Word: tirana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When hundreds of Albanians braved police gunfire last week to seek refuge in a dozen foreign embassies in Tirana, few diplomats doubted their desire to leave Eastern Europe's last redoubt of doctrinaire communism. But many also suspected that the diplomatic missions were being used in a power struggle between hard-liners and reformers in the party leadership...
...East bloc regime after another was shaken by political change last fall, only one Communist government in Europe managed to withstand the political earthquake unscathed. Now, nearly six months later, the leadership of tiny Albania is finally loosening its ultra-orthodox Stalinist grip. Last week the legislature in Tirana voted a series of political and legal reforms that may mark the beginning of the end of decades of repression and isolation...
...Europe. Before it could have done that, however, it had to endorse some of CSCE's basic human-rights requirements, including freedom of travel and other civil rights guarantees. Even the United Nations is looking anew at Albania: Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar made his first visit to Tirana last week. In Washington a State Department spokeswoman has declared optimistically that "the door is open to the resumption of diplomatic relations" between the U.S. and Albania. Though the process has only begun, it seems clear that last year's political tremors accomplished what decades of isolation failed...