Ebullient crowds of Albanians turned out en masse to greet western politicans, such as Britain's Tony Blair, as they made their rounds of Balkan capitals. Stirred by the plight of their cousins across the border in Kosovo, Albanians in Albania proper seemed to have found a new sense of purpose. Alas, four months after the Serbs' forces were expelled from Kosovo, people in Albania, though relieved that nearly all the 450,000 Kosovars who took shelter among them have gone home, look deflated again.
Crime is as rife as ever.
Gangsters are fighting over the spoils of aid that flooded the country along with the refugees. Worse, the country seems already to have gone out of fashion for outsiders. Visitors to Kosovo prefer to travel via Macedonia. The number of NATO troops in Albania has dropped from 8,000 to 2,000, and those who remain concentrate on improving access by road and air to Kosovo. Albania's messy, bitter politics makes the country acutely unstable.