[ALBSA-Info] Finally a decent article

[ira panajoti]

     I was reading the following article and it really
made me think: we have a whole team of athletes
leading the country.  My God are we headed for
success!(I am sure this comment is bound to produce
uproar as any of my comments seem to do.  Whatever the
case, I apologize to the opposition for any hurt
feelings and welcome any reactions)
--- Kreshnik Bejko <kbejko at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> Albania
> 
> Getting better
> Feb 22nd 2001 | TIRANA
> From The Economist print edition
> 
> 
> 
> Meta-morphosis
> 
> CURIOUS things happen in the capital of a country
> that used to be called the 
> poorest in Europe, until Moldova took that title.
> Last year, the opera 
> singers in Tirana went on hunger strike, because
> Albania’s government wanted 
> to pay the divas a lot more than the chorus. This
> year, the problem is the 
> zoo: the zoo-keepers survived the dark years of the
> mid-1990s by snaffling 
> the lions’ meat rations and feeding some of the
> weaker creatures to the 
> carnivores. When stocks ran out, the lions were fed
> with hay: “We have the 
> world’s only vegetarian lions,” jokes Edi Rama,
> Tirana’s mayor.
> 
> Mr Rama is one of the reasons to hope that life in
> Albania will grow more 
> conventional in the next few years. A former
> basketball star, he worked as 
> an artist in Paris before returning in 1997 to
> become minister of culture in 
> a coalition government led by Ilir Meta (a former
> weightlifter) and his 
> ex-communist Socialists. Since Mr Rama became
> Tirana’s mayor in October last 
> year, he has set about trying to improve tax
> collection, stamp out the 
> illegal building projects that deface the city’s
> skyline, clear illegal 
> stalls from its few parks and persuade local shops
> to help mend the potholed 
> pavements. If he had his way, he would also get the
> EU to help with 
> education. He dreams of a Balkan university in
> Tirana, offering courses in 
> how multi-ethnic societies can work.
> 
> On the wider front, Mr Meta shares Mr Rama’s desire
> to make Albania more 
> democratic and orderly, with a market economy whose
> rules people actually 
> obey. Mr Meta says his main achievement in 14 months
> as prime minister has 
> been to cut crime, clean up the customs service and
> boost the tax take. Now 
> he says he wants a civil service independent of
> politics. He has brought 
> into his government a clutch of young technocrats,
> some under 30, without 
> party-political baggage. At 31, he is too young to
> be weighed down by any 
> himself.
> 
> On the face of it, the economy is doing nicely: this
> year, for the third in 
> a row, it should grow by more than 7%. The currency,
> the lek, has been 
> stable; inflation last year was 2%; and remittances
> from abroad, where about 
> a quarter of Albania’s people of working age have
> gone since communism ended 
> a decade ago, are paying for a building boom.
> 
> Some of the growth is rebound from the havoc caused
> by the financial crisis 
> of 1997, when half the people in the country saw
> their savings wiped out as 
> a string of bogus pyramid banking schemes collapsed.
> The economy crashed to 
> just about where it had been when the communists
> bowed out in 1991. Foreign 
> investors fled and are only tentatively reappearing:
> a Greek-Norwegian 
> consortium has bought the company that operates
> Albania’s first mobile-phone 
> network, for instance; and a Greek-British one has
> bought the second 
> mobile-phone licence. Few local firms are anything
> but tiny.
> 
> Change will take more than investment. This is a
> country where the brightest 
> and best pile into motorboats for the scary trip
> across the Adriatic to 
> Italy: of the 1m or so Albanians living outside the
> country, guesses Mr 
> Rama, fewer than a fifth left with valid visas. In
> addition, corruption has 
> been the normal route to advancement. Some of the
> new lot are no angels; but 
> most outsiders reckon that corruption has diminished
> a bit.
> 
> Grinding poverty is still pervasive: annual GDP is
> around $1,000 a head, 
> more than a dozen times less than it is in Greece,
> across the southern 
> border. Roads are dire. This winter, power cuts have
> been repeatedly 
> plunging the country into darkness and caused havoc
> at a giant Turkish-owned 
> steel plant in Elbasan.
> 
> Even so, with a general election due in June, the
> coalition has a fair 
> chance of winning again; that would be quite a feat,
> in a region where 
> enthusiasm for “throwing the rascals out” has rarely
> let governments serve a 
> second term. Support for the opposition Democratic
> Party, led by Sali 
> Berisha, Albania’s first post-communist president,
> may be dipping.
> 
> If Mr Meta wins, he says he wants to keep on trying
> to drag his country into 
> the wider Balkan market, a process that should be
> helped by the recent 
> restoration of political relations with Yugoslavia.
> His greater goal is to 
> forge links with the EU, which appreciated Albania’s
> restraint during NATO’s 
> war in mainly ethnic-Albanian Kosovo.
> 
>
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