Albania’s Young President

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 38, 7 May 1927, Page 19 (Supplement)

Albania’s Young President

His Herculean Task

'T'HB most romantic and incalculable figure in the Balkans is Ahmet Zogu, head of a feudal family which for centuries has ruled a confederation of uncoquered mountain tribes called the Mati, and now, at the age of 31, first President of the two-year-old Republic of Albania.

From a small grey house in Tirana, whence he seldom emerges—and then under heavy guard—Ahmet Zogu exercises a difficult dictatorship over a country accustomed to the anarchy of tribal law; a country where every man has been his own policeman; where the idea of liberty is to carry a gun; and where the highest patriotic duty was to resist government and evade taxes.

His job is to manufacture a modern State —not only government, but law itself, and with law, highways, communications, schools, bridges, police force, a national mind—out of such oddments as a strip of coveted coast, a shelf of rocky mountain, a few rich but undeveloped valleys, rumours of oil, the protective jealousy of neighbours, and a million people scattered in a hundred little local Albanias, unconnected even by roads, that no power has ever been able to rule or to absorb.

At first glance it seems a lightly fantastic adventure. You stand before the President’s house on such an occasion as the anniversary of the proclamation of the republic, and imagine yourself part of a scene in a comic opera. The town is wreathed in green garlands and a-flutter with flags, the black eagle of the Shkipetars on a crimson field. The President’s guards, trim hussars in blackbraided red uniforms, march smartly up and down in the sunshine, or form a scarlet aisle through which strut self-conscious diplomats in gold braid, and nonchalant old chiefs in turbans and bright embroideries. The back drop is mountains, minarets, and cypresses; up the street is the “van of progress,” a Ford garage and a block of unfinished American main street fronts.

But the principal figure in the piece missing. I caught a glimpse of

the President dressed for the part in a black cape swung over a glorious white uniform, and looking his part more handsomely than anyone else has ever done off the stage. But he does not review his manoeuvring guard, does not so much as show his splendour from the balcony or appear at a window.

By which you may know that political drama in Albania is grim and real. Up in the mediaeval gaol in Scutari are 600 prisoners, toll of the latest revolution. A few have been hanged in the market-place. Where they lived the villages have been burned, and the livestock slaughtered or dispersed. Ahmet Bey, conceded to be the strongest man in the country, rules with an acquiescent Parliament, and has managed so far to guard his authority as successfully as he guards his aloofness and his mystery in the gossipy purlieus of Tirana. In two years he has achieved an army. He has built 300 bridges and culverts, and hundreds of kilometres of roads. In this task he has been aided by a iaw that requires of every citizen 10 lays of free labour a year for the benefit of the State. He is now constructing a railway from .Tirana to Durazzo, and opening schools. Ahmet Zogu has made his sensational pact with Italy, which may or may not secure him in power, which may or may not threaten the peace of Europe, but which certainly was the only available means of obtaining the money so desperately needed by the young and impoverished State. Albania’s is the fate of the poor—her choice has to be between evils.