TIRANA, January 2 — Last night a special meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers was held, chaired by Comrade Adil Çarçani, the prime minister, and attended by several members of the government. On this occasion, the situation that has arisen in recent days on the Albanian-Greek border was reviewed. An unprecedented number of citizens have crossed the border illegally in the Saranda district, most of them members of the Greek minority in Albania. Among those who crossed the border are many people who have long lacked valid passports but had previously been unable to obtain visas from the Greek consulate in Tirana. The meeting emphasized that the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania has neither encouraged nor is encouraging its citizens to leave their country, as various sources claim. The Albanian government has shown special care and attention to the equal development of the Greek minority alongside their Albanian brothers in Albania. It respects international norms, and Albanian legislation guarantees every individual who wishes to do so the right to travel abroad. Therefore, there is no reason to cross the border illegally. At the meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, it was underscored that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania is in contact with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic to prevent such an abnormal situation. The Presidium of the Council of Ministers decided to establish a government team to inspect and follow the situation closely. (ATSH)

— Meeting at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs — The ATSH correspondent learned that Albania’s ambassador in Athens, Mr. Izedin Hajdini, had a meeting yesterday with Ambassador Megalokonomi, Deputy Secretary-General of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during which the situation that has arisen on the Albanian-Greek border in connection with illegal crossings was discussed. During the meeting, the representative of the Greek Foreign Ministry confirmed the statement made yesterday by Greek Prime Minister Kostandin Micotaqis, who, according to the Greek press, stressed, among other things, that members of the minority should remain in Albania. Ambassador Megalokonomi also told the Albanian ambassador that Greece does not want Albanian citizens to leave their country. They are Albanian citizens, he noted, and should work and live in Albania. (ATSH)

At the meeting we held today, on 2.01.1991, with Mr. Imeri Muharremi, head of visas at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it emerged that during 1990 about 22,000 passports were issued to our citizens for travel to Greece. In the Gjirokastër and Saranda districts alone, 9,700 passports were distributed, while 500 passports have been prepared for distribution. Of these, around 8,700 passports belong to Greek citizens in the Gjirokastër and Saranda districts. About 1,400 people from Gjirokastër and around 2,000 people from Saranda have travelled to Greece. The others, nearly 5,800 people, have not yet received their visas. We emphasize that around 1,000 citizens from Gjirokastër, Saranda, etc., gather every day in front of the Greek embassy, abandoning their work for months at a time. (ATSH)

TIRANA Greetings filled with commitments and optimism The greeting that Comrade Ramiz Alia addressed to the Albanian people on the occasion of the New Year was not only a message but also a warm wish. In the leader’s words was a heartfelt appeal to make 1991 a year of great work for the benefit of the people and the homeland. This wish multiplied everyone’s greetings, adding to their good wishes a commitment to work harder, a promise of greater perseverance, and the optimism that democratic processes would steadily move forward and deepen. — On the night that divided 1990 from 1991, we worked without interruption, railway station employee Fiti[m?] K[o?]r[r?]si tells us. The engine drivers Hajdar Limani, Ilir Laze, and others were at their posts. Thanas Dede, director of the Mëzez mine, feels a mix of emotions in these first days of 1991. He experiences the natural joy brought by the traditional holiday, but also the legitimate concern about the tasks ahead. — Like people, we have al... (Continued on page 2)

It is everyone’s duty—the people’s and their power’s—to strengthen and continuously prosper the homeland.

OF THE PARTY OF LABOUR OF ALBANIA FOR THE ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN AND THE NEXT THREE LEGISLATURES I The present elections of deputies to the People’s Assembly are taking place under conditions in which the democratic development of our society has entered a qualitatively new phase. History and the present day give the Party of Labour of Albania the legitimate and moral right to address the Albanian people with a call to vote for its candidates and its program. Our Party entered political life when Albania was occupied by foreigners and abandoned by everyone. Inheriting and further enriching the finest traditions of our history, it organized and led the National Liberation Anti-Fascist War and founded the new Albanian state. The Party of Labour, headed by Comrade Enver Hoxha, has historic merits for providing the people with a political program that enabled Albania, a small and very backward country, to break once and for all with the semi-feudal economic and social structures of the past and embark on the path of industrialization, development, and economic and cultural progress. Under the Party’s leadership, a series of genuine social equalities were secured for the entire population; freedom and independence, identity and state sovereignty were preserved and consolidated under the conditions of the Cold War and a Europe divided into antagonistic blocs. Under its leadership, on the road to socialism, Albania was able to create stable economic structures and achieve rapid educational, cultural, and scientific progress, ensure equal status for all citizens, and realize the unity of the people, as an indispensable condition for defending the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of the Homeland. The Party has aimed, and continues to aim, to build a just and democratic society in which everyone is valued and rewarded according to the work they do and the contribution they make to society’s progress. It is its historic commitment to preserve these values and enrich them with the achievements of contemporary civilization. II To guarantee continuity in carrying out and deepening the historic initiatives it has undertaken, the PPSH sets the following objectives: 4. The PPSH has drawn, and will continue to draw, lessons from both positive and negative experience. Albanian communists, as always, have both the courage and the will, in the name of the future and for the good of the people, to correct every outdated practice, every shortcoming and mistake that may have been made. They will resolutely fight conservative, sectarian, or liberal tendencies wherever they appear, inside or outside its ranks. 5. The Party is fully determined to perfect all its ideological, political, and organizational activity so that its role in society and the social system may grow in keeping with the demands of the times. It will enrich its program and renew its methods and working style to make way for new progressive developments. The Party will undertake a comprehensive reorganization at every level and in every link, to free itself from oversized apparatuses and transform itself into a fighting organization. The period leading up to the next congress will serve for a general renewal of the composition of its forums, from the center to the grassroots. Changes will also be made to the criteria for admission to the Party to help further improve its composition. 6. In the future, too, the Party will work closely with mass organizations, consistently fighting to preserve and strengthen the unity of the people; to defend and expand the rights of the working class; to protect the interests of the social strata and advance the countryside; to increase the role of the intelligentsia; to create conditions for young people to grow up healthy, educated, cultured, and worthy of taking their future in their own hands tomorrow; and to support the women of Albania in their struggle for full emancipation and for enhancing the dignity and personality they have won. 7. Our Party favors loyal dialogue and proper, democratic relations with every political force that has emerged or will emerge within the country, provided these organizations are guided in their aims and actions by a national and democratic spirit and by the interests of the homeland, its freedom, and its independence. This profound restructuring is intended to be carried out in accordance with Albania’s concrete reality, its human, technical, professional, and material resources, and the traditions and psychology of the people. 2. The Party will work to overcome the difficult economic situation and its consequences as quickly as possible, and to normalize production and the market in raw materials and essential consumer goods, using domestic resources and credit. This is the first and indispensable step toward implementing the new economic mechanism. 3. Economic reform should aim at: — making more rational use of national wealth in accordance with the internal laws of the economy; — substantially improving the structure of the economy to increase its productivity and profitability, while limiting investment in heavy industry so that agriculture, the food industry, light industry, transport, and services for the people can develop more rapidly and with priority; — large-scale reconstruction and modernization of equipment and technology in all sectors, and renewal and expansion of infrastructure to meet the needs of the economy and the people; — increasing the quantity of goods and services and improving their quality to meet the people’s demands and the standards of the times; — increasing the overall efficiency of the economy and gradually eliminating loss-making and subsidized production, while taking the necessary measures to ensure stability in people’s employment and standard of living; — gradually decentralizing and reorganizing production and services into as many medium-sized and small units as possible, in order to reduce and eliminate monopoly positions in the market and in price-setting, and to make way for competition that promotes economic efficiency and quality; — gradually bringing domestic prices closer to value, and doing the same in foreign trade. This should be accompanied by strengthening the link between wages and profits for workers, cooperative members, and the production intelligentsia. III the following political objectives: 1. As the initiator and leader of many broad and profound democratic reforms, to resolutely ensure that today’s processes move forward without stopping. (It is committed to devoting all its strength to the political system and the effective realization of the role of bodies elected by the people. The adoption of the new Constitution, another important initiative of the Party, which opens the way to further democratic developments, will also serve this purpose.) 2. To fight for the creation of a legal system that guarantees human rights in accordance with contemporary European standards and with our country’s official commitments in various international forums and organizations, while preserving our spiritual, national, and popular values. The Party will fight for respect for freedom of conscience and belief, our good traditions and customs, the particularities of different ethnic and social groups, and the development of a culture based on national, popular, and democratic foundations. 3. One of the Party’s main aims will be to strengthen the rule of law. It is committed to a precise and clear separation between state activity and party activity. The PPSH will support the adoption of legislation ensuring that relations between individuals, collectives, organizations, and institutions and the state are governed by legal norms and not merely publicly. The Party considers it necessary, and will work to ensure, that the activities of all state bodies and agencies and of the justice system ... 7. Our Party is in favor of loyal dialogue and correct, will emerge within the country, provided that the homeland, its freedom and independence. III The Party’s economic program is founded on achieving, under new conditions, the fundamental goal to which it is devoted: caring for people and their well-being, and creating the necessary conditions to meet the material and spiritual needs of the people. The implementation of this fundamental law of a democratic society will be supported by special legal and economic measures to ensure that the interests of all social strata are properly valued. The Party undertakes, during the next legislature, to fight for the achievement of the following economic and social objectives: 1. To implement the radical economic reform that has been undertaken to replace the system of centralized command and administration with market-economy mechanisms, in which the large state sector will compete and coordinate with the cooperative and private sectors, and the state’s balancing role with free initiative. It will work to ensure that the state creates the necessary legal conditions for the comprehensive development of joint and individual economic initiative, within a diverse system of ownership, work and markets, aiming for collective structures of production and consumption to play the role of regulator in economic life. To this end, efforts will be made to bring about the necessary changes and harmonization in the relationship between planning and the market, and between prices and wages, so as to guarantee the interests of producers and consumers. — gradually bringing domestic prices into line with value, as well as prices the production intelligentsia. 4. To implement its food program, the Party will strive to complete the investment cycle in agriculture, so that the advantages offered by our climate and the presence of a workforce in the countryside are used with high efficiency. A key priority should be intensifying production further and improving production structures, with the aim of making maximum use of the land and increasing the independence of agricultural production from weather conditions. During the next legislature, the Party will work to ensure that agricultural cooperatives have autonomy and a broad scope of action, while deepening cooperative democracy; that collectivization in agriculture takes more diverse forms of organization and remuneration, in order to encourage and realize the initiative of cooperatives in various activities throughout the agricultural sector and that of rural families in developing production on their household plots; and that economic incentives are further differentiated in favor of hilly and mountainous areas. Given the conditions in our country, with its limited agricultural land, an advanced agrarian system based on the cooperative as a profitable economic entity is in the interests of the peasantry itself and of the entire people. In the future, the Party will support the peasantry’s initiatives to develop other forms of cooperation that meet (Continued on page 2)