CHARTERHOUSE CHRONICLE

BY BRENDAN WALSH
Albanian dreams
C MAYBE MY
children can dream", the young woman said sadly. "But not me. I cannot dream any more."
The people of Albania were invited to elect a new parliament last month. It's only a few years since they were told what pictures they could put on their mantelpiece and when to have a haircut.
Democracy still seems a
rather far-fetched idea. The election disintegrated into confusion and violence. The old Communists, now in opposition, withdrew at the last minute, accusing the new government called, of course, the Democratic Party of being anything but. Foreign observers of the elections have confirmed widespread intimidation and ballot rigging. For all their smart Italian suits and clever wooing of Western bankers, the DP has inherited the traditional reluctance of ruling elites in this part of the world to risk consultation with the people on grown-up matters.
Albania was the most starchy and charmless of all the East European communist countries. For 40 years it was occupied by three million actors forbidden to improvise on the given script. Personal initiative was systematically crushed. Hoping, planning, choosing, arguing, joking, loafing all the banal routines of being a human being fell into disrepair.
Religious belief is the sort
of quirk that particularly infuriates tidy-minded apparatchiks. Priests and imams were shot or locked up and left to rot; mosques and churches demolished and converted into cinemas. The institutions and the bric-abrac taken care of, the Party sought to wipe out the last stubborn stains of faith. Families overheard by neighbours saying night prayers were exiled to remote internment colleges. Old women
absent-mindedly making the
sign of the cross were imprisoned for crimes against the state. Albania, the dictator Enver Hoxha proudly announced, had become the first atheist state in the world.
When the Hoxha regime finally crumbled, the family icon was taken out from under the floor boards and the Koran from under the mattress. Astonishing stories
of courage and resilience, of grace under the most terrible pressure, emerged. Even when everything else has been stolen from them, people hang on doggedly to their capacity to hope, to dream of a better future.
THOSE WHO LIVE under repressive regimes talk of the trick of "doublethink", of simultaneously talking and acting in one way while thinking and feeling very differently. There is a private realm of the human imagination where the thought police are unable to patrol, and you are free to imagine the day you will run your own toy shop, listen to jazz records, and go to church on Sundays.
But the poison of totalitarianism seeps into the most secret places. The habits and resentments created by generations of bullying, humiliation and despair are buried in shallow graves.
Five years after the fall of the Communist regime, dodgems now bump and grind their way round a funfair on the site of Hoxha's statue in the capital, Tirana. Young men in shades drink beer in hastily knocked up cafes and pizza parlours. Girls worry about their diets. The cathedral is full of people in smart casual clothes, enthralled by the game-showhost patter of the visiting priest from Turin. Western investors crow with delight over Albania's economic growth figure, and hope Albania can stay out of the Balkan shambles next door.
But recent events lend credence to the running grumbles inside the country that Albania's new ruling party is heavily infiltrated by people who prospered under the old regime. Those who suffered the most were the 100,000 or so imprisoned or interned for "offences against the state".
They see their children, who as relatives of undesirables had been denied university places, unable to find a place in the new meritocracy, while the sons and daughters of the old Party bosses are studying to become lawyers and doctors. "Those who persecuted us are still in charge," one ex-political prisoner told me.
Sometimes we talk too glibly of the "indestructability of the human spirit", almost as if it was like a bag of sweets that can be hidden behind our backs until the teacher has left the classroom. For the young woman who had lost each member of her family in prison camps, despair has become too ingrained a habit to be broken by the antics of compromised politicians.
"Maybe my children can dream," she said quietly as she listened to her daughter practising on the violin, "But for me it is too late. I cannot dream any more."
Brendan Walsh is Cafod's head of communications.