U.S. Marines and Italian commandos evacuated foreign nationals by helicopter. Humanitarian aid ceased. The International Committee of the Red Cross threw up its hands. “This is almost like Somalia,” said an ICRC official. In four months more than 1,500 people died and tens of thousands were injured. Theft slipped into pillage. The railroad to Montenegro was stolen—the track torn up and sold for scrap. Pillage degenerated into vandalism. Schools, museums, and hospitals were wrecked. And vandalism reached heroic scale. Bridges were demolished, water-supply pumping stations were blown apart, power lines and telephone wires were pulled down. Albania came to bits. I went to Albania in July 1997, and I know a country is screwed up when I can tell something is wrong with its history and social organization from 20,000 feet in the air. Flying over the Albanian Alps on the trip from Rome to Tirana, I noticed that the villages are not tucked into the fertile, sheltered valleys the way the villages of Austria, Switzerland, or even Bosnia are. The villages of Albania are right up on the treeless, soilless, inconvenient mountaintops. Before ski lifts were invented, there was only one reason to build homes in such places. A mountaintop is easy to defend. The Tirana airport had one runway and a small, shabby, whitewashed concrete terminal building with a random planting of flowers outside. There were no visa or immigration formalities. Presumably, few people were trying to sneak into Albania to glom welfare benefits. Customs agents did run my bag through an X ray, however. With all the ordnance available in Albania, it’s hard to imagine what they were looking for. Pro-gun-control literature, maybe. I’d found a translator and driver by calling the Hotel Tirana and hiring the front-desk clerk’s boyfriend. I’ll call him Elmaz. He met me in the airport parking lot in his uncle’s worn-out Mercedes. Elmaz said Tirana was thirty minutes away. We drove toward town on a four-lane turnpike that—“Five kilometers long,” said Elmaz—promptly ended. “Is only highway in country,” said Elmaz. The buckled, pitted two-lane road that followed was full of cars, trucks, and horse carts—an amazing number of them for such a supposedly obliterated economy. Scores of wrecked trucks and cars lined the road. Albania has so many wrecks that all the horse carts are fitted with automobile seats, some with center consoles and luxurious upholstery. The landscape was the Mediterranean usual, a little too sunbaked and
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