Albania The Facts
Evening Herald (Plymouth) - July 22, 2003
 
A few thousand square km smaller than Belgium, Albania basks on the south-eastern shore of the Adriatic, just a hop, skip and a jump across the waves from Italy. It shares its southern border with Greece, Macedonia lies to the east, and Yugoslavia and the troubled province of Kosovo lie beyond its northern border. Albania has the poorest telephone service in Europe with fewer than two telephones per 100 inhabitants. In 1992, following the fall of the Communist government, peasants cut the wire to about 1,000 villages and used it to build fences British comedian Norman Wisdom is a superstar in Albania. Enver Hoxha, the country's psychopathic Stalinist dictator, made the British performer into such a cult figure. For while the population was cut off from outside influences throughout the Cold War, Hoxha decreed that Wisdom's films - in which he plays an underdog in a series of battles against the strict Mr Grimsdale - were a fitting parable of Albania's own struggles against capitalism and were thus deemed acceptable entertainment for the masses. The Albanians found Wisdom's antics hilarious.

Albania was part of the Eastern Bloc's military alliance, but after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Albania left the Warsaw Pact altogether. It embarked on a self-reliant defence policy that has left the country littered with around 750,000 igloo-shaped concrete bunkers and pillboxes, some of which have since been painted in bright colours.

There are more guns than people in Albania. When the Communist regime was toppled in 1992, locals looted army bases and stole an estimated 1.5million weapons along with 10.5billion rounds of ammuntion - three thousand bullets for every man, woman and child in the country. Larger weapons were taken as well. One band of bank robbers took to using a tank for a while.

SECTION: Sport; Contact; Profess'nalboxing; Pg. 40

Copyright 2003 Evening Herald (Plymouth)

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