Word: albania
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...Should Harvard divest from companies doing business in Albania...
...Albania, an isolated, mountainous country of 2.9 million people, is a place of bleak statistics. It is Europe's poorest nation, and one of the world's most closed societies. Its harsh internal policies place it among the last bastions of Stalinism. This is the legacy of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hod-ja), Albania's leader since 1944, who died last week from heart disease at 76. For more than 40 years Hoxha kept his tiny country on what he considered the only true path to Communism: self-reliance, total party control and a suspicion of outsiders that...
Hoxha's successor is Ramiz Alia, 59, who was named the new party chief on Saturday. Most observers believe that Alia, Albania's President since 1982, has been the effective ruler since Hoxha began to withdraw from public view last year because of poor health and a desire to add to his published works, which at his death ran to 39 volumes...
Hoxha's death comes at a time when Albania has been making economic overtures to the West. Last year trade accords were signed with Italy, Greece, Turkey and Austria. Albanian relations with Moscow are likely to remain strained, a fact that was emphasized last week when Albania rejected the Soviets' message of condolence. "We will have nothing to do with them," a spokesman for the Albanian embassy in Vienna told Reuters. Hoxha broke with Moscow over Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization drive in the early 1960s. He later accepted $5 billion in economic assistance from China, but that relationship soured...
Hoxha, the product of a middle-class Muslim home and a French education, rose to power as head of the partisan resistance to the German and Italian occupation in World War II. He ruled Albania ruthlessly, sending tens of thousands to forced-labor camps. He tolerated no political opposition, and his rivals were frequently eliminated, including Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, his closest associate. Shehu was officially reported to have committed suicide in December 1981, but it was widely rumored that Hoxha shot him in an argument over seeking ties with the West, which Hoxha then opposed...