They are leaving. Some across the border, some by ship, some through the embassies. They are leaving with everything. Frightened, hopeless, hopeful, sad, crying, laughing because at last they have made it. Others remain here, groaning, waiting, praying, hoping. Where are they going, what are these others waiting for?… Nothing is known. We wait until foreign radio and television stations begin their news broadcasts. Do these people have a God?!… God was overthrown by party directive in 1967, once and for all. The wretched, or those in a moment of joy, turn their heads toward the sky and gaze somewhere. Somewhere. But where is He? I am He, I am God. The Party of Labour of Albania said—the leadership of Albania’s only party. Believe in me; heaven and earth are in my hands, said the Party, with Enver Hoxha at its head; all you have to do is believe. A happy future awaits you; the “bright prospects” were opened up for our country under the leadership of Comrade Enver’s only party. There are the prospects. The ships filled up with children, with old people, with young people, with women who are about to give birth. Albania’s borders are being breached here and there, and people do not stop for bullets. They surge toward the embassies of bourgeois and revisionist countries, where people suffer just to get bread to eat. Are all the people leaving? They are not there. They are not there in every sense. “What kind of parent am I if I have no bread at home for my child?” a parent came and told us at the newsroom these days. Where is God, children, the brightest God of the human world? These people, at last these people, may be able to keep someone in their thoughts. Children have filled the ships and are leaving; they have climbed the walls of embassies and are asking for freedom beyond them. Someone has also been struck by a bullet in the street, or near their home, or inside their home. Or our children are… “Does this country have a God?!” Illus. F. Thaçi The ships filled up with children, with the elderly, with young people, with women who are fleeing. do not stop for bullets. They stream suffer for their daily bread. Everyone is trying to save their lives. Where is the God now who is called the Party of Labour? It seems it was never a God. Where is the government? I stayed in Durrës for three days in a row and did not see it. It is nowhere at the border. In Vlorë, as our comrades report, it has not been seen. The government, which holds the seal of the people’s power, has neither the courage nor the right to appear before the people and tell them: stay in your country, live. It seems to me the government has only a few comfortable offices and one person at its disposal to write the texts of statements saying that “external and internal enemies are causing this exodus.” The government, too, is no God to these people. Where is the “greatest power”: mothers and fathers? Stop your children, stop these young people, so they will stay on their own soil and love their mothers and fathers!... Oh, whom am I praying to? They are not there. There are no more mothers and fathers. “The Mother is the Party.” We have been saying this for half a century. “We should oppose our father at meetings and with wall posters, in front of the whole world.” We drove God—the family—away. Now let us find it, now that people, at last, can keep a human being in mind. The climbed the walls of the embassies and are asking for [asylum?]. Bullets have also taken to the streets, or to the area near the home, or inside the home. Or we have given the children other labels: some are hooligans, some disobedient, some even enemy forces. The children are no longer gods. The god is a person’s land; it is the land and sky of one’s own homeland. There, among them, a person has life and death, has that little bit of property and that space from which they get light and air. Where is the Albanian person’s property? They have no property; property is bourgeois, we have said until now, and we do not want it. We handed over people’s property to the state: we handed over the land, livestock, river, minerals, forest, everything. Where are these things now? No one knows. Only the people of the leadership, Enver’s relatives, agreed to be wealthy. People are leaving precisely because they lack everything. Who can stand before these people and tell them today to stay here, at their own hearth? Or tell them: go to such-and-such a place; this job and this person are waiting for you there, and may you arrive safely? No one. People now have to choose their own God. The true and unchanging God is Albania. Let us make Albania our God and listen to it

“Does this country have a God?!” Illus. F. Thaçi

Albania is failing to make the transition to democracy without pain. Indeed, new pain is being added to the old. Here, democracy is arriving amid the noise of tanks in the streets of the capital and other cities, with armed military patrols that bring to mind a state of occupation, with tracking dogs unleashed on angry, rampaging crowds, with bursts of machine-gun fire late at night and in broad daylight. Democracy is arriving across an unprecedented landscape of demonstrations and aggression, brutality and revanchism, with prisons and mass beatings. Democracy is arriving with insecurity in the streets and in homes, with Albanian blood being shed by Albanians, with no one sparing even the children. Thus the offspring of the crumbling system in power—those who stand to lose everything through democracy, the patriots of the “lost paradise” of antidemocratic dictatorship, the nostalgics for privileges seized and protected by totalitarianism—want to blame democracy and smother it at birth. To deepen further this extremely grave situation, deliberately created for dark, putschist, anti-national purposes, Albanian blood from our homes and streets is now flowing in a torrent into the Adriatic, to be scattered along the roads of Europe and the world. Thousands of young men, fellow countrymen, brothers without sisters, children without parents, mothers without children—a whole flood of despair—is abandoning the Fatherland, abandoning everything sacred in the Fatherland. This is our blood; it is the forced and painful hemorrhage of our body, exhausted and battered, of democracy, which they are trying to make emigrate urgently and at any cost, through any crime, into exile before the elections, into exile so as to win even one more candidate. In the face of this true tragedy, the Albanian bureaucracy in power and its representatives are reactivating the old Stalinist schemes that caused this very situation, blaming “the country’s external and internal enemies.” Who are these anonymous enemies? The Council of Ministers, which used this language in one of its statements in recent days, is presumed to have information about them. Consequently, so too must the Albanian government and the leadership of the PP. The statement does not hesitate to issue an open appeal—or accusation—addressed to none other than “all citizens, calling on them to stop such actions, which are dangerous to the line of independence and the Fatherland.” Such monstrous accusations against an entire people, “maimed in body and soul,” can be made only by individuals, castes, or strata who, having finally separated and distanced themselves from the people, feel in their conscience that they have betrayed its interests, and are therefore afraid of it and want to invent pretexts to suppress it. No “external or internal enemy” is responsible for the extremely tense and explosive situation we are unfortunately living through today. Our bureaucrats, schooled by the Party and with Enver Hoxha’s teachings in their minds and hearts, cannot fail to remember that the internal factor is always decisive and that politics is the concentrated expression of the economy. Here, too, they must look for the origin and continuation of this dizzying slide toward a tragic end, to which they have brought the country and consigned Albanian youth, the sons and daughters of this people. The leaders of the PP have declared in recent days that “there are no legal or practical restrictions on the movement of people, inside or outside the country.” They know reality only through reports from zealous apparatchiks who do not want to spoil their mood. The Albanian Telegraphic Agency, under the complete control of the PP, admits that Albanians are leaving, “without taking into account the risks that threaten them during such journeys from the weather, the poor technical condition of the ships, and the border guards.” They are risking everything, ready to lose everything, because they no longer have any faith; they are in a complete crisis of trust, in a state of total insecurity. They take risks because they think they have nothing left to lose, because the army and tanks in the streets, ordered there by those in power, have threatened even the one thing they still had: their insecure lives. These people are victims of the dying pseudocialist demoni(a)cal system, its wretches, victims of unbridled and unrestrained ambitions and egoism for power. Even on this day of genuine national mourning, in this situation on the scale of a national tragedy, the highest leadership of the PP does not stop, wherever appropriate and inappropriate, looking back to trumpet “the successes achieved during the 46 postwar years,” a period during which “the progress has been enormously clear.” The only thing that can be criticized, according to them, is that “more could have been done.” So this is why Albania has been abandoned by the enemies and the bread-snatchers who do not want to rejoice in 46 years of victories, by those who were not satisfied because more could have been done! No, “comrades”—gentlemen, that is not how it works. You might speak this way to foreign friends on some occasion, but not to the Albanian people any longer. The magnificent successes, the monumental works, the occasional shortcoming included just so we can say we are not without flaws, the uninterrupted rise in the material and spiritual well-being of the working masses, and so on—these stock phrases with Slavo-Byzantine overtones, had they been reality, would surely have kept us firmly rooted in the land of our ancestors. But in Albania, the people have been guaranteed neither life nor death. They remain indebted to both life and death. This dreadful “gift” still follows us like our own shadow. That is why, after 500 years, the scattered blood of the Arbër is once again dispersing beyond the Adriatic, toward the unknown, toward mercy, in search of life, in search of the right to live as human beings.

As has been announced, Albanian Television has drawn up a special program for debate, dialogue, and the exchange of views among political parties during the election campaign. In this context, television viewers have been following with interest the press conferences of political parties broadcast by television recently. In accordance with the program drawn up by television for the election campaign, the phase of debates among the parties about their programs was supposed to begin these days. The Democratic Party invited the Party of Labour to debate the problems of rural development and agriculture in the future. Nexhmedin Dumani, an employee of the PPSH Central Committee apparatus, refused to hold this debate. He said that, for the PPSH, the articles published in the Party newspaper were enough. Thus, the PPSH refuses the debate.

Here is another test and another honor for our democracy CONTINUATION OF THE PARIS–BRUSSELS–RETURN REPORTAGE During its visit to Europe, the Democratic Party delegation—sometimes deliberately, sometimes by chance—also encountered Albanian emigrants in France and Belgium. Achieving national reconciliation among Albanians, whom the rule of a single ideology has scattered here and there around the world like birds of ill omen, is one of the key points in the DP’s program. The delegation was therefore prepared for the old prejudices on this subject, all the more so since, as later became clear, most Albanian emigrants are boys and girls who were born outside the homeland, educated there, and have preserved their national identity and ardent love for Albania to an exemplary degree. These boys and girls speak and read Albanian; just as they speak French, they keep tapes of Albanian songs in their cars and portraits of Skënderbeu, Ismail Qemali, Fan Noli, and Bajram Curri in their homes. These boys and girls, richly endowed, contribute to the progress of other nations, where, despite being respected, they feel like strangers—always strangers—forever awaiting the day when their parents’ homeland will open its door to recognize them as its own children. All of them, wherever you meet them, in Paris or Brussels, ask a question that strikes you right in the heart: Does Albania’s youth know that here, in this foreign land, we are part of them and dream of returning there as ordinary citizens, with the right to reside, vote, and so on? Is Albania’s youth aware that there is a new generation of Albanians in the world, a generation innocent of and not responsible for the mistakes or faults of their parents and grandparents, a generation that dreams of a democratic Albania where we can all live together in peace and understanding? Nuhu, Besniku, Skënderi, Zana, Naimi, Duraku, Kujtimi, Sara, and so many others in Paris and Brussels asked me these questions. One Sunday I went to the Church of Saint Mary in Brussels. I saw those beautiful children, like angels, praying to God that no blood be shed in Albania, that democracy prevail without bloodshed. They were holding the hands of their parents or grandparents, who were also praying for the homeland. The young people and children had seen Albania only on a map; they knew where their mother was, but they had no right to touch or kiss her. They prayed with their hands raised, and the church dome answered their prayers with the echo of the sobbing elegies of old songs, with wandering fiddlers. I could not hold back my tears. My God, I said to myself, why are these children here, why are these beautiful people here? They are there because their parents or grandparents are there? these children here, why are these beautiful people here? (Continued on page 2)

The first pluralist elections, which will be held on March 31 in Albania, have also aroused the interest of international public opinion. Albania to be held on March 31 in Albania, have also aroused the interest of international public opinion. Numerous foreign journalists and observers have asked to come to our country to report objectively on how they are conducted. It is a very positive step that the Presidium of the People’s Assembly, as has been announced, approved the decision to admit them during the campaign and the conduct of the free elections of March 31 in Albania. However, it is incomprehensible that, despite this decision, our country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is creating numerous difficulties to prevent the Presidium of the People’s Assembly’s decision from being fully and inevitably put into practice. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responding to the numerous requests from foreign journalists and observers with bureaucratic delays, from the standpoint of the one-sided interests of the party in power. It is making selections and distinctions, generally allowing journalists to come to Albania who have given “proof” of embellishing or failing to portray Albanian reality objectively, as suited the PPSH. For other journalists and observers, who have not passed this “test,” officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are making all kinds of absurd excuses to prevent them from coming to Albania, such as the difficult situation the country is going through, the lack of food and hotels, etc. The free elections of March 31, as one would expect, also presuppose the free expression of different opinions about how they are conducted. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs apparently fears this. But it is not the Foreign Directorate of the Central Committee of the PPSH. Such actions therefore cannot be acceptable to Albanian and international democratic pluralist public opinion.

Let us restore to people our hope that Albania will join the family of European nations. [caption] Photo of Tom Lantos. During our visit, former American congressman and president of the Albanian League in the USA, Xhozef Dioguardi, was invited by Sabri Godo, chairman of the Ministerial Commission of the Republican Party. At Rinas airport, Mr. Dioguardi stressed: “I have come here today as an Arbëresh brother who has not forgotten our homeland for more than five centuries. In June, during my first visit to Albania with Congressman Tom Lantos, we expressed our hope that Albania would join the family of European nations. Albania is in Europe. Now we are seeing that Albanians are fighting courageously to make a name and a place for themselves in the community of European nations.” During the interview Mr. Dioguardi gave us after his arrival here, he once again expressed the hope he and the entire Albanian community in the United States of America share: that Albania will move forward on the path of further democratization, which will help it integrate into European processes and the political and economic institutions of the European Common Market. “I want to help the political processes here, to hear the views of the different parties,” he emphasized. Mr. Dioguardi also told us that he is affiliated with the “National Republican Institute” in the USA and that, during this month, in cooperation with this institute, he will find ways to bring specialists here whose experience will help the democratic forces present themselves as well as possible during the election campaign. The elections are an extremely important moment for Albania, because the country’s future will also depend on how they are conducted. The world must believe that free elections are being held in Albania; only by taking this path can we win political confidence. Only then will we bring businessmen to invest here. When we asked Mr. Dioguardi whether the Albanians of America would be ready to bring their capital here to help overcome the severe economic crisis the country is experiencing, he paused for a moment and told us that this, too, depends on how Albania progresses along the path of democratization. These things are connected. Albania was isolated for years by the implementation of rigid ideologies. Albanians living in America have been as far away as an ocean from their homeland and from communicating with it, just like foreigners. In closing, Mr. Dioguardi stressed: “We in the United States of America firmly believe that Albania will get through these difficult days with wisdom and tolerance and will soon see itself as a permanent member of the great European family. We also wish to express our admiration for the pioneers of the democratic movement in Albania. We wish to express our gratitude and thanks to them for giving us the opportunity to see with our own eyes how democracy is being built in Albania.” Mr. Dioguardi will return to the USA on Monday and will come back again before the election campaign begins. Tirana, March 8, 1991.

The ships filled up with children, with the elderly, with young people, with women who are fleeing.

The first pluralist elections, which will be held in Albania on 31 March, have aroused particular interest in international public opinion.