During our recent foray into the Balkans, one of the drivers we engaged succinctly remarked, “Albania was the North Korea of Europe.”
Albania emerged from World War II under the control of communists headed by Enver Hoxha. To describe Hoxha as a paranoid totalitarian dictator is to devalue the meaning of all three words: You thought the East German Stasi was bad? Hold my Birra Tirana.
Hoxha died in 1985, having broken successively with Tito, Stalin and Mao (well, Mao’s successors), seeing as not one of these three benefactors were hardline enough for his taste. Albania spent the waning years of European communism fending for itself, and growing increasingly impoverished as a result.
The regime fell in 1991, to be followed by a hangover of epic dimensions that was only beginning to dissipate in 1994, when I visited Albania for the first time. A recovery was underway, to be shattered by another economic implosion triggered by the collapse of ......
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