POLICE moved to secure Tirana airport yesterday and to reopen Albania's main gateway to the outside world but the European Union said the country remained fraught with disorder, writes Ron Popeski.
The Albanian Finance Minister, Mr Arben Malaj, a member of the all party government appointed last week, said Albania's economy had collapsed after a month of unrest and now faced paralysis.
Rebels held control in the south and threatened to form their own government unless President Sali Berisha resigned by today.
Armoured vehicles and truckloads of police, each with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, were dispatched to the airport at Rinas, 25 km west of the capital. Authorities pledged to open Rinas to commercial traffic on Thursday, but western airlines had no plans to resume flights this week.
The head of an EU mission charged with finding ways to help Albania to recover said no infusion of aid was possible until order had been fully restored.
"We are asking Albania to help us help them," said the Dutch diplomat, Mr Jan de Marchant et d'Ansembourg, head of the 11 man EU delegation. "They have to create a situation in the country 50 that the help we give them doesn't fall into the wrong hands. The police are a shambles, there are no prisons, customs or border police and hardly any army. They need just about everything."
The unrest was sparked in the south by the collapse of investment schemes which soaked up the savings of hundreds of thousands of Albanians. It spread to the north and threatened to engulf Tirana last week before authorities regained control.
Officials said pockets of violence persisted on Thursday, with 14 people killed by stray bullets in various towns. An Austrian television crew was robbed near the eastern border with Macedonia, an area of growing lawlessness.
Nuns working for Mother Teresa's missionary order staged a dramatic rescue of the mentally handicapped children under their care after rampaging gunmen burned out nearby buildings in Shkoder, northern Albania.
A bank and other houses next door to the compound of the Missionaries of Charity order were reduced to blackened shells during two days of mayhem, when thousands of guns were looted from army barracks.
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Goinxha Bejaxhiu in Skopje in 1910, has become the world's most famous Albanian for her missionary work in Calcutta. She established her order in Albania in 1991 after the collapse of the isolationist communist regime.