Bush Gets Enthusiastic Welcome in Albania

Jun 10, 03:30 PM

Current Headlines: TIRANA, Albania _ Surrounded by hundreds of welcoming banners and U.S. flags, President Bush Sunday re-iterated his commitment to an independent Kosovo and a NATO membership for this tiny and poor nation.

But more importantly, he was simply here.

No other U.S. president had ever showed up in Albania. Not many world leaders from anywhere have.

And it was clear his arrival was appreciated. The road from the highway was lined with billboards. Every light post from the airport to the center of town was adorned with both an American and Albanian flag. Children wore Uncle Sam style hats, and adults wore "Welcome President Bush" T-shirts. A canon salute echoed off the nearby mountains.

In the suburb of Fushe Kruje, Bush was mobbed by Albanians just wanting to touch the garment of the great man. Albania issued postage stamps in his honor, and covered its tallest buildings with his photos.

And so, after a week of being jeered and booed by protesters in Germany and Italy, and with his support flagging in the U.S., it was change of pace.

To hear the gratitude of Albanians, simply listen to the words of Prime Minister Berisha _ a former heart surgeon _ in greeting Bush:

"Today is a beautiful day. Today is a great day, historic for all Albanians. Among us is the greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times, the President of the United States of America, the leading country of the free world, George W. Bush.

"... Thank you heartily, Mr. President, from the bottom of our hearts, fulfilling ardent and long-awaited wish of all Albanians to have a special guest in their home."

Albania's recent history is one of waiting for scraps from the tables of the powerful. Look around the capital, a mishmash of old Soviet apartment blocks, Italian fascist government buildings, and ramshackle older structures.

While elsewhere, the people rose up in anger when their oppressors left (or faded away, as was the case here when an elected government replaced a socialist state in 1992) and tore down the physical reminders of the past, here they've realized that isn't possible. Instead, they've applied brilliant colors to the dull facades of the old apartment blocks.

This visit, however, brings with it something more: a seat at the table.

"No other nation in the region or in Europe has ever gone through so much suffering, ethnic cleansing, racism, partitions, occupations, and severe dictatorships as we Albanians have," Berisha added. "We have been blessed, however. We have won in all our efforts to defend our identity in Western oriented national vocation to emerge from the age of oppression to the age of dignity, from the age of darkness to the age of freedom. We have won because our just cause has always had the powerful support of the U.S.A., the greatest and the most precious friend of Albanian nation."

When Bush talks about U.S. support for Albanian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, supporting their efforts to join the European Union, he raises hopes that Europe's poorest nation can climb into the mainstream.

Even as he did so, however, he noted it wouldn't be easy.

"You're just not accepted into membership; you just can't say, I want to join; there are certain standards that are expected to be met," he explained. "I also told (the prime minister) that there needs to be additional political and military reforms, progress against organized crime and corruption."

Albania is a spider web of organized crime and corruption _ some estimates place the so-called "gray economy" at 50 percent of the official economy, meaning a full third of the economy is off the books.

But Bush also praised the progress the nation has made in 15 years of democracy. And he thanked the country for its placement of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan (Albania, he noted, has 120 elite commandos in Iraq).

And he talked again about how the end result for Kosovo _ physically part of Serbia, but primarily populated by historic Albanians _ had to be independence and how that had to include a European and world commitment to Serbia as well.

And then, half a day after the most important visit in this nation's history began, it ended, and Bush left the streamers, the banners, the flags, the stamps and the poverty behind.

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(c) 2007, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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