Online NewsHour: Understanding Albania -- April 13, 1999



	UNDERSTANDING ALBANIA

April 13, 1999

Since the NATO bombing began, Albania has been inundated by an estimated 300,000 refugees. Now, Serbian troops have invaded Albania for a short time. After a report from ITN, Margaret Warner gives some historical background and talks to some experts about the impoverished country.

April 13, 1999
Experts discuss the latest action in Albania

Strikes in Yugoslavia Coverage

April 13, 1999:
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook provides and update on the miltiary campaign in Yugoslavia

April 12, 1999:
Four senators react to the strikes in Yugoslavia.

April 1, 1997
Albania is wracked with civil unrest.

March 14, 1997
Albania in anarchy.

March 10, 1997
Albania's economy is destroyed by pyramid schemes.

Complete NewsHour coverage Europe.

Office of the President of Albania.

NATO

Operation Allied Force (U.S. Defense Department)

JIM LEHRER: The possibility of expanding the Balkan war to Albania: We start with a report on today's fighting from Mark Austin of Independent Television News.

MARK AUSTIN, ITN: The Albanian village of Kamenica, on fire today after days of Serb shelling. For several hours, it was occupied by Serb forces, in an operation to attack the stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Serb bombardment left houses and villages all along this stretch of the border destroyed or badly damaged. The shelling brought terror to a local Albanian population well used to border skirmishes, but not on this scale. Women and children took refuge in underground shelters during the Serb attack. There is fear along this border of a major Serb invasion. Albanian security forces did not respond to the Serb action. This is a country that does not want to be drawn into the war with Serbia, although tonight, Albanian forces are reinforcing positions along this border. The Kosovo Liberation Army has bases all along Albania's mountainous border with Kosovo. It is from here that they launch many of their attacks. The Serb incursion into Albania and the taking of the village, however briefly, is an escalation of their fight with the KLA. From recruitment and training bases all along the border, thousands of KLA recruits are heading for Kosovo. But NATO will be greatly concerned by today's Serb actions.

CAPTAIN GRAHAM WILTSHIRE, British Defense: The shelling recently has been of an intensity and duration way beyond that which we've seen before, and that's worrying, and some of the munitions which I understand from the Albanian Army today have been forming cluster munitions and so on. That's a new development as well.

MARK AUSTIN: This week, up to 8,000 NATO troops will begin to arrive in Albania, a country now effectively under NATO's military control. They are intended to be on a humanitarian mission, but today's Serb incursion is an indication of how quickly things could change here.

'The poorest nation in Europe.'

JIM LEHRER: And to Margaret Warner, who begins with some background on Albania.

MARGARET WARNER: Albania is a rugged mountainous country on the Balkan peninsula, about the size of Maryland. It's commonly described as the poorest nation in Europe. Its 3.2 million people, mostly farmers and industrial workers, subsist on an average annual income of less than $550 a family.

Albania has been a predominantly Muslim nation since the Ottoman Turks conquered the Albanian lands in the 15th century. Its modern borders were established in 1913 after Turkey's defeat in the Balkan Wars. The new borders left hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians outside Albania, living in neighboring areas like Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Kosovo region of Serbia.

After World War II, Albania's new communist dictator, Enver Hoja, turned it into one of the most isolated countries in the world, practicing a virulent form of communism and breaking with the Soviet Union for abandoning true Marxism.

In 1991, after Hoja's death and the fall of communism throughout Eastern and Central Europe, Albania embarked on an experiment with democracy and economic reform, but the country's first elected president, Democratic Party Leader Salih Berisha, presided over further economic ruin.

Civil strife erupted in 1997 with the collapse of a government-backed pyramid investment scheme. Albanians lost more than a billion dollars in personal savings. Fifteen hundred people were killed in the anarchy that followed as warring factions armed themselves with weapons raided from government store houses. Thousands of others tried to flee to nearby countries like Yugoslavia and Italy across the Adriatic Sea. Berisha was voted out of office in 1997 but Albania has continued to be plagued by economic and political turmoil.

Now with the Kosovo Liberation Army operating in its border region, Albania is caught up in the struggle over Kosovo, an area Albania controlled during World War II. Further, since the NATO bombing campaign began, Albania has been inundated with an estimated 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo.