old Mercedes bought with the earnings their brothers send back from Europe and America - it’s the illusion of prosperity - a car wash economy that produces nothing. Real Albanian businesses are few and far between.

23:16

Adnan Shakaj in Frog pit.

Adnan Shakaj has built a real and successful export businesses. In a country which should feed itself but still imports many basics, he’s supplying the dining tables of France with fresh frogs.

23:52

Adnan: We have to take great care from the time they’re collected to the time they’re delivered, including all the handling and we’ve agreed that we won’t collect frogs under 30 grams.

24:09

Clark: And like most people in business he doesn’t look to the police to protect him - the family looks after its own and tries to stay out of trouble.

24:28

Adnan: We’re a big family, 4 brothers and 4 or 5 grown-up nephews who work in the business and we haven’t created problems with others.

24:38

Clark: Albania’s frogs are emigrating whether they like it or not, most Albanians don’t have the choice either but those who do have been leaving at such a rate, it’ll soon be a case of last one out, turn off the light.

24:53

Kristo in car.

Law and order remains a big issue.

Kristo: Albania is a country where, to say the truth, the government doesn’t work well or the police, or the security is not so good.

Clark: So you have to defend yourself in Albania?

Kristo: Yes, defend yourself, defend yourself, to defend and protect yourself by yourself in everyway.

25:08

Clark: Kristo Lluka is a former teacher who makes his living now as a driver and translator but for years he’s been trying to leave. He’s just won a green card, which will allow him, his wife and their two sons to live and work in America. For Albanians a green card is first prize in the lottery of life.

25:27

Lujeta

Lujeta: I want cleaner streets, I want running water, power not to come off and a better future for my children.

25:47

Clark: Kristo and his wife Lujeta are well off by Albanian standards and they don’t really want to leave, but they’ve seen too many false dawns not to give their sons the chance.

25:58

Lujeta: I leave everything.

Kristo: We leave our life here.

Lujeta: Our life, our entire life. I’m to leave my country, but I’ll do it for the sake of my children, of course I will do it.

26:09

Music

26:21

Albanian Countryside.

Clark: With more Albanians now living outside the national borders as live within them, the country risks becoming an empty shell. And the exodus continues despite the fact that these are better times - but only by the most basic measures. Food production is up – people are back working the fields. Houses and new businesses are being built – there’s honest work to be had. That there are tourists is be recent standards, a minor miracle.

26:28

So how do our day trippers from Corfu rate Albania?

26:56

Tourists

Tourist: I couldn’t imagine spending more than a day here unless we were forced to by circumstances. I mean it’s – I think a day trip so far from Corfu is about as much as you can handle. I think anything more than that would be a little bit too much.

Tourist 2: Maybe the roads need to be a bit bigger, so you can get two cars to pass.

Clark: You don’t normally see cattle in the streets, though?

Clark: No, you don’t.

27:02

Clark

Clark: I guess there’s no reason why, in theory, ten years from now, Albania couldn’t be well and truly on the tourist map, but it’s best to be realistic because of the nature of the task, it’s different. Albania is not trying to repair a society that’s broken, it’s actually trying to build the sort of society it’s never been.

27:25

Music

27:43

Albanians Swimming

Clark: One where young men have more to do than wash cars, trade insults and kill each other. Where the state means the people, not just the powerful.

27:51

Fatos

Super:

Fatos Lubonja

Dissident

Fatos: Albanians need to create their own community, their own state, thinking that this is our own state, not something alien to us.

28:04

Clark: Then, perhaps, the tourists will stay for more than a day.

28:15

Reporter: Chris Clark

Camera: Geoff Clegg

Sound: Kate Graham

Editors: Garth Thomas

Stuart Miller

28:32