Albania

Albania. Poor, poor Albania. Created at the turn of the last century by European powers wishing to break up the decrepit Ottoman Empire, at first it really wasn't that more underdeveloped than its neighbors. They were all places that could have served as the filming location of "Frankenstein": largely unpaved roads, lack of amenities such as electricity, hospitals, schools, etc.

Albanian Town Hall Meeting

Now flash forward a few decades. After World War Two, Eastern Europe developed itself in competition with the West. Albania, led by Enver Hoxha, lagged far behind and ended up isolating itself from virtually every other nation on Earth. Its people had no experience with capitalism and when the government in the early 1990s finally began to open up to privatization, most Albanians didn't understand that a "safe" route to investment in their future involved saving money in banks. Instead, they began to invest in pyramid schemes which promised very high rates of return. 
By the late 1990s, around 2/3 of the population was involved in the several Ponzi schemes active in Albania. Leaders of the schemes were frequently seen in the media & at events involving politicians, so most people thought that they were investing in something that was state-sanctioned and therefore a safe thing. Shortly thereafter, the bubble inevitably collapsed. Try imagining a situation where 2/3 of a country's population has lost all of their savings. They might get a little upset, to say the least, especially since it was the corruption of the more-savvy politicians that allowed these schemes to proliferate. Across the country, especially in the south, police & armed forces lost control of town after town. The people raided the police stations and armories and armed themselves. Thousands of people fled the violence on boats across the 40 mile wide Strait of Otranto to Italy. It took a multinational force five months to quell the violence.

Albania in 1997

Nowadays Albania has been showing improvements in both its economic and its democratic situations. It has tried very hard to ignore the irridentist elements of transnational Albanians in Macedonia, Greece, and Kosovo in order to further ingratiate itself with NATO (which it has since joined) and the E.U.

By the way, all those arms "liberated" by the people? There's a good chance they made their way over the border into Kosovo.

Kosovo: like Albania but with more guns