World Notes ALBANIA

The avowed aim of exiled King Leka I, as he calls himself, is to overthrow the communist government of Albania. As far as the authorities are concerned, that is so much hot air. Now the would-be sovereign, who lives in South Africa, % intends to make use of that very commodity to further his ambition.

Leka, the son of Albania's first and last native-born monarch, King Zog, told the South African newspaper Business Day last week that he plans to launch a blitz by balloon, attaching leaflets advocating revolution to helium bags and floating them over his homeland. With the rest of Eastern Europe changing so swiftly, he said, the time is ripe for a softening of the last Stalinist holdout on the Continent.

Smuggled out of Albania by his parents days after his birth in 1939, Leka boasted in the 1970s of training an emigre army to harass the government, which deposed his father in absentia in 1946. Today, he says, "we hope negotiation will prevail." He adds that he is prepared to renounce the throne, if the people will it. An idea worth floating, anyway.