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ALBANIA: Long and Winding Road Straightening Out

Altin Raxhimi

TIRANA, Apr 29 2007 (IPS) - For a corner of the world where until 17 years ago a foreign visitor was either the exotic Marxist-Leninist relishing the successes of a communist system or the adventurer looking for a good story to tell back home, Albania has made quite a jump.

About a fifth of the people that visited this country of three million as tourists last year were foreigners. Most came from within the region, but the country is now attracting a high numbers of visitors from more distant European countries.

“Albania still remains the last unknown place in Europe,” Ylli Pango, a psychiatrist who became minister for tourism last month told IPS. “And that is currently an asset.”

The country drew 900,000 tourists last year. A tenth were from the adjacent Albanian- inhabited Kosovo and Macedonia, and about as many either came on the transit bus along the Dalmatian coast down to Greece, or came adventure hiking in the mountains in the north of the country. The rest were locals mostly on beach holidays.

The number of visitors is expected to grow to more than a million this year. The first busloads and charters have arrived for the spring season.

“This is a change from that trickle of foreign groups (during communist days) that were monitored and spied upon at every step, to a stage when anyone can visit the country,” said Pango.

Albania is forcing itself into speedy modernisation the way most post-communist countries did. It has liberalised the economy, and changed politics into a functioning multi-party system.

The road had been bumpy, like most of its history.

Under the dictatorship of Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha from the Second World War to 1990, Albania invited many ills of self-imposed isolation.

An autarky that sought self-reliance and no flow of capital worsened the already bad roads. These were usually narrow lanes wound around hills for fear of offering enemy planes a landing strip. These are being straightened now to shorten distances and improve driving conditions.

Old Albania lived with a widespread housing problem. A fifth of the population migrated to the west since the country opened up, another fifth moved internally to cities.

During the mid-1990s, investment by hundreds of thousands of Albanians into dubious savings schemes plunged the country into anarchy. In 1999 Albania was hit further by the war over Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia dominated by ethnic Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Kosovo took shelter in Albania.

But the economy has been growing on average five percent a year since the end of the Kosovo war. Widespread construction is evident in major cities like capital Tirana and the coastal cities Durres and Vlore.

It is a country in the making – where people often make their own rules as well. Just about 30 of the country’s 600 hotels are registered and given accepted classification.

New buildings have mushroomed along a swathe of sandy beaches on the Adriatic coast, with little indication of planned development. Many have built summerhouses here.

The coast by the largest port Durres and the nearby village Golem has seen reckless development over the past ten years. This is a scene of continuing construction and piling garbage.

“We hope to save the rest of the country from this model, this Golemisation,” Jamarber Malltezi, who coordinates a chiefly World Bank-funded plan to develop the southern coast told IPS. “You don’t see communities benefit from building resorts that have a life for only three months in the summer, or from weekend houses, or just summer apartments.” In the winter Durres and Golem become ghostly.

Other resorts lack infrastructure. Some major roads are still not finished.

Yet, Albania has much to offer.

The many powers that rose and fell along the Mediterranean have left their traces. History lives in Greek towns all over the country, Roman remains and Venetian forts in Durres, and Ottoman bazaars in the central town Kruje.

Its northern Alps, an extension of the dramatic western Balkans mountain ranges, are some of the less accessible parts of Europe, and this attracts trekkers.

The Ionian coast is among the most scenic along the Mediterranean. Old white stone villages dot the drive along rocky cliffs plunging down to the sea.

A 30-million-dollar World Bank project will undertake to develop roads and sewage systems this year. It would clear the garbage from Durres, and help manage the best recognised tourist attraction of the country – the ruins of Butrint in the south where the Trojan hero Aenneas and his soldiers halted on way to Rome.

“There is no specific recipe how to develop tourism here,” said Malltezi. “We just want not to repeat the ills of the recent past.”