The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.11           March 17, 1997 
 
 
U.S. Hands Off Albania!  
As U.S. naval forces gather off the Adriatic coast of the Balkans in response to the revolt by workers and peasants in Albania, working people here should demand: U.S. hands off Albania! We should also direct this demand against the Greek army troops massing on the border with Albania and other NATO soldiers deployed in the Balkans.

The U.S. military threats against Albania - under the ridiculous pretext of protecting "American lives" - are of a piece with Washington's drive to expand NATO into the workers states of Central Europe, as well as the NATO military occupation of Bosnia. They are all part of the imperialist march toward war against Russia and other workers states in Europe. The U.S. rulers seek to save the hated Berisha government or replace it with another pliant, procapitalist regime, with the ultimate goal of reestablishing capitalist rule in that Balkan nation.

What are working people rebelling against? They are protesting the massive rip-off by fraudulent investment schemes, as well as the ruinous effects of the austerity measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund. Pyramid schemes are only a small taste of capitalism, and workers in Albania are loudly saying they don't like it. Protesters became even more angry when the regime responded to their demands by imposing a state to emergency curtailing democratic rights. The protests have now erupted into an armed uprising.

Big-business commentators depict the demonstrators as unreasonable or naive for demanding the government cover their losses from the investment frauds. But working people in Albania correctly view the state as their own, albeit usurped by a ruling layer of social parasites that has weakened its foundations over the years. Today's events are a striking confirmation that Albania remains a workers state, and that imperialism will have to take on and go to war against the workers and peasants of that country in order to reestablish stable capitalist rule there.

The current revolt is an expression of the living legacy of the Albanian socialist revolution, in which armed workers and peasants defeated the German imperialist occupation army in 1944 and then kicked the capitalists and landlords out of power. For decades afterward, unable to intervene directly, the imperialist powers had to rely on the Stalinist regime to try to police working people. That effort failed with the outbreak of working-class rebellion in the early 1990s, which brought down the Stalinists there, coinciding with similar developments throughout Eastern Europe - a body blow to imperialism.

Washington fears that the revolt in Albania will inspire workers and farmers in neighboring Yugoslavia - including the Albanian population of the Kosovo region - to resist both the gangster-like regimes in Belgrade and Zagreb, as well as the NATO troops occupying hunks of their country. In response to the U.S. and other imperialist threats, working people around the world should rally in support of our fellow fighters standing up in Albania.  
 
 
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