Word: albania
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gymnastics and girl watching, perfection is a 10. In bowling, a perfect score is 300. In a perfect baseball game, no one gets on base. Last week Communist Albania accomplished an astonishing record: almost perfect parliamentary elections. Every one of the country's 1,830,653 registered voters cast a ballot, and all candidates selected by the Albanian Labor Party won 100% of the votes counted. But alas, a single ballot was declared invalid by officials. Wait till next year...
...Albania's quirky defiance of the rest of the world is rooted in a long history of foreign domination. After Communist partisans led by Hoxha defeated German occupiers and internal opponents in 1944 and grabbed power, Hoxha imposed a centrally planned economy and established total control through the feared secret police, the Sigurimi. In the years that followed, he distanced Albania from other Communist countries. Enraged by Nikita Khrushchev's de- Stalinization campaign, Hoxha broke with Moscow in 1961. When the Chinese began to experiment with reform in the late '70s, he denounced them as "revisionists," and effectively...
...Albania is a small (11,100 sq. mi., pop. 3 million) mountainous country of great beauty. Fewer than 300,000 inhabitants live in Tirane, the capital; 85% of the people reside in towns and villages. Small factories produce such goods as rough textiles, canned foods, glassware and machine parts. The economy is stagnant, in part because of an almost pathological aversion to debt. The constitution outlaws acceptance of foreign credits, thus making Albania's outside trade dependent on barter deals or the cash sale of its exports, which include chromium, oil and agricultural products. The economy is also crippled...
Economic self-reliance has gone hand in hand with militant nationalism. Beginning in the early '60s, Albania sprouted bunkers with narrow gun slits -- the result of a Hoxha-inspired defense campaign trumpeting the threat of imminent invasion by East and West. The regime has iron control over its population. In 1967 Hoxha launched a purge in which Muslim mullahs and Christian ministers were stripped of their duties and sent to farm and labor camps; some Catholic priests who resisted were killed. Result: the suppression of organized religion...
...Albania's economy cannot improve, however, without an opening to the outside world. Toward the end of the Hoxha era, Tirane began to accept that fact by increasing diplomatic contacts. Albania now has formal relations with 104 countries, double that of the late '70s. And at the party congress, Alia called for further increases in foreign trade. A key step in this direction came earlier this year when the Albanian stretch of a 40-mile rail link, for freight trains only, was opened between the town of Shkoder and the Yugoslav city of Titograd. The Albanians have also made deals...