Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (8 page)

All of Albania’s rich and varied manifestations of freedom, however, came to a halt promptly at 10
P.M
., when the shoot-to-kill curfew began.

It seemed the Albanians had had a bit
too
much freedom, so much freedom that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had sent an Italian-led contingent of some 7,000 troops to keep the lid on.

The OSCE troops arrived in April 1997 in their scout cars and personnel carriers. The situation in Albania was so bad that having Italians tooling around in armor-plated vehicles actually made the streets safer. Now, after 10
P.M
. in Tirana, everything was quiet. No, not quiet. There was continual gunfire coming from the maze of Tirana’s back-streets. And the gunfire set off Tirana’s dogs. As a result I spent the night thinking, first, about stray Kalashnikov slugs and the Hotel Tirana’a floor-to-ceiling windows: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a lower floor.” Then thinking about what a really large number of loud dogs Tirana has: “Gosh, I wish I had a room on a higher floor.” I ended up back at the balcony bar, fully exposed to both the bullets and the barking, but at least I had gin.

Tirana was not quiet at night, but it was invisible. Nothing moved on the main streets. And most of the town’s electricity was out so I couldn’t see it moving, anyway. I gazed into a stygian void with just an occasional tracer shell arcing across the night sky. Make a wish?

Why is freedom in Albania so different from freedom in the United States? This would take a lot more than an hour to find out, if it could be explained at all.

Albania is a little place the size of Maryland, with a population of 3.25 million. Albania is little, and Albania is out of the way, blocked from the rest of the Balkan Peninsula by high, disorderly mountain ranges, and, until this century, cordoned from the sea by broad, malarial swamps. Seventy-five percent of the land is steeps and ravines. In the north, the Albanian Alps rise in such a forbidding confusion of precipices that they are known as the
Prokletije,
or Accursed Mountains. In the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon called Albania “a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America.” (Although Gibbon hadn’t heard about Whitewater and Arkansas politics in general, so perhaps he was being unfair.) As late as 1910, geographical authorities were saying that certain districts of Albania “have never been thoroughly explored.” And considering the neophyte TV producer’s experience, they won’t be explored soon.

This isolated, outlandish place emerged from World War II run by the isolated and outlandish communist guerrilla chieftain, Enver Hoxha. In 1948, Hoxha broke his alliance with Tito because Yugoslavia wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1961, Hoxha broke his alliance with Khrushchev because the Soviet Union wasn’t being pro-Soviet enough. In 1978, Hoxha threw out the Red Chinese for having played Ping-Pong with the U.S. And by the time Hoxha died in 1985, Albania wasn’t on speaking terms with anyplace but North Korea and maybe the English Department at Yale. Hoxha’s successor, Ramiz Alia, stayed the loony course for a while, but in 1990, with communism going into a career slump all over the globe, Alia tried some reforms. Wrong call.

The Albanians’ response to a sudden introduction of personal autonomy and individual responsibility casts an interesting light on the human psyche. They ran like hell. According to Balkans expert James Pettifer, “Over 25,000 people seized ships moored in Durres Harbor and forced them to sail to Italy.” Thousands of others fled to Greece or occupied the grounds of Western embassies in Tirana. University students pulled down the gigantic gilded statue of Enver Hoxha in Skenderbeg Square, and the Alia government had to dismantle and hide the nearby statues of Stalin and Lenin. There was repeated food rioting, widespread destruction of public property, and extensive looting of everything owned by the government—and everything was.

Then things got better. Dr. Sali Berisha, whom Pettifer calls a “leading cardiologist” (Albania
has
a leading cardiologist?), was elected president. The Communists were jailed. In Pettifer’s words, “The new government…embarked on a program of privatization and the construction of a free-market economy.”

But life got too much better. This privatization being programmed and this free-market economy being constructed were based on only one industry: pyramid schemes.

Although Albania seems inaccessible, it has been, over the past three millennia, repeatedly accessed. Albanians have had the misfortune to live too close to the kind of folks who can’t seem to resist invading things—even things like Albania.

Albania has been invaded by various Greek city states, Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, Slavic hordes, Byzantium again, Bulgarian hordes, Byzantium one more time, Normans, Christian Crusaders, Charles I of Anjou, Serbs, Venetians, Turks, and Fascists. Durres, historically the principal city of Albania, has changed hands thirty-three times since the year 1000.

Albania has been invaded, yes. Conquered, no. While the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was being hellenized, latinized, Slavofied, or Turkey-trotted, Albanians stayed Albanian. Their language is the last extant member of the Phrygo-Thracian family of tongues once spoken by peoples from the far side of the Black Sea to the eastern Adriatic.

The highland areas of Albania have been claimed by various nations but governed by none. Authority has always rested with the
Mal,
the Albanian word for tribe and also—to give some idea of the cozy interaction among Albanian clans—the Albanian word for the mountain that each village is on top of.

The tribalism that has disappeared from the rest of Europe (or been reduced to what tartan you wear on your golf slacks) is still a prime fact of existence in Albania. Tribal identification transcends the theological hatreds so avidly pursued in the rest of the Balkans. There are tribes with both Christian and Muslim members. “The true religion of the Albanian is being an Albanian,” said nineteenth-century nationalist Pashko Vasa.

Tribal identification transcended atheism, too. In the 1960s, twenty-eight of the fifty-two members of the Albanian Communist Party’s central committee were related by blood.

Blood
being the key word. Albania is remarkable for the number and persistence of its blood feuds. As soon as a boy is of age, he is liable to become a Lord of Blood, a
Zot i Gjakut,
with responsibility for killing members of the clan who killed members of his clan, who killed members of their clan, and so forth—a sort of pyramid scheme of death, if you will.

Men who are “in blood” can spend years shut up inside their fortified houses. Girls, however, are let off the hook unless they swear to be virgins and wear men’s clothes. Lest anyone accuse the Albanians of utterly eschewing all rule of law, this takes place under the auspices of the
Kanun Lek Dukagjini,
the Law of Lek, a voluminous compendium of tribal custom and practice dating back at least to the 1400s, copies of which may be purchased at book stalls in Tirana.

According to James Pettifer, who wrote an essay on the subject for the
Blue Guide
to Albania, anthropologists estimate that there are some 2,000 blood feuds going on in Albania and that as many as 60,000 people are involved. (The
Blue Guide
is one of the few tourist manuals with a good section on the ins and outs of vendetta killing.) In 1992, a man was beheaded with an ax in a Tirana hotel lobby—revenge for a murder his father had committed in a northern village more than forty years before.

The Albanians certainly have preserved their culture. Whether this is a good idea is a question that can be decided only, of course, by Albanians. But in these times of multiculti zeal, it may be worth noting that the Albanian language did not have a proper alphabet until 1908. The country didn’t get a railroad until 1947. The first Albanian university was founded in 1957. And there is an Albanian proverb to the effect that a woman must work harder than a donkey because a donkey feeds on grass, while a woman feeds on bread.

Culture is an important factor in determining the economic success of a nation. But, that said, what else is there to say? Germany got rich with a culture as barbaric—a couple of world wars and a Holocaust prove it—as anything ever seen. Tibet stayed poor with a culture so wonderful that half of the movie stars in America want to move there. And how do you change a culture anyway? We could wire Albania for cable and let its citizens see how the rest of the world lives. Jerry Springer should give them some good ideas.

Albania did not improve upon inspection. Even the animals in the Tirana zoo had been stolen. The monkeys were gone from Monkey Island. The aviary was empty of birds. All the large ruminants had been “eaten,” said Elmaz. Only two lions, a tiger, and a wolf remained in captivity. No one had had the guts to steal them—although several young men seemed to be gearing themselves to the task. The bars on the wolf’s cage had been pried back. One young man stuck his hand inside, shouted, and snatched the hand back. The wolf ignored him, and the men went down the hall to tease the tiger and lions.

In the middle of downtown Tirana, 200 yards from Skenderbeg Square, is a block-long hole in the ground. Garbage fires smolder at the bottom. This is where Sijdia Holdings was going to build Albania’s first Sheraton hotel with pyramid-scheme investments. Only a portion of the cellar was completed. The basement staircase rises above ground level on one side of the hole. There’s a door into the stairwell with a neon sign above it:
CLUB ALBANIA
. Entirely too symbolic

The nearby apartment buildings that housed the country’s communist elite were built in the clean, austere International style of twentieth-century cities everywhere, but they’re crumbling. Where big chunks of stucco have fallen away, primitive rubble-wall construction is visible, ready to explode with the structures’ weight in the eastern Mediterranean’s next little earthquake.

Apartments for the common folk were built much worse. Elmaz’s mother had had the unenviable job of teaching geography to students who, as far as they knew, would never be allowed to leave the country. She lived in a block of flats with four stories of haphazardly laid masonry courses. Flaking mortar oozed from every joint. The bricks looked like they’d been dug from beds of clay with canoe paddles.

The Hotel Tirana, which went up in 1979, was so badly designed that the Italian entrepreneurs who took it over had to add a separate tower as a fire escape. Short gangways lead from the tower to an emergency exit on each floor. This outside stairway created security problems, however, so the tower was encased in steel mesh. Now if there’s a fire at the Hotel Tirana, the result will be hundreds of guests in an enormous fry basket.

Near the Lana River is a neighborhood called the Block, once reserved for Enver Hoxha’s inner circle. Their idea of luxury was semi-suburban, the kind of semi-suburb you’re trying to convince your parents to move out of before their car gets stolen. But the Hoxha residence looks like the house of a really successful Chicago dentist. There’s something of the Chicago prairie style to its broad but ill-proportioned windows, clumsy, deep-eaved roof, and dumpy fieldstone terracing—call it Frank Lloyd Left.

Hoxha’s daughter Pranvera is, in fact, an architect. I don’t know if the Hoxha homestead was her work, but other evidence indicates she’s at least as addled as her dad was. She designed what used to be the Enver Hoxha Memorial a couple of streets away. It’s an immense concrete Pluto Platter of a building with conical walls used these days for daring cardboard-under-the-butt slides by local preteens. It once contained, says the
Blue Guide,
“more or less everything that Hoxha ever touched or used.” It now contains the USAID office, dispensing foreign aid. Which of these constitutes the greater foolishness, I leave to the reader.

Elmaz and I drove forty kilometers west of Tirana to Durres, passing a complex of greenhouses from which both houses and green had been removed. We saw two summer palaces King Zog had built for himself, completely ransacked. Someone had tried to take the very paint off the walls.

Durres was, at the time, Albania’s only working port. And in that port were exactly two ships. One was a Chinese-built destroyer that had been “bought” from the Albanian navy. At any rate, $6,000 had changed hands. Now the
Khajdi
was a discotheque, paneled inside with the same rough wood used in the beer halls and gambling hells of Tirana’s Youth Park. Something had gone wrong in the bilge, however, and the
Khajdi
was listing so far to starboard that you felt you’d had more than enough to drink the moment you stepped inside. Business was bad, the proprietor reported.

The other ship was a beached freighter missing hawsers, hatches, portholes, and anything else that could be filched, including anchors. A couple of men had shinnied up the foremast and were trying to pry a brass knob off the top. A gang of boys ran around the deck playing pirates or, if you think about it, not actually playing. Technically speaking, they
were
pirates.

Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. I asked him whether the OSCE force had imposed law and order. He didn’t think so. “They are just driving around and sitting in cafés like everyone else,” he said. I asked him if the government had managed to quiet things down. It didn’t have an army anymore, but it still had the secret police, actually the too-well-known police, the Sigurmi, left over from the Hoxha regime and now renamed, with euphemistic masterstroke, the National Information Service. But Elmaz didn’t think the police had done much except pester Sali Berisha’s political opponents.