638
PARTISAN REVIEW
local residents and officials prior to preparing a plan to be presented to
the nation's governing body. While it includes improving infrastructure,
such as roads and highways, it also has built in programs for community
involvement including a community owned and operated radio station.
At the same time that external economic support is provided, however,
the difficult task of creating the foundations for genuine democratic
reform must occur. Isolated by decades of totalitarian and authoritarian
regimes, which replaced a feudal clan system of government, Albania
became, in some respects, the Tibet of Eastern Europe, a country about
which so little was actually known that it became a place for which any–
thing could be imagined. Now, open to the homogenizing effects of glob–
alization, Albania is striving to preserve a cultural heritage that includes a
unique dialect and musical system while fostering the foundations of gen–
uine democracy. The tradition of Communist dictatorships, under which
the population was forced to work on communal farms and other coop–
erative endeavors, undermined the impulse toward community effort, and
restoring an ethos of voluntary service to the public good among Alba–
nia's citizens will be difficult. Discarding the outdated social and political
institutions of former regimes and establishing new venues for citizen par–
ticipation are necessary elements of this process, but forging an authentic
democracy and civil society will involve more than that. It will require a
transformation of long-standing beliefs and value systems among a pop–
ulace dominated for so long by authoritarian governments.
Back in Albania's capital, Tirana, there is a sense of frenzied desola–
tion along the kiosks that embellish the streets in front of the austere
buildings that house the government's official offices. Yet, in the court–
yard of the Hotel Rogner-the home away from home for most of the
major media covering the events in Kosovo-I look out upon a garden
of dozens of blossoming trees and shrubs that surround a large swim–
ming pool. It reminds me of scenes in Kenya, where I once served with
the United Nations, and now, as then, I think about the way in which so
many countries that appear to be tropical paradises are abysmal in terms
of their records on human rights, a fact that is often overlooked by over–
zealous environmentalists who sometimes seem to care more about pro–
tecting wildlife than about repressive brutalization of the human spirit.
On the plane ride back
to
the United States,
I
sit with Fron Nazi, a
native Albanian who was founding director of the Soros Foundation in
Albania and now has his own consulting firm. We both have our own
methods for ending the war in Kosovo. Mine is that loudspeakers
should be set up that would play Gabriel Faure's "Requiem," since I
believe no amount of hatred, however long-standing and deep, could
