Abstract
It isn't easy to speak with Edi Rama, the mayor of the Albanian capital, Tirana, even when you're alone with him. At his office–a spacious, wood-paneled room he shares with two live turtles and an extremely large television set–the phones and audience-seekers kept interrupting, so we left for lunch at a nearby restaurant.
But Rama, a tall, powerful-looking man with a penchant for polka-dot ties, red socks, and brightly colored shirts, attracts interruptions like a magnet. An elderly well-wisher shakes hands with him on the street; a band of young men from Kosovo ask to have their picture taken with him as we cross the city park; outside the restaurant, a young woman gets him to sign a copy of Tirona, an album he cut with a local hip-hop group that pays homage to his wild, rapidly growing city. Once seated, the interview, antipasto, and entrees all take a back seat to the incoming text messages on Rama's cell phone, through which he appears to do much of his governance. On the way back to City Hall, his thumb still rapidly worked the keypad, as his scarlet-lined overcoat and a gray-suited bodyguard trailed behind him.
“I'm sorry,” Rama explained at one point, “It's always like this.”
Indeed, Rama is more than the mayor of Albania's largest city; he's quite likely the most famous Albanian alive and a symbol of change for hundreds of thousands of his countrymen at home and abroad. A painter and former basketball star, the 40-year-old mayor has shaken up the capital, by bulldozing hundreds of illegal kiosks and other structures that had been illegally constructed in the city's parks, computerizing municipal government, combating corruption, and even painting many of the capital's dour concrete housing blocks in bright, bold color schemes of his own design. In the process, he won a 2002 U.N. Poverty Eradication Award and, last year, was named World Mayor 2004 by the London-based City Mayors web site, after garnering more votes than the mayors of Mexico City, London, and other major cities.
“You can love him or hate him, but you can't ignore him,” says Erion Veliaj, executive director of Mjaft, a citizen's watchdog group spearheaded by young Albanian professionals who've recently returned from jobs overseas. “Painting the buildings all these colors gives everyone something to talk about: Some take pride in it, some take shame, but at least something is happening. He is one of the few people in the country who is actually moving things forward.”
That is in itself no mean accomplishment in a country that has become accustomed to going backwards. Albania emerged from near-total isolation from the outside world in 1992 (its Communist dictatorship feared invasion by everyone: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the West) only to have its entire industrial sector collapse, an event that led to a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands to the West. In 1997, a series of pyramid “investment” schemes collapsed, taking many Albanians' life savings with them, and the country descended into weeks of violent anarchy that left 1,500 dead and the economy in shambles. Shortly thereafter, the war in Kosovo swamped the country with ethnic Albanian refugees.
“After 1997, Albanians came to look on their country as a sort of a transfer station between life and death,” Rama says between text messages. “My real project is to try to resuscitate hope, so that people will start looking on their country not as a transfer station, but as a place where they might want to live.”
For the past 15 years, Europe has been coming together. The European Union (EU) absorbed most of the nations that were neutral in the Cold War, plus eight nations that were once part of the Communist bloc. Bulgaria, Romania, and even Turkey are in line to join this continent-spanning superstate. But for Albania, the gap between conditions in their nation and in “the West” has in many ways been growing wider.
While Northern Europeans fret about bike paths, the health risks of genetically modified foods, and how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Albanians still do not have a single wastewater treatment plant. Albania has 3.5 million people but not one sanitary landfill or hazardous waste facility. Its countryside is littered with abandoned industrial enterprises where families of squatters live and raise livestock in extremely poisonous surroundings. Peasants cut down upland forests to keep their homes warm while construction companies haphazardly mine gravel from riverbeds.
“There are so many social and economic problems in this country, and the state budget does not have the resources to deal with them,” notes Dhimiter Haxhimihali, a professor at the University of Tirana, where laboratory equipment is in short supply and many classrooms are left unheated in the winter. In the chemistry department, where Haxhimihali works, the budget is so lean that even common experimental chemicals can no longer be obtained. Across town at the Polytechnic University, the rector and other senior administrators wear outdoor coats in their offices for lack of heat.
But while large parts of the rural north of the country have become depopulated, the capital has been growing at a shocking pace. When I last visited a decade ago, Tirana was a sleepy Balkan backwater of 250,000, with low-slung concrete buildings decaying on the margins of wide, empty streets. Now it's almost unrecognizable: a teeming, traffic-clogged metropolis of nearly a million, complete with glass-and-steel high-rises, trendy restaurants and clubs, and a halo of suburban sprawl of Houstonian proportions.
Art galleries, fashion boutiques, and internet cafes line once dreary streets near the Lana River, whose banks used to be covered in illegally constructed kiosks and shops, many of which were said to have ties to organized crime. Part of the home of the late Communist dictator Enver Hoxha has been turned into a bustling bar and cafe, while the pyramid-shaped building that previously housed the Hoxha museum is now a popular disco. Highways, roads, sidewalks, and the airport have completed or are undergoing extensive upgrades, many under the direction of Mayor Rama.
Man with a plan: Edi Rama, mayor of Tirana, Albania.
“Tirana is improving everyday, and I'm sure that in five years it's going to be fabulous,” says Donika Bardha, an Albanian-American businesswoman whose family runs Piazza, one of the capital's most popular restaurants. “When you see so many changes happening so rapidly and the local government working so hard it gives people hope, and hope is one of the most important things for Albania right now.”
“Tirana is slowly becoming a real European city thanks to the hard work of the mayor's staff,” agrees Aleksander Xhuvani, director of international relations at the Polytechnic University, who notes that Rama is refurbishing infrastructure and creating the capital's first-ever development plan. “Every city in Albania wants to have Rama as their next mayor.” The capital's residents do as well; in 2003 Rama easily won a second term.
But the mayor is extremely unpopular with Albania's national political parties. Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha–the country's president before and during the 1997 anarchy–has described Rama as “a pillar of corruption.” Veliaj, from the citizen watchdog group, says that any ambitions Rama might have for higher office may well be derailed by operatives within Prime Minister Fatos Nano's Socialist Party, which Rama joined in 2003. “He may be loved by the people, but he's hated by his own party,” he adds. “He's too successful for his own good.” Rama says he received a number of anonymous phone calls and threats while he was working to bulldoze hundreds of illegal buildings in Tirana's city parks and, on one occasion, awoke to the sound of bullets flying through the windows of his home.
If Albania is to one day join the European Union, the national government will need to have some successes of its own. Meeting the EU's tough environmental standards is fast becoming one of the greatest obstacles to future membership, according to Mihallaq Qirjo, local director for the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe. Compliance, he says, “is going to be really tough.”
Narin Panariti, director of policy at the Albanian Ministry of Environment, says her staff has been working for months to identify the legal and regulatory changes that would need to be made to conform with EU law. “It's an enormous list of things to do, more than in any other sector except agriculture,” she says, noting that it will probably take until the end of the year just to compile their “to do” list. “It will take us years, probably more than a decade, to perform all the changes.” These include everything from stepping up pollution monitoring (at factories, busy urban intersections, and popular beaches) to adopting coherent regulations for performing environmental impact assessments and improving the quality of automobile fuels.
Arian Gace, an Albanian environmental expert who works at the local office of the U.N. Development Program, says progress will be slow. “The present politicians do not have a genuine interest in going in the fast lane toward Europe because if you are going there you must comply with a lot of regulations that are going to lower your profit margins,” he says. “Why go to Europe when that will force you to pay for all the hidden costs of pollution and unregulated development?”
“There's a saying in Albania: It's better to be the top guy in the village than the bottom guy in a town,” he adds. Many national politicians may be in no rush to join Brussels.
His last text message sent, I asked Rama how he saw the road ahead. “I am optimistic for Albania, but Albania needs time,” he said after a moment's pause. “With the current way of managing Albania and doing politics here, I'm afraid this time could be very long.”