It's 16 years since Enver Hoxha died but only 10 years since his giant statue was toppled by an angry mob in Tirana's Skenderbeg Square. The marble plinth still stands vacant, leaving only a dusty outline of his image in brass, a ghost of times past. The pyramidal museum built in his memory has become a student disco. Rather than totalitarian chic, Skenderbeg's main attraction is now a modest Ferris wheel. Ten years is hardly overnight, but after five decades of isolation Albania is grappling with the modern world. Rarely has social change been so abrupt or has a country been overturned so dramatically by the open market.
Traffic hits the square from all directions and in the chaos of Tirana rush-hour you are as likely to see a horse and cart as you are a brand new Mercedes imported from Germany.
Torture victims
Over at the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims Bardhyl Belishova is less convinced about the future. The 70-yearold first went to the council as a patient in 1994 and subsequently joined the care staff. Albania's recent history presents difficult terrain but Bardhyl is better qualified than most to help negotiate its past. Born in Tirana to a wealthy family, he was won over by communist ideals of equality for all. In his early years he was active in the anti-fascist movement and after the second World War he went to Moscow on a university scholarship for electronic engineering. It was there his political beliefs began to erode, observing a stark divergence between communist ideology and the inequities of daily practice.
For a time living conditions relaxed at home but when Hoxha broke ties with Kruschev's Soviet Union in 1961 the Albania leader - or his Party of Labour - chose to return to a strident form of Stalinism more in line with China.
Bardhyl's sister Liri, herself a member of the Politburo, challenged Hoxha's proposal and was duly expelled from the party.
Liri was sentenced to the peculiarly Stalinist penalty of "internal exile". She was transported to a remote mountain village and forbidden to talk to anybody. After 10 years she was transferred to a factory for hard labour. Her punishment lasted a total of 30 years.
Severe penalties
Liri's relations also suffered. Her husband was jailed as were all five Belishova brothers. Additional penalties meted out to her extended family, such as denying any of them access to university or even forbidding youngsters the "privilege" of playing football proved particularly effective in subduing dissent.
Anyone regarded as a threat to the regime would bring hardship upon everyone associated with them. It was a responsibility few could bear.
Bardhyl did not fare much better. Initially sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of planning to set up an opposition party with acquaintances, his case was commuted to a jail term of 25 years.
Several of his close friends died in a captivity comparable to the Soviet gulag. It is estimated that 36,000 people were jailed as political prisoners from 1944-91 with one in seven executed and many others dying from "natural" causes.
Midway through Bardhyl's incarceration he was condemned to death for writing a letter critical of the prison system. This was also commuted and he served out the remainder of his sentence until his release in 1987.
Patients at the Norwegian-funded council include ex-prisoners as well as former wardens and policemen with a guilty conscience. All are given physical and psychological assessment, but given the volume of suffering progress is tediously slow. Bardhyl feels Albania needs a South African style truth commission to deal with its past. He is perturbed by the chameleon-like accession to power of figures who served the Party of Labour (renamed the Socialist Party) and judiciary during its most repressive phases.
Many share blame
"I am personally ashamed of what has happened over the last 50 years in Albania," he reflects angrily. "I am ashamed for having believed in communism and that Albanians did not react to the establishment of a dictatorship. You cannot justify what happened here and put it down to Enver Hoxha and the communists because to a certain degree, the whole of Albanian society was responsible for what happened."
Naturally, he welcomes a new order, but the pace and quality of transition alarms him in a country riven by organised crime, blood feuds and a legacy of corruption.
"Where is the real change?" he asks. "Our elections [in 1992 and 1996] were not fair and while life here has changed for the better, we were not ready with a plan for social change. "Ten years have passed," he says with the deliberation of a man used to counting days. "And ten years is not a short time."