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Albania After Hoxha: Any Change for Believers?
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11512 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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10 / 1986 |
3,064 Words |
| Author
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Dan Wooding
Dan Wooding is an award-winning British journalist now living
in Southern California, where he is the chief correspondent of
the Open Doors News Service. He was previously a senior
reporter with both the Sunday People and Sunday Mirror, two of
Great Britain's largest-circulation newspapers. He is the
author of 19 books. |
John Lennon, in his classic song "Imagine," asked his audience to picture a world where there is "nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too." A world without religion doesn't exist, but one tiny nation in the Balkans, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, has taken a giant step to rid itself of what Karl Marx called "the opium of the people."
The mystery-shrouded land of Albania, which is ruled by the world's most Stalinist Communist Party, has taken Marxist-Leninism to its logical conclusion and officially declared God dead. Since 1967, all churches and mosques have been closed for worship. Thousands of Christian and Moslem leaders have been imprisoned or shot, and all vestiges of religion - 70 percent of Albanians were Muslim, the rest Orthodox and Catholic with just a handful of Protestants - have, on the surface, been brutally suppressed.
It seems, at first glance, that this beautiful mountainous country of approximately three million people, which shares a border with Yugoslavia on the north and Greece to the south, is proof that John Lennon's dream has come true, in part, with a people living in harmony, and with no religion interfering with their goal to become the world's purest socialistic society. As a special bonus, no one has to pay income tax and all medical and educational bills are paid by the state. Abortion, which is widely practiced in many of the so-called Christian nations of the West, has even been outlawed.
Albania is, however, a land which places very little trust in other societies and is constantly on the alert for invaders. Throughout the country there are countless thousands of concrete "pillboxes"
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