Word: albanians
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...electric cage that shocks the prisoner when he tries to straighten up or sit down. According to a United Nations survey, 80,000 of Albania's 1,700,000 citizens were thrown into concentration camps between 1945 and 1956, and 16,000 died there. Last spring, a dozen Albanian army and navy officers were tried, in an improvised courtroom in Tirana's Partisan Cinema, as pro-Soviet conspirators. Found guilty, they were marched right off to an adjacent vacant lot and executed by a firing squad...
...occasional tourist, the Sigurimi appear more comic than lethal. Whole platoons of gumshoes peel off two by two to shadow individual visitors. Any attempt to talk to an Albanian results in his being shouldered out of earshot by an agent. One tourist on the beach at Durres succeeded in evading his shadow by swimming out beyond the breakers to accost an Albanian girl in a bikini. The girl, treading water, said: "I would like to have a long talk with you, but you must know that in this country it is impossible...
Visitors seldom detect any Albanian tendency to criticize the government or the country's backwardness-and the Sigurimi are not the only reason. Traditionally proud, suspicious of foreigners, filled with a clannish loyalty, Albanians reply to complaints about their country with fierce anger. "That's the way it is," the average Albanian will splutter. "You just have to understand...
...donkey cart and the chauffeur-driven Mercedes from the state motor pool. Farm land is almost totally collectivized, and most peasants are virtually paid off with a lek and a promise. Tirana has a TV transmitter that broadcasts to a total of 200 TV sets owned by party officials. Albanian workers patch holes in their trousers with bits of vulcanized rubber, but in the new "jet class" "the men wear Italian-cut suits, and the girls have flaring cocktail dresses...
Chip on Shoulder. Soviet and satellite technicians have been replaced by Red Chinese experts since the break with Moscow. The Chinese draw the same low wages as their Albanian counterparts and earnestly spend their free time studying the difficult native language, but most of the xenophobic Albanians regard them as something straight out of a zoo. Chinese films are being shown at the numerous open-air cinemas (one visitor commented that Albania has "drive-in movies for pedestrians"), and in the darkness students frequently boo and whistle at the heavy propaganda...