Leading article: Unlocking the iron cage of Albania

The Albanian regime led by President Sali Berisha is trying to silence foreign news broadcasts. It is a waste of time. If even the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha could not keep out western popular music - Italy is too close - Tirana's current rulers are unlikely to have any more success with the BBC World Service.

But this decision is significant. Any regime that switches off the Voice of America relay, expels foreign journalists and fire-bombs its own papers is doomed. Of course it can keep going for a while. Protesters can be machine-gunned, tanks can seal the borders, the secret police restored to the rank and privilege they enjoyed until 1991. All that can happen; and yet the regime's survival has now become a short-run thing.

That prediction does not have to do with the virtues of news journalists - though the penny-pinching British government might note the critical role played by the World Service at moments like these. It is to make the simple observation that there is no economic progress, based on trade and markets, without the full flow of information, with official encouragement, inside and outside the country. Efforts are being made by the Chinese government to prevent unbiased news reaching the country's interior; the Iranians want to censor the Internet. Yet not only does technology make such illiberalism more and more difficult to sustain but information restriction has to be traded off against market participation. Without knowledge - of events, trends, demands - trade is bound to suffer.

So the Berisha regime is voting against markets, against trade, against Albania's only conceivable future. The past is state socialism. Its debris lies all around that benighted country, from the rash of concrete pill boxes, erected on the orders of Enver Hoxha against the non-existent threat of invasion, to the eroded slopes denuded of tree cover by a collectivised peasantry lacking fuel. There is no way back into economic isolation; too many Albanians have tasted the fruits of freedom to let it go far.

But freedom alone guarantees nothing. Albanian liberty began promisingly. President Berisha inaugurated market reforms; the lek was stabilised. But during the past two years freedom has been exploited by gangsters and get-rich-quick merchants with - the conclusion is inescapable - the connivance of high officials. We should not make too much of the naivete of the Albanian people taken in by pyramid schemes: such schemes and their cousins flourished in Depression America. The something-for-nothing mentality is visible here in Britain, too. But the Albanians were conned in a remarkably comprehensive and wholesale fashion; and one of the country's short-run problems is how to re-establish trusting economic and political relationships in a situation where, willy-nilly, many people will end up losers.

First, of course, there must a return to order. Calm in the streets of Vlora, Gjirokaster and Sarander is a precondition of progress. But if the country can be cooled down, what conjunction of foreign government intervention and action by the Tirana authorities is most likely to secure, say, a restoration of the status quo ante 1994?

No one needs to pretend Albania is a strategic pawn or even a potential contributor to regional instability. Hoxha's only allies were the North Koreans; Moscow's only interest is indirect, routed through Belgrade. There is an oppressed Albanian majority in Serb-ruled Kosovo, but so far Tirana has shown no inclination to stir up that small and dangerous hornets' nest. An efflux of people from Albania could be a nuisance to Greece and Italy, members both the European Union and Nato. But our interest rests on more than the obligations of alliance. It goes wider than humanitarian concern or even the prospect of new Adriatic beaches which one day ought to bring that country much-needed tourist revenues. It is our stake in seeing a small country emerge from the iron cage of unfreedom.

The Greeks and Italians want the Dutch, current presidents of the EU, to convene crisis meetings, and so they should. A comparatively tiny amount of money, made available perhaps as a soft loan, could tide the Albanian government over the effects of the pyramid- selling scandal. But the usefulness of a bail-out depends on the capacity of the Tirana government, first, to regain some minimal degree of public confidence, and, second, to establish conditions in which scams and schemes may go on (no one is ever going to extirpate get-rich-quick aspiration) but are kept local and manageable.

Is President Sali Berisha capable of such transformation? It might mean his undoing the results of that corrupted election of last May which saw his Democratic Party into power. There is no point ignoring the fact that among the opposition's democrats and liberals are hardline Communists; yet it is hard to see how the institutions of freedom, economic or political, can be reformed without cross-party co-operation.

There is a further condition to be met before any offer of financial or other assistance is given by the EU, the World Bank, the United States or any other international actor. It is official freedom of the air. President Berisha's attempt to muzzle the press is more than an effort to stop news circulating in Albania. It is the act of a regime ashamed of its repression; it wants the foreign audience to deprived of evidence of Albania's primitive condition and its own people to be left in the dark. President Berisha needs to see how damaging and self-defeating such action is. Albania has barely started out on the rocky road towards capitalist democracy. Getting back to the starting point requires even this small Balkan state to learn liberalism. And it starts today with freedom of information.