Albania Essay Research Paper Albania one of

Albania Essay, Research Paper Albania, one of Europe’s smallest countries, is situated in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula. It has a 360-km (225-mi) coastline on the Adriatic and Ionian seas and is bounded on the north by Yugoslavia, on the east by Macedonia, and on the southeast by Greece. The Albanians’ name for their country, Shqiperi, which means “eagles’ land,” aptly suggests Albania’s isolated, rugged terrain and its strongly independent people. In the 1990s, after more than four decades of Communist rule, Albania began the process of moving from a one-party dictatorship to a multiparty democracy and from a centrally controlled economy to a free-market system. It is hard the world financial history would find a case like Albania s where the collapse

of the pyramid scheme endager savings of the greatest part of Europe s poorest population. It is hard it finds a bankruptcy which so totally threaten the state s finance. Only the iceberg banking part of the usuries is made evident and its dimensions seem catastrophic. Some $250 million were frozen at their banking accounts and they belonged only to two foundations and that is something more than 50 percent of the money circulated in the arteries out of the banks for the economy. It is not known how much of the money circulating in all the country – wich is some $1.5 billion – has conquered the under-water part of the still undiscovered pyramid scemes. Even though President Sali Berisha claimed victory in the elections, which many international observers said were marred by

serious voting violations, he banned an opposition rally today. Many of those who defied the ban, including elderly men and women who were near the square, were beaten with truncheons by riot policemen as horrified election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe looked on from a nearby hotel balcony. Several men stood near the square with blood running down their faces. About a dozen opposition leaders were beaten and hauled into police vans at the steps of the Palace of Culture. Most of them were later released from police cells, but the deputy leader of the opposition Socialist Party, Servet Pellumbi, remained in detention, and the general secretary of the Democratic Alliance Party, Arben Imami, was reported to be in serious condition in a

hospital. The violence today was the worst since a stormy election that experienced election observers said was the worst they had seen in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since the end of Communism. ‘I have never seen the totalitarian face like this, people being beaten, cameras taken,’ said Yuraj Atabaki, an observer from the Netherlands who has monitored nine elections in the region since 1991. About 40 of 53 observers sent by the O.S.C.E. said they had witnessed basic electoral abuses at the polls. More than a dozen of the observers signed a statement saying the election did not meet international standards for free and fair elections. Many ballots were altered and invalidated so as to favor Mr. Berisha’s Democratic Party. They said the presence of armed

policemen and what were thought to be plainclothes secret policemen at polling stations changed the tense pre-election atmosphere into one of intimidation and coercion on election day. When it comes to democratic elections, justice and freedom of the press, Albania has not fared well under President Berisha. But under the tutelage of the World Bank and the United States Treasury, a kind of capitalism — awash in corruption — has taken hold. The southern region of Albania has become one big bazaar. There are probably more Mercedes that pound the rutted roads — per capita of population than many other places in the world. In a field outside the seaside town of Durres, hundreds of new and secondhand Mercedes, BMW’s and fancy Volkswagens await buyers. The asking price for a