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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

MiG retirement marks the end of an era

Mig-15 Mig-17 Mig-19
TIRANA - Albania‘s antiquated air force of Soviet-designed MiG aircraft, which killed 35 Albanian pilots but no enemies, is finally on its way to the museum and the scrapheap, the armed forces chief said on Tuesday.

"If anyone wants to buy them, they are welcome," General Pellumb Qazimi told Reuters. Some potential Western buyers "wanted to turn them into bars", he said.

For the Albanian military, the general said, the future lies in a fleet of modern multi-role helicopters able to "interact with the planes of the ( NATO ) alliance we want to join".

A satellite of Soviet Union and China during the first decades of the Cold War, the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha was given a fleet that grew to 125 MiGs to repel what Qazimi called "a classic total aggression" from the West.

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