Reply #24: Bush=USA=Kosovo champion. Bush=not Italy, not Turkey, not Yugoslavia, and not Greece.

[nealmhughes]

The USA also equals rights for all in Albania, not the nomenclatura alone, as was the case under Hoxha, or the feudalists under Zog and the Turks before him.
The sad part of recent Albanian history was its decision to follow the giagantic rapid industrialization promoted by Lenin and perfected by Stalin, and then bankrolled by China after the great Hoxha rift between the two major then Communist states, the USSR and China.
Evidently, Albanian pride was at odds with being the "lemon growing colony" for anywhere in Eurasia. What is striking is that its near neighbor Bulgaria, has had not a whit of a problem with being a bread basket and hog butcher to the East, as someone has to provide the food!
Albania was snatched out of a tribal/ethnically divided slumber by the Second World War and has before that had been a pawn of the Great Powers, whether they were Italy or Austria or Turkey or Russia or the ex-Yugoslavia. When they were deprived by the Great Game's demise of any sponsorship and went it alone, only one country stood ready to agitate for a fully independent, free, open society Albania, and for their cousins over the line in Kosovo, and that was the US, hence, the admiration of the US.