BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND ANNE HOWIE
TIRANA, Albania - "What a lot of people here tell you is true. From the day the NATO bombing began, the attacks on us by Milosevic intensified to an unimaginable degree. I never expected this kind of `ethnic cleansing' to happen. I thought Íd die one day, probably sooner than later because of our struggle to end the oppression of the Albanian people. But in Kosova, not in Albania. I never expected to be thrown out of my house like this. What the United States is doing with its bombs is not helping us."

That's how Shaban Dace summarized his views to Militant reporters in a May 1 interview here at a camp for Albanians expelled from Kosova. It's located near the center of Tirana, by a lake in the city's central park. The 4,500 residents, about half living in tents and the rest in a makeshift trailer park, have named it "Magic City."

Dace worked in a small factory producing bottled wine and other alcoholic beverages in Pirane, a village near Prizren, Kosova, until 1991. He was fired then, like most industrial and other workers of Albanian origin in Kosova, because of his support for the Trepca miners' strike. The miners demanded an end to austerity measures the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade was trying to impose and recognition of national rights of the Albanian nationality. For the next eight years, Dace, his wife, and their four children tilled a small piece of land in Pirane to make ends meet.

On March 24, the day Washington launched the U.S.-NATO assault on Yugoslavia, paramilitary forces under the command of Zelco Rasnatovic - a Serb nationalist known as Arkan who is infamous worldwide for his brutality - and units of the federal Yugoslav army began shelling Dace's village at 4:00 a.m. and setting houses on fire. Villagers were given less than an hour to leave, Dace and others from Pirane said. Three days later virtually the entire population of Pirane, made of 220 families, found itself expelled to northern Albania.

Dace's story is typical among the nearly 400,000 Kosovar Albanians who have fled to this country. But his opinion that the NATO bombing has made everything worse is shared by a minority among those who are being deported from Kosova en masse. It is not a small minority, however, particularly among workers and farmers from Kosova.

Many working people in Albania express similar views, drawing on their experiences with repeated imperialist military interventions here. "America and Europe are each pushing their own interests in Kosova, and they are competing about it," said Minella Bala, a retired truck driver. He spoke to Militant reporters at his home in the port city of Sarande, southern Albania, May 3. "They mean no good for us. They are damaging our cause, the workers' cause."

Bala was the president of the citizens' council in Sarande, formed during the 1997 armed rebellion that eventually brought down the pro-imperialist regime of former Albanian president Sali Berisha.

Against the pro-NATO stream
The opinions of Dace and Bala go against the stream of the pro-NATO orgy unleashed on the population here by the Socialist Party government of prime minister Pandeli Majko and by virtually all political parties in Albania.

Skender Bej square at Tirana's center shows how far the SP administration has gone to open up Albania to the U.S.-NATO forces and aims. "NATO in Kosova," says a huge banner hung in the front of the building that houses the opera and the main public library there. The government-sponsored banner displays the Albanian flag on one side and the NATO flag on the other. A smaller banner on the same side of the building read, "May 1." It was up when we arrived in Tirana the night of April 30 and stayed up through the May Day weekend. We were told there were no May Day rallies of any kind anywhere in Albania, as has been the case for the last decade.

The media constantly praises the reactionary imperialist alliance and its operations in Albania.

In early April, the Albanian parliament voted unanimously to open the country's ports, airports, air space, and military facilities to NATO forces attacking Yugoslavia.

The port of Durres, the country's largest, about 50 miles west of Tirana on the Adriatic, has been taken over by NATO forces. No one can enter its perimeter without Albanian army and NATO permission. According to what Militant reporters were able to see and hear, ships unload troops and their hardware almost daily, as NATO is rapidly building a force of more than 20,000 soldiers in Albania. No details are available from either the NATO command or authorities here at this point about the exact size or composition of the force among the 19 NATO member states.

For several miles south of the port of Durres, the coastal area has been closed off to public access with fences and barbed wire and turned into a large base for NATO troops. German soldiers guarding a NATO outpost in this area, right by the highway that runs along the coast, got agitated, pointing their automatic rifles as if they were ready to shoot at Militant reporters driving by who tried to take a photo of the scene.

U.S. forces that are part of the NATO deployment are largely based at the Rina airport, outside Tirana. Much of Albania's commercial air traffic has been curtailed to give virtually free access to warplanes of the Atlantic military alliance during their air raids in Kosova and elsewhere in Yugoslavia and their increasing exercises.

That seems to portend more battles at the Albania-Kosova border. While in Kukes, northern Albania, May 2, these reporters saw an Apache helicopter circling the area near the border, about 15 miles away. Clashes with Belgrade's forces were taking place at the time, we found out later.

Convoys of imperialist troops can be seen around the country, but particularly in the corridor from Durres to Tirana and Kukes. Trucks obviously transporting heavy weaponry towards the border with Yugoslavia are always well covered.

Washington and other imperialist powers are preparing for a possible ground invasion of Kosova on the pretext of stopping the mass deportations of Albanians from that region. Their operations in this country are a central part of surrounding Yugoslavia with an imperialist military noose and trying to get the so-called frontline states neighboring Serbia and Montenegro in line behind NATO's course.

Toward this end, Washington is increasingly using the forces of the Kosova Liberation Army, known as the UCK, its initials in Albanian.

UCK turning into Washington's tool
The UCK, which for years has waged an armed struggle for independence of Kosova, is turning into a tool to advance the aims of U.S. imperialism. It earlier incorporated, to a degree, a number of young fighters and others involved in the mass struggle for self-determination inside Kosova who helped defend working people there from brutal assaults by Belgrade's forces.

Now, buses with UCK fighters in uniform can be seen headed to the border virtually every day we've been here. They often parade in Tirana yelling, "UCK! UCK!" They get some applause from pedestrians, but noticeable indifference from many as well.

Frequently UCK members have little U.S. flags pinned or sewn on their uniforms next to Kosova Liberation Army insignia.

A few we ran into in the camps for Albanians who fled Kosova, who were getting ready to head for their "training bases" near the border, were quite unabashed about identifying themselves as UCK members. They all openly expressed support for what NATO is doing and said they want weapons and air protection from NATO planes to get into Kosova in massive numbers.

"I was in the UCK and had left to go to Pristina to get some exams finished at the university when the Serbian police forced us to leave," said Burhan Elezi, a stomatology student originally from the Kacanik area in Kosova. "We only want arms from NATO and we'll do it ourselves. We also need help from NATO planes because we can't stand up to the Serbian weaponry. We'll take over Kosova." Responding to a question on whether accusations by Berisha, floated in the press here, that the UCK is not to be trusted because many in its leadership are "too Marxist oriented," Elezi said, "Absolutely not. The UCK has nothing to do with Marxism. We want to turn Kosova to the road of the West."

In the past, U.S. government officials have accused the group of being a terrorist organization. But they have largely dropped that designation since Washington succeeded in getting the UCK leadership to sign the accord - initially crafted at Rambouillet, France - that provided the justification for the NATO assault. It's likely that contingents of UCK troops will be used as the first cannon fodder by Washington if the imperialist powers decide to launch a ground assault on Yugoslavia.

Thousands of Albanian immigrants from several countries in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere have come here to join the UCK, which reportedly has 30,000 members in Albania now. We found that most of those we spoke to, either those already in the UCK or about to join it, were students, high school and university teachers, doctors and other professionals, and shopkeepers. Fewer were peasants or workers. Shefqet Loshi, for example, was a small businessman who had immigrated to Switzerland and spent 15 years there. He moved to Kosova about a year ago and used his savings to buy a business, he said, which was burned down a month ago. He is now operating out of the lake camp at central Tirana in organizing fund-raising for the UCK.

Criminal elements in Albania have also praised or publicly pledged troop support for the Kosova Liberation Army. A gangster known as Zani, for example, said after being released from jail recently that 26 of "his boys" would join the UCK. Zani ran one of the most notorious gangs in Vlore, southern Albania, during the working-class revolt against Berisha - terrorizing the population there. He did several months in prison subsequently for his activities.

Stories abound, unconfirmed by Militant reporters, of parts of NATO arsenals ending up in UCK hands here.

In the camps housing Albanians from Kosova, it often takes particular courage and determination among working people to raise opinions opposing NATO's course. Many who are ardent supporters of the imperialist assault intervene to try to stop those expressing views such as Dace's. Most of these people are openly, or more discretely sometimes, associated with the UCK and are trying to clamp down on civil discussion that goes against their views.

Attempts to cut off discussion in camps
That's how the conversation with Rustem Kelmendi, a construction worker from Malisheva, Kosova, was cut short at the Asllan Rusi Sports Palace on May 1. The facility near Tirana's center serves as the central registration place of Albanians expelled from Kosova. Kelmendi faced no obstacles in telling his story at first. His brother had been killed by Belgrade's special police forces and Kelmendi saw the body mutilated later, he stated. But as soon as he began explaining that the U.S.-NATO assault gave the Milosevic regime the green light to take off with its "ethnic cleansing" dreams in Kosova, a group of other Albanians intervened to cut off the discussion. Some of those who surrounded Kelmendi belonged to the UCK, they said later.

At the same sports center - where up to 3,000 deportees are staying on any given day in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, waiting for possible reunification with family members or to be relocated to more humane facilities - a similar incident occurred. A Militant reporter was interviewing a student from Kosova. Another Kosovar Albanian who spoke some English had offered to translate the conversation. As soon as Shpendi Malaj, the high school student from Cakova, began explaining his opposition to the NATO bombing raids in Yugoslavia, the volunteer translator became angry, said some harsh words to his fellow Albanian and to the Militant reporter, and took off.

These exchanges multiply many times every day as Albanians have continued to be forced out of Kosova, terrorized into leaving by Belgrade's forces.

Estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees put the total number of Albanians expelled from Kosova since March 24 at 675,000. More than 395,000 have crossed the borders into Albania. Nearly 205,000 have flooded Macedonia. The remainder are in Montenegro and Bosnia. Small numbers have been airlifted to other countries like Germany, Italy, Turkey, or the United States so far.

Kosovar Albanians have been dispersed throughout this country. The largest number, more than 90,000, are in Kukes in a number of camps that are in the worst conditions in terms of sanitation and protection from rain or other natural elements. Many people there, a large percentage of them farmers, still have their tractors with them. Some had their tractors and cars burned by Serb forces before crossing the border, but the majority appear to have been able to cross with vehicles.

Militant reporters visited several camps in Kukes as well as in Tirana, and in Vlore and Sarande in southern Albania. After talking to dozens of people, a picture similar to what we found at camps in Macedonia and Montenegro emerged.

The "ethnic cleansing" by the Milosevic regime continues to unfold at a slower but steady pace. The repeated stories in the big-business media of large-scale massacres in Kosova are unsubstantiated or at best exaggerated. We asked repeatedly and found no one who had direct knowledge of mass rapes. It appears that villages where the Kosova Liberation Army was not carrying out open activities had not faced, for the most part, major problems or harassment by Serb paramilitary gangs and special police forces prior to March 24.

At the Lipjane agricultural community in the Vershec village, for example, about 300 people were part of a relatively strong UCK unit in a population of 1,500, said Daut Nishari and his father, Sadik, during a May 3 interview at a camp in Kukes. "That was the reason the village had been attacked three times in the past year," Daut Nishari said. "The paramilitaries, though, had not been able to push us out until after the NATO bombing began." The Nisharis had changed residence seven times, moving from relative to relative, after their house was burned some months ago.

Dace said 16 people from his village were killed because they refused to leave their houses in Pirane or they decided to fight against Belgrade's troops on March 24-25. There had been no major problems with Serb forces prior to that.

The majority of those interviewed said the police or border guards in Kosova took their passports, drivers' licenses, or other personal documents on the way out of Kosova. Serb gangs also took most of the cash Kosovars carried with them. It was often done in a humiliating way. After passports were taken away near the border, guards at another checkpoint dozens of feet away asked for hundreds of German marks in fines because people did not carry passports, we were told by many people, on the threat of holding some family members as hostages. All the vehicles driven by Kosovar Albanians we saw in Kukes or on the long mountainous road from northern Albania to Tirana had no license plates. They had been taken by Belgrade's military. This is a conscious effort by the Milosevic regime to make more difficult any future return of these people to their hometowns.

Conditions vary widely at the camps
Tens of thousands are being put up on a voluntary basis by residents of Albania who bear the burden of housing the newcomers. Government aid in form of food and sanitary supplies has barely begun to be distributed to these families, and the portions are meager. The conditions at the camps housing Kosovars vary widely. Facilities ran by the Albanian government - whose ministers have no shortage of self-serving statements about "the excellent handling of the refugee crisis" by Tirana - tend to offer the poorest conditions. Two such camps in Kukes had no running water, electricity, or garbage collection. Every time it rains the entire camp turns into a muddy field and water floods most tents, we were told.

Minella Bala in Sarande explained most clearly what a number of other Albanians alluded to. Prejudices against Kosovar Albanians exist throughout the country. And many Kosovars do not look forward at all to a long stay in Albania. In Sarande, for example, no Kosovars are staying in residents' houses. They are put up at a hotel that had been burned out during the 1997 revolt and other similar facilities.

"Authorities here simply cleaned up that hotel a little," Bala said, "but didn't go out of their way to welcome the Kosovars." Those who just arrived from Kosova are used to a much higher standard of living than virtually all working people in Albania, as a result of the differential progress in development achieved through the revolutions in Yugoslavia and Albania in the last half century.

Bala raised these points, confirmed by Militant reporters with Kosovars living in the hotel he described, to refute statements in the main TV stations from Greece that Kosovars were being moved consciously there by Tirana to "dilute the weight of the Greek-speaking minority" in southern Albania. Most imperialist powers are utilizing the conflict to advance their competing interests, Bala explained. For the rulers in Greece, the possible annexation of parts of southern Albania - which nationalist forces in Greece call Vorios Ipiros (north Ipiros, which is the name of the Greek province bordering Albania) - has been a long-term goal for the last half century.

Athens and Rome, in particular, are using substantial financial resources to set up camps with conditions much better than anything the Albanian government can put together. Even though many working people appreciate humane living conditions for deported Kosovars, a number point to more long-term and not- so-obvious goals. "Italy is most likely planning to turn the camp at the airport in Vlore into a military base of some sort once the refugee crisis abates," said Albert Shyti, pointing to the camp being set up by the Italian army at the formerly abandoned airport in Albania's third largest city. Vlore was also the hotbed of the 1997 revolt. Shyti was one of the central leaders of the citizens' committee that led the struggle against Berisha in Vlore.

Even though the would-be capitalists in power in Albania have won wide acceptance for the massive deployment of the U.S.- NATO forces here - much more so than for the previous deployment of French, Italian, and Greek troops following the 1997 rebellion - imperialism still faces the task of defeating the working class in this country to accomplish its goals.

Washington is utilizing the assault on Yugoslavia to consolidate its hegemony as the number one military and economic power in Europe. And the U.S. rulers and their allies in Europe are laying the groundwork for using their military might to do what they've been unable to carry out by other means: reestablishing the domination of capitalist social relations in Albania and Yugoslavia and tightening the noose around Russia with a similar goal in mind there.

One symbol of how far they themselves sense they have to go is the fortification of the U.S. embassy in Tirana, which our bus from Skopje passed by on the way into Albania's capital. It's done in a way none of the Militant reporters here have ever seen before. The outside thick stone wall surrounding the complex has electrical barbed wire on top. Inside there's another wall, higher than the outer one, made of a double layer of sand bags. No one can peek inside from the street level. The front and other main gates are locked shut. Personnel use other not-well-known entrances, we were told. A number of Albanians in the bus pointed to the scene and made jokes or laughed.

Differing views on NATO bombing
Despite the attempted intimidation by thuggish elements in the camps, a number of working people described to Militant reporters situations similar to those recounted by Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro, sometimes refusing to buckle as pro-imperialist elements intervened. "The NATO bombing has helped the Serbian government to carry out the `ethnic cleansing' in Kosova," said Shpendi Malaj. "It's destroying both Serbs and Albanians. They should stop the bombing."

At the hotel in Sarande housing Kosovars someone from the town of Vushtre, near Mitrovica, told Militant reporters that a number of Serbs had deserted from the Yugoslav army and were asking Albanians in his neighborhood two months ago for help in getting civilian clothes to escape. He did not want his name disclosed.

Others described similar stories of pockets of opposition to Belgrade's policy in Kosova among the minority of 200,000 Serbs who lived there. Vjosa Paloca, whose family farmed on the outskirts of Klina, a town of 15,000 near Pec, Kosova, said at least three of her Serb neighbors asked her to stay and offered to help stop the terrorist gangs from driving Albanians out. "I don't know what happened to them," she said, after the police set large sections of the city on fire to force the majority Albanian residents to leave.

This appeared to be true in a number of cases where Serbs and Albanians lived in the same town. In the village of Dobrojevo near Pristina the population was about half Serb and half Albanian. "We didn't have a problem with most of our Serb neighbors before March 24," said Eyhrie Sulejmani. "After the bombing started some started saying, `You wanted NATO, now go to Albania and get NATO to help you.' They collaborated with the police to get us out. But other Serbians tried to stop it. When they couldn't, they left themselves."

When asked if they were aware that many government officials and pundits in the United States, Britain, and other countries participating in the bombing of Yugoslavia have spoken openly against independence for Kosova, most Kosovar Albanians said it was the first they heard this.

"We need independence now, without a question," Sulejmani said, expressing a commonly held view. "Return to autonomy we had before 1989 won't do. We can no longer trust the regime in Belgrade. And anyone arguing about dividing Kosova in two parts has to walk over the wishes of most of us."

Kosovars won autonomy in 1974 as a result of a decades-long struggle for self-determination by the Albanian nationality - which until the beginning of this year comprised about 90 percent of Kosova's population of 2.1 million. Autonomy meant the right to elect a regional parliament and veto power by the local government on most matters affecting Kosova, such as education, health care, and police functions. Four years before autonomy, the University of Pristina had been opened, with all courses offered in both Serbo-Croatian and Albanian.

Albanians had been recognized as a distinct nation and their language recognized as one of the official languages of Yugoslavia as a by-product of the victorious social revolution led by the Partisans in the aftermath of the successful struggle against the country's occupation by Nazi troops during World War II. The Partisans united working people of all nationalities under a program that called for equality and mutual respect of all nations. In the early years of the 1942-45 revolution, partisans from Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece collaborated and even tried to carve out a course for a socialist federation in the Balkans that different nations would join on a voluntary basis - much like the Bolsheviks succeeding in doing in the early years following the 1917 Russian revolution.

But the Yugoslav revolution, and the workers state it brought into being by abolishing capitalist property relations, were deformed at birth by Stalinist domination of the regime of Josip Broz, known as Tito. Tito was the central leader of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, the main political force among the Partisans.

Prior to the victory of the revolution, 50,000 Albanian partisans in Kosova had joined the struggle, partly on the basis of Tito's promises that Kosovars would have the right to national self-determination, "up to secession." But that was not to be. Following the victory of the antifascist struggle, Tito's armies drowned a rebellion by Albanian partisans in blood when they tried to carry out the earlier agreement on self-determination. The struggle for a republic in Kosova, like the six other republics of the former Yugoslavia, dates back to those days. Despite these early setbacks, Albanians in Kosova benefited from some of the initial affirmative action policies instituted as a result of the Yugoslav revolution to aid industrialization and the building of infrastructure of the least developed regions. But as a bureaucratic caste crystallized its hold on power in the 1950s under Tito's Stalinist misleadership, these gains began to be eroded. Tito opened up the Yugoslav economy to investments from imperialist trusts less than a decade after the victory of the revolution. Austerity demands by the International Monetary Fund, advanced as a precondition for further loans, combined with the bureaucratic, anti-working-class methods of planning and management by Belgrade, resulted in an economic crisis that affected underdeveloped regions like Kosova disproportionately. These conditions meshed working-class struggles like the Trepca strike Dace spoke about with the struggle for national rights in Kosova.

That was when the Milosevic regime launched its nationalist tirades to justify its crackdown on the working-class resistance to its austerity policies at the end of the 1980s. In doing so Belgrade found it necessary to revoke even the limited autonomy in Kosova to retain control of the land and other economic resources to maintain the parasitic existence and bourgeois way of life of the section of the ruling caste loyal to the bureaucracy in Serbia.

That set the stage for the current explosion.

Views among workers in Albania
Knowledge of the impact of the U.S.-NATO assault on the working class in Serbia and Montenegro - which now comprise the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - affects the views of working people and youth inside Albania.

Militant reporters made a point of showing a number of photos they got while in Yugoslavia, prior to the trip to Albania, that graphically depict destruction of factories, farms, houses of workers and farmers and individuals affected by it. "Serb people are human beings like us," said Manjola Goxhaj, after seeing those photos. She is an Albanian who works as a translator in Tirana and was traveling on the bus from Skopje to Tirana with Militant reporters April 30. "The United States has no right to bomb them." Ermal Keco, a construction engineering student at the University of Tirana who accompanied Militant reporters and helped translate, had a similar reaction.

Opposition to the U.S.-NATO assault on Yugoslavia and the increasing deployment of imperialist troops inside Albania was strongest among workers and farmers in southern Albania, where the rebellion against Berisha was based.

That revolt was sparked in January 1997, when fraudulent "pyramid" investment funds promoted by Berisha's regime collapsed and many working people lost their life savings. Hundreds of thousands of Albanian workers who had immigrated to Greece, Italy, Germany, and other imperialist countries in search of jobs and a living income had returned at that time to reclaim their savings after hearing of trouble with the pyramid schemes. They had been lured into depositing their savings there with promises they would double their money within months. "Berisha's promises of a get-rich-quick capitalism turned into a nightmare," said Violetta Chrisafi, a sewing machine operator at the Rekor shoe factory in Gjirokaster (see article elsewhere in this issue). "We didn't sit back. We fought back."

Workers, farmers, students, and others took to the streets to demand compensation from the state, relief from the already heavy burden of the government's attempt to integrate Albania into the world capitalist market, and an end to police repression that had become widespread under the rule of Berisha's Democratic Party. Berisha tried to suppress the rebellion by force. But hundreds of thousands resisted and got support from sections of the military and thousands of former army officers Berisha had dismissed as loyal to his rival, the Socialist Party. By early March 1997, the government lost control of the southern half of the country. Albania's army and police were dissolved for a period of time, most of the population got arms, and the jails were thrown open. To avoid the fall of the regime through revolutionary means - a development that would have boosted the self-confidence of working people and set a dangerous precedent for all the rival layers among the rulers - the Socialist Party joined the Democratic Party in a coalition government. This regime invited imperialist troops to intervene to help it quell the revolt under the guise of "restoring stability."

The governments of Italy, Greece, France, and other countries dispatched 7,000 troops by mid-April under the sanction of the United Nations. New elections were held last summer, while the country was under foreign occupation. The Socialist Party won a large majority in parliament and has ruled ever since.

Stability has not been the order of the day, however. Last September, Berisha's forces led an armed revolt that forced former premier Fatos Nano to resign. The SP administration subsequently named Pandeli Majko as the new prime minister. While the government has been able to reconstruct the police and army, many other state institutions don't function well. Industry remains devastated here. This has been the case since 1992, when Berisha cut state subsidies as part of his "market reforms." About 90 percent of state-owned plants have been shut ever since, leaving little choice to most workers but to emigrate to other countries, especially for the younger generations. According to unofficial estimates, up to one-third of the country's population of about 3.5 million has immigrated in the last decade.

Albanian revolution, and degeneration
"There is not much future for young people so most of them leave," said Ioanis Savas Xeras, a shepherd at the majority Greek-speaking village of Dervitsani in southern Albania, near Gjirokaster, during a May 3 interview. He was part of the partisan movement in Albania that led a struggle to rid the country of the Nazi occupation during World War II. The partisans, led by the Communist Party, or Albanian Workers Party, turned the antifascist struggle into a social revolution by the mid-1940s, establishing a workers state, in a similar fashion as in Yugoslavia. Xeras said he had hoped "the abolition of capitalism would bring a better future." Prior to the revolution there was no irrigation or machinery for agriculture and most farmers like himself were slaves to big landlords, he said.

Xeras spoke highly of the initial agrarian reform in the late 1940s but was opposed to the forced collectivization of the land and the "super dictatorship of Hoxha." Enver Hoxha headed the CP regime and ruled Albania until his death in 1985. During the reign of this Stalinist regime, which turned to Moscow for collaboration for a brief period in the early 1950s and then aligned itself with Beijing, Albania's borders were virtually closed for working people, who were kept isolated from the rest of the world. Xeras's son died during a hunger strike in prison during Hoxha's reign, jailed after passing around flyers for democratic rights in high school.

Despite the horrible deformation of the Albanian revolution from birth, Xeras was not for returning to capitalism, drawing on his experience before the revolution. "I am not a politician or a diplomat," Xeras explained. "I am simply telling you my life experience." The shepherd vehemently opposed Berisha's "market reforms," and took up arms against the hated DP regime in 1997. He also did not think highly of the current orientation of the SP regime towards "the West." Both the Socialist Party and Democratic Party are largely run by former Communist Party officials who went their separate ways at the beginning of this decade, leading to the dissolution of the ruling stratum as a coherent caste.The main good thing that happened since 1990, as Xeras put it, "is that the borders opened so young people can immigrate and we have a little more freedom to express ourselves."

No to privatization
Many of Xeras's views were shared by a number of industrial workers we interviewed at the TEC thermoelectric plant in Fier, the Ballshi oil refinery, the Rekor shoe factory in Gjirokaster, and elsewhere. In fact, compared to interviews we did last year, we found that opposition to privatization of state-owned industries increased.

At the TEC plant in Fier only one of the dozen or so workers who spoke to us supported privatization of the complex, which employs 700 workers. Even the plant manager, Lirim Alisinani, was against it this time. The former director, one of Berisha's men who had pushed hard to place the plant on a long list for sale to foreign investors, was replaced two years ago in the aftermath of the 1997 revolt. Armando Bardo, an electrical engineer there, laughed when asked about it. "Privatization?" he said. "Why? It will only mean layoffs, probably a wage cut and loss of paid holidays." Workers there make 14,000 to 25,000 lek per month, a relatively high wage in Albania. They have 60 days vacation a year, as well as health insurance and paid meals at work.

The cost of a loaf of bread is 70 lek. A kilogram of meat costs 600 lek and a kilogram of tomatoes 200 lek. So food costs are high for most workers, whose average daily take-home pay is around 400 lek.

At the Ballshi oil refinery, where most workers had pinned their hopes on an Australian company, Caravoil, buying a majority stake in the refinery up to last year, opinions were much more divided this time. The facility has been running at 20 percent capacity for the last two years, having suffered serious damages during the rebellion and plagued by old, largely Chinese, technology. Even one of the administrators there was not too keen about the Australian investor this time. He pointed to another smaller refinery in the area bought by an Australian company, which was "destroyed" by the capitalist investors. Production decreased from 500 to 300 tons of oil per day and workers did not see any wages for months. "It was a disaster," Baftiar Aslani, head of planning, said. But the administrator pinned his hopes for reviving the Ballshi refinery on finding a "strong investor from Europe, not like the Australian."

A number of the workers had different opinions, though. Sali Saliu, a young operator at the hydrogen unit, said in response to comments by a supervisor that only U.S. investments can save the day: "Their plans for foreign investment are OK, if it means improving technology and production. But the union is never going to accept layoffs of two-thirds of the workforce that the Australian company wanted." At the Ballshi refinery, 200 of the workforce of 1,500 were put on long-term holiday last year because of the drop in production for the last half decade. But even these workers get full pay for two years before going to unemployment compensation.

These workers and their stance seem to have kept the capitalists away.

Among these workers we found the strongest opposition to the U.S.-NATO assault on Yugoslavia. "You can call me a pacifist, but I am against the bombing," said Trifon Tashi, a turbine operator who has worked for 31 years at the TEC plant. He was arguing against one of his co-workers, Eduard Velaj, who said the NATO assault could help stop "ethnic cleansing" in Kosova. Saliu at the Ballshi oil refinery also opposed the imperialist assault.

At the Rekor Albania S.A. shoe company, half the workers interviewed expressed open opposition to or questioned Washington's course. It was the highest percentage among all the workplaces we visited. "I just don't like NATO," said Melpomeni Dimitraki Vrenja, a sewing machine operator. "We didn't have a good experience when the Italian and Greek troops came here two years ago."

Catherina Tirsen from Stockholm, Sweden, and Bobbis Misailides from Athens, Greece, contributed to this article.

 
 
 
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