THE ELECTIONS IN ALBANIA (pg 4)

New ‘elections’ are to take place in Albania on May 28, and the Albanian Communist Party has already started a fierce propaganda tending to throw a veil of legality over the farce that will be played on that date.

The newspapers and the radio strive to enumerate the ‘benefits’ that the Regime has brought to the people. The ‘Democratic Front’ launches proclamation after proclamation in which it is repeated with satisfaction that the unanimity of the Albanian people will vote for the Communist Party.

How can we, moreover, imagine a different result? The methods used on the occasion of these popular consultations are not ours, alas! it is too well known for us to doubt the absolute triumph of the Communist Party.

Rather, it is with curiosity that we ask what is the goal that the Government of Tirana proposes to achieve with all this staging. Whose eyes are they trying to cloud? Surely not in the Western Nations, because, in his speech of March 15, Mr. Dean Acheson clearly made the opinion that the United States of America could have on the validity of this kind of elections heard. Here are Mr. Acheson’s statements on this matter:

“Regarding the whole group of countries which we are accustomed to regard as the satellite region, the Soviet leaders could withdraw their military and police forces from it, and refrain from using the threat of this force to wield the power of persons or regimes which do not enjoy the confidence of the peoples of those respective nations, as freely expressed through the proper representative processes. In other words, they could decide to observe, in practice, the clauses of the declaration they signed in Yalta on the subject of liberated Europe.”

“On this subject, we do not insist that these governments adopt a given political or social structure. What is interesting is that they are really independent national regimes, having a will of their own and resting on honest bases of popular confidence.”

“We would like to feel that we are dealing with something representing the national identity of the peoples in question. We do not believe that such a situation is really incompatible with the security of the Soviet Union.”

“This is a matter of basic good faith and it is vital, to ensure an atmosphere of trust, that other treaties and other agreements be honored. Nothing would change the international climate as much as the organization in these satellite countries. elections which would allow the true will of the people to be expressed.”

It only remains for us to think of another solution and realize that once again, it is the Albanian people that Enver Hoxha and his accomplices want to fool.