ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 15, 1997 TAG: 9703170047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR THE ROANOKE TIMES
A Virginia Tech agricultural economics professor and two consultants who were working on a project to improve the agricultural structure of Albania were among Americans evacuated Friday from the country's capital city of Tirana.
Roger Kraynick, a member of the Tech faculty since last June, and two consultants hired by the university - Mike Martin from the University of Florida and Bishu Chatterjee from California - were evacuated safely to a ship and had arrived in the port city of Brindisi, Italy, said Herbert Stoevener, an agriculture and applied economics professor at Tech.
The three men were in Tirana as part of Tech's work on a project sponsored by Winrock International, a nonprofit consulting firm in Little Rock, Ark., that works with developing countries, Stoevener said Friday. The project's focus was to bring the agricultural sector of Albania up to modern standards, he said.
The project was financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Much of the Tech team's work was with the University of Tirana, Albania's primary agricultural institution, Stoevener said.
"I spoke with Dr. Kraynick yesterday," he said. "There had been some women and children evacuated, four helicopter-loads. He said that even though there was continual gunfire all around, no one panicked in this American group. Things seemed to be relatively cool as far as this group was concerned."
Stoevener said he received an e-mail from Winrock officials Friday that Kraynick, Martin and Chatterjee were fine. Stoevener said he expected Kraynick to return to Blacksburg but that Chatterjee and Martin would likely return to Winrock headquarters in Little Rock.
The future of the Winrock project is uncertain, Stoevener said.
"There is a need for the project not to be diminished at all by this," he said. "But in terms of the future of our project, it has to be safe for us to operate there. The university has to be open, which it is not at the present time."
U.S. troops flew into Tirana on Thursday to evacuate Americans trapped in a weeks-long uprising, sparked by the collapse of high-risk investment schemes that drained the savings of thousands of Albanians. It has grown into anti-government protests.
Such schemes had been "mushrooming" in Albania, said James Littlefield, a Virginia Tech marketing professor. Littlefield, who had been advising the University of Tirana on curriculum and facilities issues, said Friday that in the course of his work he learned of "raging pyramid schemes" - multilevel investment deals where money from new investors was used to pay off older ones.
"Every family in the country had money in them," Littlefield said. "This is a country with 3.3 million people who have an average income of $30 a month. They got the money by selling apartments, by having relatives abroad send money. They got it in a number of ways.
"Now their homes are gone, their savings are gone - everything is gone. They're desperate because they don't have anything now."
And as a result, "there's great confusion, great disaster right now."
Littlefield said he has known about the schemes for about three years. Each time he visited Tirana, they seemed to get worse.
"Eventually, it just fell apart," he said. "There's not enough money in the country to maintain that forever."
Littlefield said the schemes were allowed to flourish because the country lacked a system of checks and balances.
"Whoever was willing to start such a scheme did it," he said. "Here, you'd get caught pretty quickly and the government would make you stop. In Albania, the government did not warn against them or say `You can't do this.'''
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