Albania unveiled. Part 1: three books | thearticle

Albania, ancient Illyria in Shakespeare’s _Twelfth Night_, is the most remote, isolated and mysterious country in Europe and has a unique language unrelated to other tongues.  The

18th-century historian Edward Gibbon remarked that a country “within sight of Italy is less known than the interior of America.”  After more than 2,000 years of almost continuous foreign

rule, between 1945 and 1990 the secretive communist country under the dictator Enver Hoxha was sealed off from the outside world.  In 1968 I reached the border in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia,

but could not cross with “forbidden to enter Albania” stamped on my American passport. Albania, 210 miles long, 95 miles wide and only 45 miles from Italy at its closest point, is slightly

smaller than the state of Maryland, and the people proudly call themselves “sons of the eagle.”  The capital Tirana, named after Teheran, recalls the 17th-century victory in Persia; the

currency, “lek”, is short for Alexander the Great, born in neighboring Macedonia.  Albania is famous for rugged mountain scenery and lavish hospitality, but it is also desperately poor and

tragically backward, savagely bloodthirsty and hopelessly corrupt.  Its most famous modern citizen is the Catholic nun Mother Teresa (1910-97) who cared for the sick and dying in India. Lord

Byron visited the country in 1809 and described the blood feuds and courage in battle in Canto 2 of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ (1812): “Blood follows blood, and, through their mortal

span, / In bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began.”  But he also asked: “Where is the foe that ever saw their back? / Who can so well the toil of war endure?”  In 1813 Thomas

Phillips portrayed Byron in elaborate Albanian costume: a long white kilt, gold-embroidered cloak, crimson velvet gold-trimmed jacket and waistcoat, silver-mounted daggers and pistols. In

1848 Edward Lear painted the spectacular landscapes.  In _The Hotel Years_ (1929) the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, in a typically harsh view of modern Albania, called it “coarse, enigmatic

and tragic, redolent of destiny and secret curses. . . . A country whose history is oppression, whose ethics are corruption.”  Ismail Kadare’s novel, travel books by Lloyd Jones and Robert

Carver, and two recent films — _The Forgiveness of Blood_ and _L’America_ — illuminate this strange and shadowy country. I Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, the birthplace of

Enver Hoxha in southwest Albania, during the reign of King Zog (1924-39).  A Muslim atheist, he studied language and literature at the University of Tirana, where he received a teacher’s

diploma in 1956, and in Moscow in 1958-60. _ The General of the Dead Army _(1963), his first novel and first great success, was translated into English from the French translation of

Albanian.  Kadare tried to evade the scrutiny and suppression of the feared Sigurimi, the secret police, by using fables, myths and allegory to suggest his political beliefs.  But he was

banned from publishing for three years in 1975, and was perversely attacked again for “evading politics” in 1981. In 1990 Kadare sought political asylum in France, and has lived in Paris,

with visits to Albania, since then.  His books have been translated into 45 languages and he’s won many prizes, including the Man Booker International in 2005.  He also has important

biographical and political qualities that make him a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize: he opposed the communist dictatorship and went into exile; he’s a famous Muslim writer; and an

author from Albania, now a sort-of democracy. Yet he has never won the Prize.  But Kadare, aged 86, cannot wait much longer to be crowned. In _The General,_ an unnamed Italian general goes

to Albania in 1963 to exhume the decomposed bodies of 3,000 Italian soldiers killed there in World War Two, and return them to their families for reburial in Italy.  But he has only lists of

names with brief physical descriptions and dental records.  The title seems surrealistic but is literally true.  The peacetime general, who did not fight in the Albanian campaign, thinks:

“I have a whole army of dead men under my command now.  Only instead of uniforms they are all wearing nylon [body] bags with two white stripes and a black edging, made to order by the firm

of ‘Olympia’.”   He seems to command the dead, but during his search they also command him. In _Mussolini’s Italy,_ R.J.B. Bosworth explains that when Italy invaded Albania in April 1939,

“the national illiteracy level was a dismal 85 per cent, roads were non-existent and, by every index, Albanian peasants, the vast majority of the population, subsisted in grinding poverty.”

  Kadare confirms that “down the centuries, there can be no people who have experienced a sadder destiny. . . . With weapons or without, they are a people doomed to annihilation.”  In 1961

they broke with their only ally, the Soviet Union, and were completely isolated in Europe: “They were in a state of blockade.  The U.S.S.R. refused to let them have any more wheat. . . .

It’s going to be hard for them to hold out.” The novel is mainly told from the General’s point of view, with remarks from soldiers during the war, his pleasant memories before leaving Italy

and bitter comments by contemporary Albanians.  He’s accompanied by an Italian priest with the rank of colonel who speaks the language and knows the country.  Extremely critical of the

Albanians, the General grants that they are brave and hospitable (though not to him), but often calls them wild beasts: “They are a rough and backward people.  Almost as soon as they are

born someone puts a gun in their cradle, so that it shall become an integral part of their existence.”  Their mournful songs, set to martial music, are like ancestral voices prophesying war,

and they still cling to the honor of vanquishing the enemy in solitary combat: “Whenever they haven’t been able to find an enemy to fight they’ve turned to killing one another.”  The

slightest insult, an imprudent joke, a seductive glance at a woman can spark a vendetta.  When a young man breaks his long-standing engagement, his old father kills the son’s

prostitute-lover and is hanged for the murder. The weather, mentioned in the first and last sentences, is always marked by fog, rain, snow, wind and cold.  The terrain is rugged, the winters

biting, the canals overflowing, the earthquakes ravaging.  The people are as hostile as the environment.  They see the General’s mission as a second Italian invasion and extension of the

war: “he was in the midst of a people who had killed and been killed by his own soldiers in the war.” “There were no proper fronts, no direct confrontations” when the Italians fought against

snipers and guerrillas. The General particularly searches for the corpse of Colonel Z.  He’d met Z’s family before leaving for Albania and fantasizes about his attractive widow, whom he

suspects is having an affair with the priest.  Z was the commander of the infamous Blue Battalion that had burned and massacred villages, killed women and children and hanged the men—and Z

sometimes committed these crimes with his own hands.  When the uninvited General intrudes at a wedding feast, he learns that Z had hanged a woman’s husband and raped her 14-year-old

daughter, who couldn’t bear the shame and threw herself down a well.  The wife had managed to kill Z and buried him under her doorstep, so she’d trample on him whenever she entered her

house.  In the most dramatic scene, the woman, now old, appears with a sack of her victim’s bones and throws them at the General’s feet. The General’s duties are morally ambivalent.  He’s

following the hallowed tradition of honoring dead warriors, which was first portrayed in the _Iliad_.  After Priam, Hector’s father, has ransomed his son’s body from his killer Achilles, he

gives Hector a luxurious and solemn burial.  In Richmond Lattimore’s translation: > they laid what they had gathered up in a golden casket >  > and wrapped this about with soft 

robes of purple, and presently >  > put it away in the hollow of the grave, and over it >  > piled huge stones laid close together. The recovery of the bodies is a kind of

Resurrection.  The General irreverently says “the bones come popping up out of the ground” and the priest gives them the last rites.  As the gravedigger sings in _Hamlet_: “Oh, a pit of clay

for to be made / For such a guest is meet.” At the same time this perverse exhumation violates the sacred law that forbids disturbing the dead.  The desecration and emergence from the

graves suggest Gothic ghouls, vampires and the living-dead heroines of Edgar Poe.  The General competes with another foreign (and presumably German) general who eagerly seizes Italian bodies

that don’t belong to him.  The General even commits a scam by falsely identifying unknown soldiers and rebaptizing them with the names of the most important men on his list.  The priest

believes their work is a vile profanation, and the General wonders if “the unhappy creatures we are hunting out so zealously might prefer to be left in peace where they are.” A dead soldier

(quoted in italics) condemns the dig; and the earth, as if clutching the dead, resists their attempt to wrest the bodies from the mud.  An old Albanian insists, “All God’s creatures should

rest in the earth from which they sprang.”  These mortuary intrusions, however well intended, are actually a dance of death and reenactment of the war.  The dead seem to be taking revenge

when a gravedigger suddenly dies from an infected cut.  Kadare alludes to an unnamed German ballad—in fact, Gottfried Bürger’s “Lenore”—which reinforces the fear that death is pursuing the

General.  In the poem Lenore begs Death, who’s returned from the war and risen from the tomb to ride through the moonlight, to leave the buried dead alone.  But he seizes her, they ride

together to her fiancé’s grave and she dies there. Kadare’s clear style and pervasive irony reveal his great debt to Franz Kafka.  Like K.’s impossible attempt to enter the Castle, the

General’s task is impractical and impossible—with no recourse for help to a higher power.  Kadare mocks his profane project: he has only five men to dig up a whole army; his maps are

meaningless; “the mission has never been able to establish precisely” their methods and goals; and “if all the graves are as deep as this he shall never finish.”  Plagued by uncertainty, the

General finds the “whole scheme basically ridiculous,” but he tries to “brush such rational considerations aside.”  His work is “filled with an element of the unexpected and the unknown”;

“Nothing offered even a semblance of certainty.  The mud alone held the truth.” His whole mission has a Kafkaesque absurdity.  They “are hunting in the dark”; they don’t “know what

difficulties still lie ahead.”  He admits, “I always run into some obstacle or another that I can’t see any solution to”; “none of them seem to be able to find the grave they are looking

for”; they “cannot seem to bring it to any successful conclusion.”  The skein “was getting into only a worse tangle, as in a nightmare”; “this road was unfailingly going to bring them back

to where they started”; “our soldiers’ remains are going to be handed over to families in some other country.”  He hopelessly declares, “I shall take the matter to the highest authority

immediately,” but also admits, “Anything could happen to them here without anyone being responsible.” This grim novel includes a paradoxical Kafkaesque assertion: “In war it is always

difficult to say exactly what is tragic and what is grotesque, what is heroic and what is worrying.”  The General regretfully concludes that his grave-digging has aroused old hatreds and

prolonged the military conflict, that the wages of war is death and “the remains we dig up constitute war’s very essence.” II _Biografi_ (1993) by the New Zealander Lloyd Jones has two aims:

to describe Albania, which he visited in 1991, the year after the revolution that overthrew the communist regime; and to find the village dentist who had served for twenty years at

countless public appearances as a double of the dictator Enver Hoxha.  The apparently innocent title is actually quite sinister.  It does not refer to the literary genre, but to the state

record of political offences—real or imagined but potentially fatal—kept on everyone by the secret police.  A man tells Jones that after the fall of the communists, when he was allowed to

read his own file, he couldn’t bear to see what his treacherous friends had said about him. Jones meets Albanians who respectfully mention Ismail Kadare, and urge him to read _Dossier H.,_

his satire about an absurd _biografi_ on the Greek poet Homer, and _The Great Winter_, which dares to portray Enver.  The latter put Kadare in great danger and Jones is surprised to hear

that “if it were not for Hoxha, Kadare would have been crucified.”   By then Kadare was too internationally famous and too propagandistically useful to sacrifice. Jones describes familiar

Albanian themes in Kadare’s novel and the two films. The graves of the forgotten dead, left for a long time in overgrown grass, re-emerge in this travel book.  The custom of sacrificial

blood feuds, subject of the film _The Forgiveness of Blood,_ had been politically perverted: “the Party had adopted for itself the position of an aggrieved victim that was ‘owed blood.’ ” 

As in the film _L’America_, cars stripped of their wheels and tires are put up on blocks and abandoned.  Jones’ driver refused to leave his car: “He worried that if he deserted it here

overnight it would be picked clean and left a corpse.”  In _L’America_, Italy had replaced America as the immigrants’ El Dorado.  But they are disillusioned when they finally cross the

Adriatic and America, as it was for the turn-of-the-century Italians, again becomes the Promised Land. Jones has a lively background chapter on the self-appointed and then exiled King Zog. 

His main preoccupation, as with many Albanians, was staying alive and he miraculously survived 55 assassination attempts.  His widow Queen Geraldine, from a noble Hungarian family, did

vegetable gardening in England—Zog would not allow his guards to do menial work—and hung out with exiled royalty.  She didn’t know what to do with their gigantic son and presumptive heir,

King Leka.  Six feet, eight inches tall, he was too obviously a target to be a soldier and had no employable skills.  But Leka was treated like a King when he condescended to visit the King

of Zululand. A brave female partisan, who’d fought the Italians and Germans in World War Two, remembered her heroic experience seemed unreal: “it was like being in a movie.”  Enver, the

victorious partisan leader, was notoriously cruel: “People who saw a smile cross Enver’s face were surprised to learn he was ordering their execution.”  Survivors were forced to cry at his

death: holding back their tears was dangerous.  After his fall, pages from his prolix works were used to wrap food or wipe bottoms. In Albania under communism, the first officially atheist

country, the government destroyed almost all the mosques and churches and used them, like Enver’s pages, for practical purposes: barracks and warehouses.  To Jones, Tirana looks like rubble

at the bottom of a cliff, a grim capital of shabbiness and mud and no prospects.  As more household appliances are brought across the borders by men returning home from working abroad, the

fragile electrical supply is overloaded and frequent power cuts plunge the capital into darkness.  Jones finds nothing to see, nothing to do and almost nothing to eat.  Hungry children press

against the restaurant window to see him devour yoghurt and cheese, and drink _raki_. As in Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed

upon the world.”  A foreign-educated woman of the once-privileged class has worked as a seamstress for the last twenty years for two dollars a month.  Death threats from Albania prove that

the attacks by Vatican radio are angering the communists.  Jones’ hotel room, without heat or water, reeks of raw sewage oozing from the nearby toilets.  Conditions are hopeless, people are

starving.  One prisoner concealed the death of his cellmate and lived at close quarters with the corpse so he could eat the dead man’s food.  There are no drugs and even the limited supply

of flour will run out in a few days.  Infant mortality is worse than in the Sudan.  Every factory lacks raw material and is closed, and the workers must try to survive without pay. The hopes

of the revolution were cruelly betrayed when Enver the liberator became the dictator and communism immediately became Stalinism.  Uncle Joe invented the totalitarian system, described in

Orwell’s _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and fiercely implemented in Albania (soon followed by China and North Korea): the intense political propaganda and perversion of truth that celebrated the

perfect conditions of the disastrous country; the slavish adherence, under threat of death, to the hopeless Party line; the overwhelming statues and hero-worship of the great leader; the

personal and economic disasters: massive poverty and starvation; the pervasive fear of the vast network of spies and secret police; the denunciations without evidence for “betraying the

people” and convicts’ gratitude for “light” sentences of only ten years; the secret police, without real enemies, had to invent them; the fake charges and false confessions; the families

suffering for their relatives’ crimes; the people, deprived of their possessions, had only memories—bad ones; deaths from natural causes were so rare that they were reported as significant

events in the newspapers; mass arrests created a profusion of concentration camps: one town boasted they had more than any other place, and many poor souls sought out the camps for a better

life; executions were frequent and thousands of Unpersons disappeared;  generations born in the camps had no other place to go: they were now free but nothing had changed. Like a Hollywood

stand-in, Petar Shapallo, the village dentist, had been a look-alike substitute for Enver during the tedious ceremonial duties, as well as a prime target for assassination by poison, bullet

or bomb—a perfect example of the fake accepted as real.  As a reward for his unwilling service and to preserve absolute secrecy about the deception, his entire family was immediately

executed in 1965.  After the dictator’s death Shapallo looked like a ghost come back to haunt and terrify the guilty-ridden people. Jones searches for his prey throughout the book, catches

up with him, drags him back to his remote native village on the northeast border with Yugoslavia and finally learns his extraordinary life story.  Shapallo had three roles: as dentist, as

Enver’s shadow and as the current dying man .  At first he’d been ecstatic about his job as impersonator.  He studied photos and newsreels to learn how to imitate the dictator’s speech and

walk, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies.  Since Enver loved all things French, Shapallo studied the language and literature.  He was taught to make light of an assassin’s bullet: Enver was sure

to survive the cowardly attacks. As he morphed into the role, Shapallo felt he was born to be a king.  He experienced the delicious feeling of being worshipped and adored.  His posthumous

return to the real world, including the revelation that his whole family had been safely murdered, was more difficult than his stand-in role.  Like many Albanians, “he felt that he couldn’t

be hurt any further; he had lost the capacity to fear,” and wondered if the village people would fondly remember their old dentist.  He bid farewell to Jones and died during the harsh

mountain winter. Enver’s widow, Nexhmije, like his shadow and Zog’s queen, inevitably had a rough time.  At first she lived comfortably, without fear or guards.  In an interview with Jones

she portrayed Albania as a victim, not an oppressor.  She complained that after the country’s split with Russia there was no support from the West, not even from Italy, and the country was

driven into the hostile hands of China.  After the split with China in 1979, Albania was left to live on its own ever-diminishing resources, which explained the dire condition of the

country.  Two days after his interview, Nexhmije was arrested.  Sentenced to eleven years for embezzling 750,000 leks, she spent four years in prison. After being hermetically sealed for 50

years everyone wants to leave Albania.  Unlike the Russians who can walk across the frozen Lake Lagoda to Finland, the impatient but unrealistic fishermen in Durrës must wait “for the sea to

freeze over so they can walk to Italy.”  There’s a mass exodus on the intensely crowded and battered old ships.  But there’s still one more bitter disillusionment for the illegal

immigrants.  Unable to find a decent existence in Italy, they realize they’ve brought their “hopelessness with them—they had been caught out, and all the blind corners of their home town had

resurfaced.”  An Albanian in Greece also found “the centre of Athens crawling with his half-starved countrymen.  They roamed the markets scavenging for scraps and fighting one another.  It

was a terrible time.” III Kadare’s graves reappear as a typically morbid theme in Robert Carver’s_ The Accursed Mountains_ (1998).  Bodies of Allied pilots who crashed in the mountains of

wartime Albania have never been found.  Most men under gravestones marked with a Communist red star didn’t die fighting.  Short of real heroes, officials “brought them in from village

graveyards after the war and reburied them.”  The 33,000 prisoners murdered in Enver’s concentration camps have no graves at all. Lloyd Jones sailed to Albania from Italy in 1991; Carver

entered from Greece and traveled from south to north for three months in the summer of 1996.  In a livelier and more satiric style, Carver outdoes Jones in suffering and hatred.  Jones,

despite the hardships, likes the Albanians; Carver emphasizes the horrors (which make for an entertaining travel book) and is angry about the hopeless condition of the country.  Jones,

searching for Shapallo, goes to the northern mountains without fear or trouble.  Carver exaggerates the dangers, fears he will be murdered, and wonders if he’ll lie forgotten in a remote and

unmarked grave. Jones does not get involved with women and stays healthy; Carver falls for an Albanian woman, gets saddle-sore from riding on horseback and very sick with dysentery.  Carver

also describes the perils of bad _biografi_, and the tortures of the Sigurimi, who have to supply traitors to fill their quotas and make the Haitian _tonton macoutes_ seem like feeble

amateurs.  He adds that Shapallo was first given plastic surgery, that his doctors and trainers were killed, and (more ghoulishly) that he later attacked his own face with a knife, put out

one of his eyes and disfigured himself so he would no longer resemble the dictator. Carver’s method is to “meet people, talk to them, write down what they say, observe, make my own comments,

analysis and judgement.”  He offers some shrewd comparisons.  The inferior local tobacco, which falls out of the cigarette paper, is like the stuff in _Nineteen Eighty-Four_.  Reckless

drivers resemble Mr. Toad in _The Wind and the Willows._  A dilapidated ferry reminds him of Bogart’s _African Queen_.  The clinic in a remote village, where people without medicine are

dying of syphilis and plague, recalls the ghastly Turkish hospital in the film_ Lawrence of Arabia_. Carver recounts the tragic history of Albania to explain its current conditions.  The

Ottoman ruler Ali Pasha boasted to Lord Byron that he had personally murdered 30,000 people, including his own harem, and had survivors “strangled by deaf-mute black dwarves.”  King Zog ran

away without fighting the Italians.  The Nazis in Kosovo raised 20,000 Albanian SS troops.  The British spy Kim Philby informed the Russians about the Royalists’ plan to invade in 1949. 

Enver’s men were waiting for the parachutists and slaughtered them before they hit the ground. Carver concedes that the brutal Enver shot his own victims to make sure they were dead; that

his concentration camps, even worse than Stalin’s gulags, were rewards for not being shot.  His reign was marked by the ruined economy, starvation, purges, tortures and executions.  But

Carver also notes the achievements of the evil leader.  Enver, “the only man in history who had ever managed to master this unruly and anarchic people,” had eliminated bandits and blood

feuds.  Yet Carver declares that the national hero Skanderbeg, “Ali Pasha, King Zog and Enver Hoxha are all the same person.  The Albanian character remains unchanged and unchangeable.  It

is a hopeless country with hopeless people.” Torn for hundreds of years between the Ghegs in the north and the Tosks in the south, they are united only by hatred of the Serbs, who often

massacred Albanians in Kosovo.  The Albanians have a well deserved reputation as violent and treacherous thieves, rapists and murderers, who cut off the ears and noses of anyone who steals

from them.  The indelible problem is the feudal law of knife and rifle, where life is cheap, honor must be preserved at all costs and shame is worse than death.  In blood feuds men travel as

far as Italy, even America, to seek out and murder their clan enemies.  Several thousand people a year have been killed in feuds since 1992 and the figure is rising steeply.  The

honor-bound Albanians, as Charles Doughty said of the Bedouins, are “sitting to their eyes in a cloaca.” The communists had completely destroyed the economy, and as the full extent of the

devastation hit him, Carver felt as if he “was in a vile dream which it was impossible to get out of.”  He found that nothing worked, nothing was available.  In this failed state mechanized

agriculture was dead, food was scarce, villagers extracted dim light from candles and water from wells.  Machinery was broken, industry ruined, plants abandoned, oil derricks rusting.  Since

all the enterprises had collapsed and no one paid taxes, the whole system was corrupt and everyone lived on bribes.  Elections were fixed and the ruling party murdered the opposition. The

old traditions of generous hospitality and sacredness of guests are uneasily combined with profound ignorance and mindless violence.  With no work and no money, angry men resort to deceit,

cheating and theft.  Carver reports that “Albania has the lowest per capita income in Europe, comparable to the Central African Republic, and the highest per capita ownership of Mercedes

Benzes.”  The country is full of cars stolen in Italy and Greece and provided with false papers.  When roused from their typical passivity and inertia, the Albanians are capable of great

cruelty: “forcible rape of men, women and children was a constant in Albanian history.”  Carver compares the ruined country to Central Asia, the infant mortality to the deserts of the

Sahara. Carver’s depression and rage are intensified by the betrayals of his paid interpreters and supposed friends.  Everyone assumes he is a rich Westerner, and tries to cheat him and

extract as much money as possible.  Instead of being protected he is an easy target, swindled and made to pay double.  To please his outdoorsman and guide, he is forced to climb over arduous

mountains instead of taking the easier route through the gentle valleys. Carver’s most interesting encounter is with Natasha, a beautiful, well-educated, cosmopolitan and sophisticated

24-year-old Albanian.  Her family were high-ranking communists; she speaks English, German, Greek, Macedonian and Albanian; and has a high-paying job with the British EU general in Tirana. 

She’s separated from her longtime Albanian lover, who used to beat her up until the Sigurimi (useful for once) threatened to disappear him if he ever touched her again.  The most advanced

and independent Albanian Carver had ever met, she’d been to England but condemned the men as total wimps, feeble and wet.  Still, she wants to move to London, get a serious job and rent a

flat in Mayfair.  Looking straight at him with her lovely brown and liquid eyes, she admits that after eight months she misses having sex. Natasha is well dressed, witty and clever,

confident in her own femininity and sexuality.  They both hoped to have a future with each other but he didn’t, as she suggested, see her when he returned from the mountains.  Carver leaves

the reader to speculate about why he resisted this delightful woman.  Did his wandering life as a foreign correspondent preclude marriage; was she merely trying to use him to get a UK

passport; was he not good enough for the high-flyer who disdained most English men; was he unable to provide the kind of luxurious life she expected to have?  There’s no hint of frantic

passion and a sad farewell. Carver goes beyond severe criticism to offer some depressing but convincing judgments about the rotten state: “Nothing would ever be done to clean up and rebuild

the country.”  Albania uproots everything from the past and always has to begin again from zero when regimes are overthrown.  He denies the contemporary cant about cultural relativism, the

need to accept the values of other countries as valid as our own.  He believes Western rationalism and democracy are clearly superior to Islamic fatalism and dictatorship.  He rejects the

persistent Albanian idea that the West is obligated to pay them.  Giving them more food and money, he argues, would only encourage dependency and corruption, especially since bandits shoot

aid workers to get their goods and whatever remains is stolen by the government. Most importantly, and rightly opposing prevailing thought, Carver thinks that European colonial rule was

infinitely better than the independent regimes that followed it: > The colonised had been abandoned to a ruinous oppression by their > native tyrants after tasting the sweets of 

European-enforced order > and industry. > . . . The robber elites in these countries were far more ruthless > and rapacious than their colonial predecessors had ever dared to be.

> . . . While professors and savants of Third World origin safely > established in America or Europe continued to denounce white racism, > imperialism and colonialism, their less 

fortunate compatriots left > behind in the abandoned colonies, without either education or > capital, tried in desperation to smuggle themselves out of their > fate and into the 

West. _Part 2 of this essay on Albania, “Two Films”, will appear tomorrow._ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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