Piratical Dictature

A large room on the second floor of a small grey house forms the sleeping and working quarters of a Dictator only 31 years old, whom elder statesmen held uneasily and attentively in mind last week. One enters, climbs a neat, unvarnished stair, and is stopped by two rugged guards in black-braided baggy white trousers, red fezzes, pirate sashes. Their pay is $12 a month. Firearms are by Mauser and Anfaldo. These ornate banditti are mountaineers of the tribe of Mati, and they guard their tribal Chief, Ahmed Bey Zogu, who is nominally President and actually Dictator of Albania.

Feverish rumors continued last week that Albania, backed by Italy, is preparing war on Jugoslavia. Famed Croatian Jugoslav leader Stefan Raditch even went so far last week as to exclaim: "We are not afraid of the Italian Colossus with feet of clay, nor of its puppet-pawn, Albania. . . . We are against war, but if the Italians want to fight we will fling them into the Adriatic!"

With such talk on loose tongues, many a correspondent lolling at his ease in Vienna cabled of swords loose in their scabbards; but two alert, able newsgatherers approached the possible theatre of war from opposite sides and saw what mobilization existed.

Correspondent Larry Rue spent an entire week covering the Albania-Jugoslav frontier from Greece to the Adriatic for the Chicago Tribune. His motor car, he cabled, was the first through the mile- high, snow-covered uplands since December. A broken connecting rod meant getting another car, and friendly peasants shoveled much snow and pushed often and mightily. "I visited every garrison, outpost and supply depot," cabled thoroughgoing Correspondent Rue, concluding that in his opinion the Jugoslavs were emphatically not mobilized last week.

From Tirana, Albanian Capital, a London Daily Mail correspondent sent news even more reassuring: "There are no Italian troops whatever in Albania." Yet, such is the persistence of the war rumor (TIME, Jan. 10) that major statesmen in the chief European capitals found time to inform correspondents last week that Albania is "a perilous zone ... a looming danger . . . portent . . . menace. . . .

This much is certain, that Ahmed Bey Zogu is no mere young adventurer in the pay or under the dominant spell of Dictator Mussolini. His tribal family is among the most ancient in Albania, and its wild, remote highland strongholds between Tirana and Scutari are probably impregnable to an army not especially equipped for mountaineering. There Ahmed Bey Zogu is not so much President of Albania as Chief of the Mati tribes.

These mountaineers--his feudal retainers--are the true and only stable support of his power. At 16, he succeeded to his late father's duties as Chief; and since the second Balkan War he has gradually assumed an increasingly dominant national position, winning other tribal clans to his support with tact and skill. During the two years of his presidency there have been built 300 bridges and almost 1,000 kilometres of roads--a desperate necessity if Albanian commerce is ever to develop.