When Madness Reigned
The crisis in Albania from the perspective of a missionary priest of the Orthodox Church of Albania
by Luke Veronis
April 2, 1997. Recent events in Albania can only be described as madness—senseless destruction, meaningless deaths, countless injuries, overwhelming despair, and a continual fear and uncertainty for the future.
I recall words of wisdom Archbishop Anastasios, the head of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania, shared with me several times over the past three years. Whenever we experienced some frustrating difficulty or setback, he would say, “Remember, Albania was a country that Satan controlled for 50 years. Don’t think that he is going to sit back and allow us to bring the light of Christ into this land without a fight.”
As our work progressed, however, I often forgot this wisdom. Unfortunately over the past month, Satan’s evil has returned with a force few could have imagined.
Recently I visited the local military hospital. Dirt lies everywhere. Plaster falls from the walls. Windows and doors are broken. Flies buzz around. Beds are rusty. Mattresses have only half the foam in them. Medical attendants, doctors, nurses, and visitors smoke everywhere, even in the operating room.
The first person we met was Eda, a seven-year-old girl with a bullet in her stomach. Six days earlier she was playing in the garden outside her house, when a bullet that had been shot into the air fell and hit her. The same day three other children in her neighborhood were killed. One of the children, a two-year-old girl, was sleeping at home when a bullet came through the window and went through her head.
On another visit to the hospital, we heard the screams of Bektashi, a 12-year old who three days earlier was playing with a friend. They were playing with explosives, and one went off and burned Bektashi’s entire side and arm. Forty children were in the hospital with similar burns. In another room lay a boy with an amputated leg; a bullet had hit a main artery and the doctors had to amputate. Hundreds of injured people filled the hospital, most of them suffering needlessly.
The physical suffering is only part of the picture. There is also the economic devastation. Friends of ours, Kristina and her family, wonder every day how they will survive. Five months ago their family moved to Tirana from the northern city of Shkodra. Though they sold their house, they did not have enough money to buy a new one in Tirana. So they decided to invest all their money, including money one son had saved as an immigrant worker in Greece, with one of the “promising” investment firms that were the talk of Albania. Kristina’s family figured that if they received the 100 percent return as promised within four months, they would have enough money to buy a simple two-room apartment. Instead, the company folded two months ago, and now Kristina and her family have no money and no house. They have nowhere to go.
People around the world are wondering what happened in Albania. International news has shown the violence and destruction of the past month. For many, it is the first time they have ever heard of Albania.
After 500 years of subjugation under the Ottoman Empire, and a brief period of independence during the early part of the century, Albania endured 45 years of the most oppressive Communist regime in the world, under which it existed in total isolation from the outside world. Albania even broke ties with her former Communist allies—first Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union, then China. Each time, President Enver Hoxha claimed that the break was necessary because his country’s former allies betrayed the hard-line Marxist-Leninist path by becoming too liberal.
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