Top Quotes: “Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe” — Fred Abrahams
Introduction
“For four decades after World War Two, tiny Albania was hermetically sealed. The Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, banned religion, private property, and “decadent” music such as the Beatles. Secret police arrested critics and border guards shot people who tried to flee. But as communism crumbled across the Eastern Bloc, the regime loosened its grip. Pressed by demonstrations and poverty, in late 1990 the communists allowed other parties to exist. In early 1992, more than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a democratically elected government came to power and started to bring Albania in from the cold.
Albania made a rapid switch. It transformed from a country with sealed borders to a smuggler’s dream, from the world’s only officially atheist state to a playground for religions, from a land with no private cars to a jumble of belching cars, buses, and trucks. Albania flipped from a country of harsh, top-down repression to a vibrant state where most anything goes.”
“In 1997 after the crash of massive pyramid schemes defrauded people torched city halls and looted military depots.”
“I watched the United States and other Western democracies repeatedly make shortsighted decisions that stymied Albania’s transition. For many years, the U.S. and West European governments supported an authoritarian or corrupt Albanian leader for the sake of stability in the Balkans and, later, Albania’s cooperation in the “war on terror.” These governments frequently backed an individual more than the country’s institutions; for this, Albania is today paying a significant price.
Through it all, I had the opportunity to mingle with Albania’s elite. I watched former political prisoners join the government and government ministers go to jail. I saw foreigners who loved Albania get declared persona non grata while swindlers won business contracts and the highest state praise. I have been called a Communist, a CIA agent, pro-Albanian, anti-Albanian, pro-Greek, anti-Greek, pro-Serb, anti-Serb, and by one journalist, whimsical boy with an earring and short pants.” But above all, I have been privileged to peer behind the curtain of a society that is for many outsiders opaque.”
“Oft invaded and overrun, Albanians honor guests but view outsiders with a leery eye.
The fields looked choppy and parched. Gray flecks dotted the land like acne on a teenage face: the concrete military bunkers built during communism on almost every farm, field, and mountain to repel invasion and, more important, to instill fear of outside attack. The pillboxes proved difficult to destroy and for years served as food stands and sometimes as homes for the poor.”
“The passengers stirred. Most on the charter flight from New York were Albanians from the United States who were visiting their homeland for the first time in almost fifty years, or for the first time ever. They knew Albania from stories and songs and faded photos torn at the sides. Many had left family behind when they fled for a better life. The landing gear descended and they jumped in excitement for their bags.
The plane landed with a bump, and then a startling tick and tack, as if the tires were flat. The runway had hexagonal, concrete slabs rather than asphalt. Cows grazed under plane wings as soldiers with faded green uniforms huddled in the shade looking bored. They were boys, but with weathered skin and tired eyes. From the plane we walked down a wide path flanked by palm trees and patches of burnt grass. The air felt dry and hot. Rinas Airport stood before us, the tower missing windows and tilting to one side. A tractor rumbled by with our luggage in tow.
In the parking lot I found a frantic scene of dust and tears, Families separated for decades were hugging tightly and kissing each other on the cheeks, with boxes of televisions, clothes, and toys piled high. Young boys tugged at my sleeve: “Bon giorno!” “Taxi?” and “Hello!” It was July 1993, one year and a bit since Albanias first free elections after four decades of isolation and dictatorship, and the country was awaking, rubbing its eyes. To the world it was that crumpled bill in the back pocket that you forgot was there.
Tirana was chaotic and hot. A single traffic light hung in the center of the city, and it did not work. Private cars, illegal three years earlier, raced through the streets, dodging horse carts and blasting kitschy musical horns. Most were third-hand clunkers from Germany; they say Albania is where a Mercedes goes to die. Books by Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha littered the streets. Vendors used pages from Hoxha’s more than one hundred books to wrap goat cheese and chunks of bloody meat.”
“It was poorer than any place in Europe’s East, with few phones, dirt roads, and people living on aid.”
“We took our first xhiro, the evening promenade down the boulevard, where friends and families ambled arm in arm, chatting, watching, and being watched. The Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard, built by the Italians in the early 1930s, was closed every evening for the pedestrian flow, but post-communist traffic demands soon put that practice to rest.”
“To the boulevard’s west lay the forbidden Block — the previously sequestered area of villas where Politburo members and other ruling elite had lived. By 1993, families were strolling down the tree-lined streets, still half expecting someone to order them out. Over time, the Block became the most expensive real estate in Tirana, home to fancy apartment buildings and ritzy cafés named Rio and Fame. For a while, Hoxha’s villa housed a fast-food restaurant with golden arches called McMarriot.”
“Across the street lay Rinia Park (Youth Park), a patchy green quad with crisscrossing paths and an abandoned restaurant that Albanians called Taiwan because construction finished after Hoxha had severed Albania’s ties with China in 1978.”
“Next came the Ministry of Interior and Tirana’s city hall, designed by Mussolini’s architects. The pastel-colored façades were chipped and cracked. Then the boulevard spilled into Skanderbeg Square, a stretch of concrete surrounded by the national museum, national bank, and Palace of Culture. In the middle stood the bold statue of Albania’s national hero, Gergi Kastrioti, aka Skanderbeg, who led the Albanian resistance against Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. His efforts failed, as the Turkish-built Ethem Bey mosque next to the statue affirms. Albania remained part of the Ottoman Empire for 434 years, becoming the last Balkan state to gain its independence in 1912.
On a platform in front of the national museum lay the base of Hoxhas statue, which an angry crowd had toppled two and a half years before. Above the museum entrance, workers chisled away at a colorful Socialist Realist mosaic of marching peasants and Partisan fighters, trying to remove the yellow communist star from the red Albanian flag. Albania was marching towards democracy, trying to erase its past.
From the start, I felt excited to be a special guest. Albanians welcomed all foreigners with Balkan hospitality and the giddiness of people emerging from a fifty-year sleep. But they embraced Americans in particular as the victors of the Cold War. They did not carry my car from the airport as they had tried with Secretary of State James Baker two years before.”
“In a tin-and-glass kiosk on the boulevard I spent a night drinking with a husky young man named Azem Hajdari, who explained how he had led Tirana’s students against the communist regime in late 1990, his charm growing with each story and drink. Eight years later, gunmen assassinated Hajdari in Tirana, sparking a violent protest and attempted coup. His role in the student movement, I later learned, was controversial, as was his alleged involvement in organized crime.”
“Others came from neighboring Kosovo and Macedonia, parts of the former Yugoslavia where ethnic Albanians lived. For years these Albanians had viewed Albania as a paradise, soaking up the propaganda of Enver Hoxha’s radio and TV.”
“The paper caused a scandal right away. Albania’s new, democratically elected president was pushing a press law with vague terms and high fines that many journalists feared would muzzle the media. A student wrote a front-page article that quoted those in favor of and against the law. In an editorial, the students said the law threatened free speech. Next to the piece ran a cartoon by a talented art student: contorted figures cut from newsprint getting trampled by a boot.
The paper appeared on a Thursday, and the students bicycled it, tied with a red ribbon, to the city’s newspapers, party offices, and embassies. On Monday morning, I stopped for coffee on my way to the university and an older journalism student looked surprised. “Why aren’t you at the department?” he asked. “Something is going on.” I biked to the university to find Rudolf Marku changing the padlock on the computer room. The newspaper was closed, he said, and we had to leave. The swimming pool was dry.
The reasons Marku and the deans gave were contradictory and confused. Although we had taught the newspaper class for weeks, as graduate students we were no longer considered qualified to teach. The donated computers were not for the newspaper, and the students should use them for other work. The article on the press law should not have been above another story on AIDS and youth. Marku called us communists. The deans threatened the students with expulsion.
Angry and confused, we went to the recently opened U.S. embassy for help. Ambassador Bill Ryerson, a grandfatherly figure with glasses and balding head, listened politely. He offered to confirm our credentials as graduate students so we might teach, and he did so with a red wax stamp on the transcripts that Columbia faxed from New York. As we were leaving the embassy, Ryerson’s deputy called us into a room and growled about the deans’ obnoxious behavior. He suggested we “stay calm” until things got sorted out.
We ignored his advice and issued a statement about the closure that got published in the vocal opposition press. The deans responded by kicking us out of the university; the once-friendly guard blocked our entrance at the door. A vice-dean named Aurel Plasari wrote a scathing article in the newspaper Zèri i Rinse (Voice of the Youth), the former organ of the communist youth. “I would have preferred skinning a dead dog to explaining university regulations to foreigners who consider Albania to be a Zululand,” he wrote.? The newspaper of an opposition party fired back. On a full page, the paper published embarrassing poems by another dean, including one called “I Loved You Communism.” Naively, we had stepped into a storm.
In fact, I learned later, Reporter’s closure had nothing to do with us or the deans. It stemmed from a conflict Albania’s president was having with the Soros Foundation — funder of our project — and in particular with the foundation’s fiery director. At the time, I thought two stubborn men were locking horns. But I soon saw that the foundation director was boldly criticizing the president’s increasingly authoritarian ways — perhaps the first foreigner to scratch the veneer. The new leader disliked dissent.”
“Churches and mosques sprouted across the land, mostly with foreign funds. After years of enforced atheism, some mosques posted instructions on how to pray. Evangelists, Hare Krishnas, and Moonies battled for the Albanian soul.”
“Economically Albania was moving fast, and my barometer was our Columbia friend Gazi. When we first arrived, his family used water from an outside spigot and cooked on a kerosene burner that sat on the ground. Over time, they installed a sink and stove. Across the country, families bought color televisions and satellite dishes to catch the outside world. Bathrooms got tiles, water heaters, and porcelain toilets to cover open pits.
But the economic gap was shockingly clear when I visited Macedonia, a few hours to the East. The trees looked greener. The streets were cleaner. Shops had glamorous items such as packaged meat. A trip south to Greece revealed a wider divide. Crossing back into Albania one literally stepped from asphalt into mud.
Most troubling was the chaotic development, without planning or care. Rinia Park on the boulevard, once a serene green square, grew kiosk cafés with plastic chairs. They soon had awnings, patios, and walls. By 1995, the park was consumed, as were the banks of the Lana River, smothered by cafés and shops, their garbage tossed into the fetid water. Behind the Palace of Culture yawned a massive hole with mud and rock. Nobody knew why it had been dug in 1991. The most common explanation was a hotel that never got built; most people called it the Sheraton Hole. It remained a giant urinal in the center for more than ten years. At the pleasant beach near Durres on the Adriatic Sea, twenty miles west of Tirana, visitors threw watermelon rinds onto the sand. One day I watched a car speeding on the hard sand strike and kill a boy playing soccer with his friends. After years of forced order and control, Albanians viscerally rejected the common good. Democracy meant the right to break rules.”
“Gradually I learned to converse in Albanian. Albanians have a cadence, a rhythm fueled by cigarette smoke and olive oil. The way they speak, the way they engage, is ceremonious, lyrical. There are introductions, then coffee, then allusions, and only then the point, if a point is ever made. Often it is communicated with a squint of the eye or a tilt of the head. Whole conversations transpire with the twitch of a face. If in some cultures one must read between the lines, in Albania one must read between the words. After years of invasive monitoring, they learned to speak in subtle twists.”
Socialism
“I was struck by the stories of brutality and survival under the previous regime, and almost every Albanian had a tale to tell. Critics were thrown into prisons and their families into work camps. One man was arrested because he complained that a shop had no cheese — in Hoxha’s paradise the shop always had cheese. Another man was imprisoned for singing the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” One artist nailed his paintings together and hid them in the attic because they violated the party’s interpretation of acceptable art. He was betrayed by a family member and spent years in jail. The Association of Former Political Prisoners said the regime had imprisoned 34,135 people for political reasons over four decades, and sent 59,009 others to labor camps. After bogus trials, 5,487 people were sentenced to death.”
“Born in 1908 into a middle-class family in the southern town of Grokaster, Hoxha studied at the prestigious French lycée in another southern town, Korça, and won a government scholarship to attend the University of Montpellier. He returned to Albania in 1936 without a degree and taught French in his former Korça school — a cheerful and mild-mannered man, one of his pupils recalled. He became active in a local communist group, although Albania had no communist party at the time and, as an agricultural society, not much of a working class.
Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938. The next year, Mussolini invaded Albania and easily deposed its ruler, Ahmed Zog, a former prime minister and president who had declared himself king. Zog fled with his wife and two-day-old son, Leka, whom I watched try to retake the throne fifty-eight years later.
Under Italian rule, Hoxha lost his teaching job. He moved to Tirana — at the time with less than twenty thousand people — and opened a tobacco shop, which became the secret meeting place of the budding communist movement. The Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito offered help, and under his tutelage the Albanian Communist Party was founded in November 1941. Enver Hoxha, then thirty-three years old, became secretary general. He held the position for the next forty-four years.
During World War Two, Hoxha played a major role in the communist resistance with his close friend Mehmet Shehu, the Partisan military commander. The Partisans fought the Italians alongside other groups, notably the followers of King Zog, known as Legaliteti (Legality), and an anti-royalist nationalist movement called Balli Kombetar (National Front). As in other Balkan countries, the resistance fractured along political and regional lines.
Italy capitulated in 1943 and Germany occupied Albania, installing a puppet regime with help from the nationalist Ball Kombetar. In return, Hitler expanded Albania’s borders around Kosovo, the predominantly ethnic Albanian-inhabited region in Yugoslavia, and North Epirus, the area of northern Greece where many ethnic Albanians live. But by 1944 the Partisans were pushing north towards Tirana with help from the British. In October they formed a provisional government with Hoxha as prime minister. One month later, the Germans withdrew from Albania, and the Partisans marched triumphantly into Tirana under cover of Allied planes. Communist propaganda boasted that Partisan bravery had liberated Albania after a heroic fight. The history books conveniently ignored support from the Yugoslavs and hardware from the British and Americans, let alone Hitler’s decision to leave Albania. Instead, Hoxha crafted the image of a hardened guerilla fighter from the hills.”
“For support Hoxha relied on Tito. Yugoslav experts advised the government and brought food to ward off starvation. Yugoslav investments rebuilt the agricultural sector and some light industry. In return, Albania did not contest Yugoslav claims on Kosovo. Yugoslavia became the first state to recognize the Albanian government. In 1948, the Albanian parliament, under pressure from Tito, voted to merge Albania and Yugoslavia’s economies and militaries.
At the same time, divisions emerged in Albania over the extent of Yugoslav control. Some argued for even closer ties, but others feared that Tito would annex the small and vulnerable state. Hoxha remained neutral in the debate, but then made a decisive move. When Tito severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1948, Hoxha labeled the Yugoslav leader a corrupt, revisionist communist who had betrayed Marxist ideals. He gave Yugoslav advisors forty-eight hours to leave.”
“Hoxha seized the chance to eliminate his rivals, purging Albanian officials with real or suspected ties to Yugoslavia. He had fourteen of thirty-one members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee executed, as well as thirty-two of 109 deputies in parliament. The reign of terror had begun.
In need of a new benefactor, Hoxha turned to Stalin. Soviet advisors replaced the Yugoslavs, and the USSR offered a steady flow of aid. The Soviets built a submarine base on the island of Sazan off Albania’s southern coast, giving them a strategic post on the Adriatic Sea. At the first Albanian Communist Party congress in November 1948, on Stalin’s advice, delegates changed the party’s name to the Albanian Party of Labor. Soviet aid helped Hoxha improve the electrical grid, education, and health care. Illiteracy and infant mortality declined. Still, the country remained an agricultural backwater, neglected and remote.”
“The secret police, or Sigurimi (Security), enforced control. An estimated one in four Albanians worked for the ever-listening agency, usually as informants. Neighbors spied on neighbors, husbands on wives, and pupils on teachers. Friends testified in court against their oldest mates. Unlike Eastern European countries that allowed a degree of dissent, Hoxha tolerated virtually none. The slightest word against the party could bring prison or worse. Whole families were banished to internal exile, where they worked remote fields, checking in twice a day with police. Children born into such conditions were marked for life.
The people nearest to Hoxha felt most at risk, former Politburo and Central Committee members said, because he repeatedly purged and executed long-time comrades and friends. Over time, the Politburo became a gaggle of obedient sycophants – villagers from the provinces who were indebted to Hoxha for their rise.”
“During his rule, Albania severed ties with all of its patrons – Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China in succession. He used each break to justify a domestic purge, eliminating those with doubtful devotion to his despotic rule.”
“Hoxha introduced reform based on Mao’s Cultural Revolution, sending bureaucrats and government officials to work the rural fields. He revised the education system to filter outside ideas. Independent-minded writers and artists lost their jobs or went to jail.
In 1967 Hoxha banned religion, as if he were jealous that someone had faith in a force higher than him. He ordered the destruction of mosques, churches, and cloisters and their conversion into sports halls or warehouses. The Catholic cathedral in Shkoder became a basketball arena with “Glory Marxism-Leninism” inscribed on the court in large red letters. Albania was never a religious country, but Hoxha officially declared it the world’s first atheist state. Albanians buried sacred relics or hid them in their homes, where they stayed until freedom of religion returned in 1990.
After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hoxha withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, although Albania had not attended a meeting for years. The Ministry of Defense began a colossal project to build an estimated seven hundred thousand concrete, steel-reinforced bunkers. The military put the concrete mushrooms along the coast and borders, on mountaintops, farms, and even city streets. Arrow tips were mounted atop fence posts to thwart parachutists. Too expensive to remove, the bunkers dotted the country years after communism’s fall. Lovers visited them for trysts and poor families used them as homes. Farmers who got back nationalized property spoke of how many bunkers they had received.”
“The government boasted the bunkers could withstand four nuclear blasts. That claim was shattered in 1999, during the Kosovo war, when NATO jets attacking Yugoslav forces mistakenly bombed and destroyed bunkers on the Albanian side. Albanian soldiers positioned nearby ran from their posts. “Damn Enver,” a person who saw the bombing told me they yelled. “He said these things were safe!”
The beginning of the 1970s saw a degree of cultural liberalization, inspired by Italian television, as young people tried to dress and dance like their contemporaries across the Adriatic Sea. Tirana women wore makeup and men grew sideburns. That came to a crashing halt after the eleventh Albanian song festival in December 1972, which offended the regime with its Western flair. Hoxha railed against corrupting “foreign influences” and young artists paid the price. A well-known singer was imprisoned and a popular songwriter was banished to the north. The head of state TV, Todi Lubonja, was blamed for the transgression. He and his son, Fatos Lubonja, were jailed until the regime fell. Other moderate voices in the media and culture fields were purged, as were many in the military. It was necessary, Hoxha said in 1974, to “cleanse the army with an iron broom.”
At the same time, Hoxha’s relations with China worsened after U.S. president Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, and China cut economic and military ties six years later. Albanians hoped for a new path, either back to the Soviet Union or perhaps towards the West. They got neither. Proud and stubborn, Hoxha embarked on a path of self-reliance, declaring Albania the only true socialist state in the world. “Better to eat grass than betray our principles,” a saying went.”
“By 1980, his diabetes required insulin shots twice per day. Hoxha’s kidneys were failing and his vision was bad. At party congresses he sat at the podium symbolically turning the pages of his speeches as loudspeakers broadcast prerecorded words to the crowd.
In 1981, Hoxha summoned strength for one last purge to eliminate his partner from World War Two and heir to the throne, Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu. The trigger was the engagement of Shehu’s son to a woman from Tirana who had an anti-communist relative in the United States. Under pressure, Shehu agreed to cancel the engagement but Hoxha convened the Politburo to debate the affair. Politburo members attacked Shehu for his treachery and forced him to engage in self-criticism. Hoxha did not speak. The next morning, Radio Tirana announced that Shehu had committed suicide. Apparently sensing his impending demise – and perhaps hoping to spare his family – Shehu shot himself. Some say he was shot.
The party denounced Shehu as a foreign spy and police arrested his wife and three sons. One son killed himself the next year by wiring his iron bed to a light plug. Shehu’s wife died in prison six years after that. In 2001, the family found Shehu’s remains in an unmarked grave: bones, a skull, some clothes, a watch, and a pair of shoes.
According to Albanian leaders from that time, the most likely explanation for Shehu’s death is the megalomania of the man he served. By 1981, Hoxha was gravely ill. His logical successor was Shehu, the second most powerful man in Albania, and considerably stronger than numbers three and four. But Hoxha craved power even on his deathbed, and wanted history to hold him high. He needed a successor who was ideologically agreeable and would not overshadow the Leader. As omnipotent as Hoxha was for forty years, the determined war hero Shehu, notoriously calculating and stern, could minimize Hoxha’s aura of invincibility.”
“The prisoners erupted in joy. They shrieked and jumped like free men. Some days later they paid the price for their exultations with beatings and a twenty-day lock-down, but repercussions entered no one’s mind on that cold day.
Outside of the prisons, all Albania mourned. Even those who despised the regime felt a sense of loss. Hoxha was the guardian of a patriarchal land – the man who had shepherded Albanians from the destruction of World War Two, steered them between the hostile East and West, and built a society with electricity and schools in the furthest hills. His indoctrination had seeped into every crack of life, a cult of personality so complete that his death was traumatic even to those who had suffered from persecution. “Daddy, will the Germans invade Albania?” a young girl nervously asked her parents.”
“Shoppers stood in lines from 5:00 a.m., and often went home empty handed. The only vegetable readily available was leeks, and it became a symbol of Albania’s despair. Collectivized to the extreme, the economy had exhausted its possibilities, like a human body burning muscle and fat to survive.”
Post-Dictatorship Socialism
“In 1985 the party allowed some discussion of economic reform: how to improve the system. In January 1986, authorities cut prison sentences by a quarter, and released a few political prisoners who were serving their final year. But the Party of Labor’s Ninth Congress in November 1986 kept change in check. The slogan of the meeting, chosen by Alia, was the “Congress of Continuity.” The next year, the government allowed farmers to own two sheep, but they had to be the same sex. The reform could not propagate.
With the economy failing, Alia cautiously resumed the policy that Hoxha had started and approached some Western European states, in particular Germany, which had diplomatic relations with all the other states in Eastern Europe. In 1987 Germany agreed to give fifty million marks in development aid in return for diplomatic relations. France soon gave credit for hydroelectric plants and Italy provided a modest amount of aid.
Inside Albania the party loosened its grip. Homemade devices called “tin cans” converted televisions from VHF to UHF, letting viewers watch the forbidden Italian RAI 2 and Yugoslav 2. Snide remarks and critical huffs against the regime increased, although thousands of political prisoners remained behind bars. Unheard of during Hoxha, political jokes emerged. Cannibals were cooking two Politburo members over a fire, one joke went. The cannibals had to remove them from the fire because, while roasting, they ate the potatoes.
Albanians scanned for signs of change. They analyzed the leaders’ glances on TV, the firmness of handshakes, and the seating at meetings. They believed that every Reagan-Gorbachev summit addressed their fate. Hope for emancipation assumed mystical forms. Northern Albanians near the coast talked about “the monster of Lezhe,” an underwater beast that lived in Lezhe Bay. The creature was later discovered to be a trapped whale, but its presence assumed surreal and magical tones that hinted at change.”
“Years later, many Albanians still recall Ceausescu’s death as the key impetus for the communists’ defeat. They saw that a repressive system could fall. Also, Albania stood as the lone communist state in the East.”
“The northern city of Shkoder rejoiced at Nicola Ceausescu’s end. The city had an anti-Hoxha slant. The Leader had come from Girokaster in the south, and he discriminated against Albanians from the north. Plus, Shkoder is largely Catholic, and the Sigurimi treated the clergy as Vatican spies. Cafés in town grew thick with rumor and cigarette smoke. Radical graffiti appeared on walls: Poshte Komunizmi! (Down with Communism!), Poshte Partia! (Down with the Party!).”
“On June 12, Parliament legalized the issuance of passports, which for decades were driven only to the drivers of state-owned companies and the party elite. Travelers had gotten a passport from the Interior Ministry, an oversized red book that drew smirks from foreign border guards, and returned it when they came home. Now every citizen could get a document to leave the prison state.”
“By week’s end, about five thousand Albanians had crowded the embassies. The German compound housed 3,199 people, who slept in the garden, and used a hand-dug latrine. A woman gave birth to a baby girl she named Germana. Eight hundred and seventy people slept in the Italian embassy, and about five hundred stayed with the French.”
“At 4:00 a.m. on July 12, the authorities herded the remaining people onto buses and drove them in a convey to Durres. The group was terrified they would be executed, Bujar Alikaj recalled. Villagers lined the road to wave goodbye. The passengers threw their watches and money out the bus windows, as if they wanted to leave it all behind.
In Durres, five ferries waited at a dock. The Albanians walked past a line of police and Sigurimi with video cameras. On board, foreign journalists swarmed, wanting to know why the people had fled.”
Toward Democracy
“Ramiz Alia and the party leadership grasped the regime’s precarious state. They postponed the start of classes for two weeks, claiming that some university buildings needed repair.”
“As winter neared, the students’ anger grew. The university and Student City had broken windows, no heat, sporadic water, and electricity cuts, made worse that year by a drought. When the lights went out at night, voices sprang from the dormitories: “Freedom!” “We want democracy!” Students banged on the heating pipes. Music students answered with a chorus of horns.”
“It rained the morning of December 9, a makeup day of class, and students from Tirana came to Student City cold and wet. They saw students’ muddy pants and shoes hanging from the balconies, some stained with blood from the previous night. No one had died and the three arrested students were released, but the police showed they would use force. For the students, the violence galvanized the cause. Change would not come from above, they realized. Alia could not be trusted.”
“By 10:00 a.m., thousands of students had gathered at Student City’s central space. The organizing committee announced a demonstration in front of the main university offices. The eager crowd marched, armed with hormones and high hopes.
The riot police blocked most of the roads from Student City and funneled the crowd down the larger Elbasan Street. A few blocks away, in front of the High School for Arts and next to the Museum of Marxism-Leninism, the riot police closed the road with shields and batons. A few thousand students pushed up against the police. Bashkurti tried to speak with the students from behind police lines. The Sigurimi filmed from the nearby roofs. The chants grew louder: “We want Albania like all Europe!” “All Tirana is with us!”
By 2:00 p.m., the cold, rain, and fear had whittled the crowd to a few hundred. But the Sunday soccer match in the nearby stadium started at 2:30 p.m. The Ministry of Defense’s team, Partizani, was playing Dinamo from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Fearful of the dangerous cocktail of students and football fans, the government decided the protest should end. The students in the front row heard the order on the police radio: “Disperse them with force!” The students bolted through a field next to the Italian embassy, muddy from the day’s rain. They sprinted and jumped into apartment buildings, hidden by sympathetic residents. School books and shoes littered the sloppy field.”
“The next day, December 10, more students filled Student City’s open space, which would soon be called Democracy Square. Professors and professionals joined the crowd. Factory workers who earned five hundred leks per month — about sixty U.S. dollars — threatened to strike. Someone brought a sound system and the square resounded with music and chants. The students named an organizing committee with many of the people who had been active the previous two days.”
“The cunning Alia had played it well. Sensing the irreversible pressure from Student City, he had preempted the students. At the same time, his message was mixed. He had allowed the creation of “independent political organizations in accordance with the laws,” but had not specified what kinds of organizations were permitted and under what laws. According to the constitution, the Party of Labor was the “sole leading political force of the state and society.””
“A crowd surged, was repelled by the police, and surged again, gaining confidence as its numbers grew. Proud and determined, Hoxha looked out over the square wearing a suit and long coat, with his left hand behind his back and right hand at his side. The crowd pushed. A boy climbed Hoxha’s coat and hooked a metal cable around the dictator’s thumb. Men pulled from the left, while others pushed from the right, and the Leader’s body began to tilt from side to side. Just after 2:00 p.m., it separated from its base and came crashing down, predictably, to Hoxha’s left.”
“The government resigned and Alia announced an eight-member Presidential Council. The next day, mobs toppled Hoxha’s monuments in Kora and Girokaster, the former leader’s home town. In the Tirana pyramid, the Enver Hoxha Museum closed.”
Early Democracy
“The collapse of the Stability Government thrust Albania into a downward spiral of lawlessness that some have called the “time of dark forces.” The outgoing prime minister, Ylli Bufi, strangely announced that Albania had only one week of reserves for bread, causing frantic mobs to storm bakeries, warehouses, and shops. An estimated forty-five people died between December 1991 and February 1992 from riots and street violence. The all-powerful communist state had collapsed and nothing had taken its place. Some villages organized the systematic dismantling of community centers and cooperatives, distributing the windows, roof tiles, wooden beams, and electric wires. But in many cases, thieves yanked up railway track, uprooted water pipes, and stole manhole covers. They ripped bars from Albania’s prisons. They felled the stately poplars that lined national roads and burned them for heat. “The trees are nice,” one man told a journalist. “But if we don’t cut them, the bandits from the next village will do it first.””
“Meksi lacked the strength to counter Berisha.
That fear proved to be justified. During Berisha’s tenure as president, from 1992 to 1997, Meksi stood in the doctor’s shadow, never seriously challenging him, even as the country slid towards violence. His obsequiousness is perhaps why Berisha proposed him in the first place. Although no concrete evidence has emerged, Meksi is dogged by allegations of corruption, leading some Albanian observers to conclude that the two men had an unwritten deal: Berisha ruled and Meksi stole.
In contrast, Berisha denied his rivals important positions, with the exception of Gen Ruli, who stayed to deal with finance. Democratic Party founders Gramoz Pashko, Preg Zogaj, and Arben Imami sat in parliament but held no other posts. Azem Hajdari, the first DP head, was denied his request to be interior minister and settled for head of the parliamentary commission on state security. Relations between Hajdari and Berisha deteriorated over the next year, even forcing the former student to spend time in the United States after the police threatened him with arrest.
At the same time, the DP got depleted as intellectuals and professionals took jobs in government and state institutions. Berisha filled the void with grateful supporters: ex-political prisoners, anti-communist militants, and people from his region of Tropoja. Familiar with this style, many Albanians joined the party because they got scholarships, jobs, and business deals.”
“As Berisha consolidated power, the DP and government struggled to run the state. Bandits stopped drivers for their money, cars, and even clothes. Gangsters were better armed than the police. In April, Prime Minister Meksi declared that crime and poverty were “the gravediggers of the new democracy.” Lawlessness and rampant individualism were the dark genies inside the democratic bottle. With the fear of Enver gone, Albania lost its glue.
Desperate to show authority, the government publicly hung two brothers convicted of bludgeoning a family of five to death in the town of Fier. Authorities left their bodies swaying in the square for a day.”
“In the chaos, corruption boomed. Inexperienced officials at first accepted three-figure bribes, but they quickly learned the proper scale. When British Petroleum signed a contract to provide fuel at Rinas Airport, a person familiar with the deal told me, Albanian officials wanted pilots to pay by the tank with cash, like cars at the pump. The sanctions imposed by the U.N. on neighboring Yugoslavia because of the war offered special opportunities for smugglers, and Albania had the perfect combination of remote borders and a weak state. In the coming years, the Democratic Party and others would get rich from illegal oil sales to Slobodan Milosevie’s regime. The sanctions busting drove a black economy, created a class of criminalized businessmen and damaged the already fragile institutions of state.
To help the transition, Western advisors poured in, as the Yugoslavs, Russians, and Chinese had done before. Great Britain got the offices of the president and prime minister, although Berisha’s closest relations remained with the United States. The U.S. took the ministries of defense and finance. The Germans got the agency for privatization. Starved for contact with the outside world, Albanians treated the foreigners like gifts from above, and swallowed advice with indiscriminate zeal. ‘People thought Maggie Thatcher had kissed me on both cheeks and sent me off,’ recalled Guy Roberts, a young British advisor sent by the Westminster Foundation to help the prime minister. “In fact I was a departmental researcher in the basement.”
The lessons started with the basics, Roberts and other advisors said: how to operate a computer and copy machine, set agendas and draft budgets. In 1992, the government wanted to establish diplomatic relations with Libya, and it drafted a letter to Muammar Qadhat, at the time scorned as a terrorist by the West. A western advisor gently suggested they drop the idea. That same year, the foreign ministry received a “diplomat” from the Republic of Sealand who wanted to establish diplomatic ties. When ministry staff could not locate the country on the map, they asked a foreign advisor for help. He politely informed the minister, a doctor from a respected Catholic family, that Sealand was not a country but an abandoned anti-aircraft fort six miles off Britain’s eastern coast that had declared itself a principality. That same minister discovered a hidden button under his desk which, he was told, turned on the recording equipment in the ministry’s negotiation room. Such recordings were normal to create transcripts of meetings with foreign states. The next day the minister held a press conference and accused the communists of bugging the ministry to undermine the Democrats’ work, and he even took the case to court. “The minister apparently doesn’t know the difference between a microphone and a stethoscope,’ an expert witness testified.”
“Setting up diplomatic missions in London and other countries proved more complex, even where embassies had existed before. Virtually none of the new ambassadors had traveled abroad. Many had never flown, stayed at a hotel, or ridden an escalator. Around the world, Albania’s new diplomats lived in cramped quarters above the embassy. They ate in cafeterias and arrived at state functions on the public bus. Diaspora communities had to buy them clothes.
To save money, the government asked the prewar ambassador to the U.K, an émigré living in London, to resume his job. He declined due to age, but his son took the job as honorary counsel. “We put a brass plate on my house and worked from the sofa,” Alexander Duma told me with a smile. He and his father designed a visa stamp in the garden and had it made down the street. A full ambassador came one year later and the government upgraded the Duma house to embassy.”
“The prosecutor asked for a break. When he returned, the charges were dropped.
The next day, the prosecutor amended the charge from disseminating false information to revealing state secrets.
In court, Ngjela weaved legalistic genius and vaudeville flair. “The first charge was for disseminating false information,” Ngjela said, waving his hand in the air. “And the Defense Ministry has submitted testimony that no tanks were in the north. Therefore, if the charges are changed to revealing state secrets, then it means the minister lied in court. Either both my client and Minister Zhulali go to prison or they both go free!”
The prosecutor dropped the charges again. But it was not the end of the paper’s legal fight.”
“Despite the revanchist politics, Albania’s economy seemed to grow. I watched Albanians buy cars and fix their apartments. They opened cafés and traveled abroad. But I could not understand from whence the money came. Industry had collapsed and Albania was importing basic goods. Unemployment was higher than the government said. Remittances from workers abroad no doubt helped, but could they keep the country afloat?
The answer became clear when I visited the area around Lake Shkoder on the northern border with Montenegro, at that time still part of Yugoslavia. A narrow two-lane road with potholes and a weak shoulder ran to the border crossing. During communism, only rumbling government trucks or a clopping mule had interrupted the asphalt’s sleep. By 1994, the road had become an active strip, with goods worth millions rolling through every month.
The boom began in 1992, when the United Nations imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia because of the war. Formal trade ceased with Yugoslavia’s neighbors — Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania — but clandestine trade quickly soared, especially for oil. Albania’s far north became a booming commercial zone; smugglers calculated their money by weight. According to the sanctions coordinator for the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Albania supplied more fuel to Yugoslavia than all other countries combined.”
“The international community understood that Albania needed the business. Concerned with cooperation on Kosovo and Macedonia, it tolerated illegal acts.
The business began with Albanian companies importing oil and fuel from Italy and Greece to the ports at Vlora and Durres, former Albanian government officials and financial police told me. Albania’s domestic fuel use had jumped with the legalization of private cars in 1991, but imports soon far exceeded what Albania consumed. By one count, in 1994 Albania imported double the amount of oil that it used. Once in Albania, the importers sold the fuel to smugglers who transported it north. Tankers deposited the fuel in one of the many gas stations that had sprung up near the border. Day and night, trucks brought fuel from the stations to Lake Shkoder, where smugglers loaded it onto boats for transport to Montenegro on the other side.
At first men loaded barrels onto dinghies. Soon they pumped gasoline and diesel through rubber hoses onto small barges. Eventually smugglers installed underground pipes.”
“One of the main oil importers in Albania was a company called Shiponja (Eagle), which belonged to the Democratic Party. The law allowed political parties to run businesses, and the Socialists had a similar company called Progress.”
“Regardless of Schifter’s motivations, Berisha had developed a powerful enemy in Washington, and Schifter would play a central role in the Albanian leader’s demise.
Berisha pressed on with the Omonia trial, despite protests from Greece and the United States. In September, a judge sentenced the men to between six and eight years in prison. Greece expelled seventy thousand more Albanians, and the police beat men as they tossed them across the border.”
“International observers, diplomats, and journalists watched from the veranda of the Tirana Hotel as the police moved in with batons against the opposition leaders and the crowd. The police were “clobbering people without regard,” one U.S. observer said. They beat six opposition leaders, including Democratic Party founders Gramoz Pashko and Arben Imami, who lost his front teeth, and dragged them away in vans. Paskal Milo from the Social Democrats, later Albania’s foreign minister, broke his arm.”
“The final break with Washington, however, came when Berisha played across the border. In December 1996, as tension in Kosovo was rising, he supported calls for Kosovo Albanians to take matters into their own hands and rely less on international support — a clear reference to the United States. By this point, even Berisha’s supporters in the Pentagon felt he had gone too far. The friction with Greece could be contained. Stolen elections can be tolerated. But a threat to regional stability, with American troops in Bosnia and Macedonia, was too much.”
“In an interview in April 1997, after the Democrats lost power, Zhulali accused Berisha of using Kosovo to distract Albanians and foreigners from the domestic crisis. “President Berisha’s last political move to transfer attention towards Kosovo, in trying to radicalize the situation, failed,” he said. “This also brought about his final isolation from the outside world.””
The Pyramid Scheme
“By 1993, Albanian mattresses were full with bills. No one trusted the state-run banks. Guest workers were sending money for their families to open cafés, buy satellite dishes, and refurbish apartments. Businesses worked with cash and people hid their money at home.
Three years later, the banks had not improved. Payment times lasted five to six days, and three times that for interbank transfers. ATMs, checks, and credit cards did not exist. As the U.S. ambassador reported in 1996, the banking system was “a relic of the past.”
The lending side looked even worse. A high default rate forced the national bank to impose credit ceilings, on advice of the IMF. In 1994, on IMF and World Bank advice, the government restricted the state banks to lending only the amount repaid on existing loans. These restrictions crippled Albania’s fledgling small businesses. New ventures could not start and existing companies could not expand.”
“By late 1995, the Bosnian war was coming to a close. The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia signed the Dayton peace accords in December and the United Nations lifted sanctions on Yugoslavia. Overnight, Albania lost its lucrative oil market to the north. Albania had always maintained that its fuel imports only met domestic need, but with the sanctions busting gone, oil imports dropped.
One month later, the pyramid schemes began to shake. Without a steady income from smuggling, the schemes were forced to recruit an ever-growing number of investors. To attract new principal, they raised their monthly rates, setting in motion a downward spiral that ended in their dramatic crash.”
“Mostly, Albanians felt duped. The government had given the impression that their investments were safe. Berisha had said the Albanians’ money was “the cleanest money in Europe and the world.” He encouraged them to invest. They could tolerate his arrogance and authoritarianism so long as they made money. Now they had no reason to accept his lies.
The government promised to return what it could. Not even a penny from these deposits will be used for other purposes besides their reimbursement, Berisha said, promising distribution on February 5. By then antigovernment demonstrations had spread across southern and central Albania, including Tirana. When the police responded with violence, the people’s anger swelled.”
“To residents of the dusty and dilapidated town of Lushnje in central Albania, the pyramid boss and former army officer Rrapush Xhaferri was a saint. Known as “the general,” he renovated the stadium and brought world-class players to the local soccer team. More importantly, he helped thousands of Lushnje residents survive. His pyramid scheme Xhaferri, which he called a “charitable foundation,” provided income in the town of crumbling concrete homes.
The Albanian government had a different view: “the general” was a leftist sympathizer with Socialist Party ties. His “charitable foundation,” along with the other newer scheme, Populli, were pure pyramids without business investments, and therefore easier to close. On January 23, 1997, the police arrested Xhaferri and more than one hundred people connected with the two schemes.
Lushnje erupted. An angry mob shouting “Down with Sali!” broke through police lines and set fire to city hall. Protesters surrounded the police station, demanding Xhaferri’s release.”
The Civil War
“Albania’s foreign minister, deputy prime minister, and head of the Democratic Party, Tritan Shehu, answered his office phone the next morning at 9:30. On the line was Agim Shehu, the powerful deputy interior minister.
“The situation is dangerous in Lushnje,” Tritan Shehu recalled being told. “The people are about to attack the police. The police will shoot and cause many victims.”
Agim Shehu said the demonstrators wanted to meet a representative of the government and someone should go there by helicopter with the recently arrested men from Lushnje to calm the crowd. The police would provide protection as the delegation landed in the stadium to divert attention from the police station. Tritan Shehu said he would think it over.
Five minutes later Berisha called. “You are the only one to go, he told Shehu, stressing the need to avoid violence. “I was nervous but I also wanted to avoid bloodshed,” Shehu recalled. “I said yes.” It was a decision he would ruefully regret.
Two helicopters took off, one carrying Shehu, his bodyguard, and the minister of justice, the other with a group of Lushnje detainees. The pilots unloaded their cargo in the stadium, as planned, and started to leave. As dirt swirled under the rotors, the Lushnje crowd converged. They waved leeks in the air — the lone vegetable in shops during communism’s latter years — as a symbol of their poverty. The Lushnje detainees lifted their shirts to show the welts and bruises they had received in custody. As the only means of escape disappeared over the stadium seats, the crowd swarmed on Shehu like sharks to bloody meat.
Shehu tried to calm the crowd but an iron bar struck the back of his head. Angry men beat him with fists and leeks.
SHIK officers in the crowd and DP supporters from a nearby village dragged Shehu inside the stadium and into a locker room. Thirty to forty people crammed inside, behind a locked door, as the mob raged outside.
“If Xhaferri doesn’t come, Shehu is dead!” they screamed.
The men protecting Shehu had weapons but no one could figure out how to escape. Shehu was bleeding from the head, staining the back of his shirt.
Two hours later, Tirana sent another helicopter with twelve police. As they landed in the stadium, the crowd stripped them of their weapons and beat them, witnesses said. Three of the police escaped into the locker room. The others begged for mercy. They said their commander had forced them to come.
By nightfall the crowd had dispersed. A doctor came to the locker room and stitched Shehu’s head. Then the stadium lights went out. Either the police cut the lights to cover an escape or the electricity died as it did most nights. A scrum of men surrounded the blood-soaked Shehu and hustled him onto the playing field and out the back of the stadium.”
“The crowd threw Molotov cocktails and fired machine guns and grenade launchers at agents in the building. Each of them had only two rounds of ammunition, the former communications officer told me. Three of the agents got pinned on the ground floor because the route upstairs was under fire. At one point, Commander Hidri went to the window to look at the crowd and was shot in the throat. He died the next day.
After a two-hour standoff, the demonstrators brought a dump truck and rammed the front door, both former SHIK and Vlora residents recalled. Agents on the second floor jumped out a window in the back. Some found shelter in Vlora homes. Others ran to nearby villages, eventually reaching Tirana. Three agents were captured, one of whom died.
With the Vlora SHIK under the protesters’ control, military garrisons in the area continued to fall. Albanian conscripts were underpaid, unmotivated, and largely sympathetic to the furious crowds who stormed their gates. Vlora residents easily looted machine guns, ammunition, grenades, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles. From that day, sunny Vlora grew dark. Armed men set up checkpoints to keep out Berisha’s “Chechens.” Nobody knew who the men were — hoodlums or members of a political group.”
“Men stormed the police station and freed prisoners. In Saranda, rioters set fire to the library and state bank. Across the south, army depots had been guarded by three to six soldiers, most of them nineteen-year-old boys who were poorly equipped and barely paid, some using rags as socks. Overcome by rabid crowds, the conscripts let people take guns, ammunition, and grenades.
In Vlora, armed protesters said they would storm Tirana if Berisha ran again for president.”
“”The town has fallen to the people, a man calling himself a rebel leader told the press. “Berisha’s troops have turned tail and are in hiding.” That afternoon, a mob surrounded the local army base. The commander ordered his soldiers to hand over their weapons. The residents of Girokaster, children and adults, stormed in like drunken shoppers at a holiday sale, taking weapons of every caliber and type.
Girokaster went Kalashnikov crazy. Kids waved pistols and automatic guns in the air. Grenades littered the ground.”
“In Tirana, DP fanatics threatened to overthrow the reconciliation government. “After March 9, the whole south had weapons,” SHIK deputy head Bujar Rama told me. “Northern militants, when they saw such a situation, went out of control. They decided to take weapons as well.” Then DP head Tritan Shehu agreed. The arming of DP supporters, he said, “started as an isolated incident but it went out of control.””
“The call for a stabilization force at first met a tepid response. Albania was dissolving with myriad players: Berisha, the Socialists, Salvation Committees, the new government, and criminal gangs. No government wanted to send soldiers into that morass.”
“At Durres port, smugglers sold places on boats for $250. The Italian coast guard plucked nine hundred people from a sinking gunboat with a broken rudder and no fuel. The U.S. Navy saved a capsized boat.
“I’m not happy thinking about jumping into a boat or swimming for it, a six-month pregnant woman told the press. “But this is what the government has done to me.””
“The chaos of 1997 was not a civil war along geographic, religious, or tribal lines. Berisha enjoyed support in the north, but many northerners opposed his rule, furious at having lost their cash. Likewise, the DP had supporters in the south.
At its core, the crisis was a revolt by people who felt economically and politically duped. The pyramid schemes provided the spark, but the arrogance of Albania’s rulers had primed the country to ignite. For five years, Berisha had monopolized power. When faced with protest, he clamped down, promoted loyalists, and pushed through his reelection. He exploited differences between north and south for political gain, stoking tension and then presenting himself as a guarantor of peace. He built a fire he tried to control.
At the same time, the Socialists took advantage. It was clear by early 1997 that the collapse of the pyramid schemes offered them a chance. They stayed in the background at first as the Salvation Committees formed, and then floated to the fore. They plotted how to return, rather than how to help the state.
Another element was organized crime. Gangs from Albania, Italy, and Greece profited from the chaos. Of the more than sixteen hundred people killed between March and May 1997, most died in shootouts between rival groups. On the road to power, the Socialists also made alliances with local criminals, gangsters, and thieves.”
“Beyond Berisha, the opposition, gangs, and more, the revolt was an expression of despair. Unshaven men firing automatic guns with cigarettes dangling from their mouths was a vulgar show of lost hope. I saw it as a primal scream, a release of energy that shrieked anger, betrayal, and powerlessness. Spraying bullets was a testosterone shot to say: I am!
Above all, I viewed 1997 not as a crisis in the country, but a crisis of the country. Albania had an entry in the atlas, a national hymn, and a flag. It sat in the United Nations. But the country lacked a collective identity to hold it together. Politicians on all sides were looking to preserve or get power, rather than protect and promote the common good.
The effect of 1997 is still felt today. Looters took more than six hundred thousand weapons of various types and 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition. They destroyed court houses, police stations, and town halls.”
“Less than six years after losing power, the former communists in Eastern Europe’s most Stalinist state were back. The moderate Socialist Rexhep Meidani replaced Berisha as president and party head Fatos Nano became prime minister.”
“Vandals had damaged or destroyed half the police stations and all of the prisons, as well as roughly 130 military posts along the border, he said. Villagers near Kuçova sent the Defense Ministry a telegram that pleaded, “Please take back your tank.” In Shkoder, another looted tank had “for sale” painted on the side. “In such conditions we cannot speak about security.” Teta said.”
“In June, the parliamentary commission investigating the 1997 meltdown had recommended that the prosecutor’s office investigate Sali Berisha’s role. Five other officials had broken the law, the commission said: SHIK head Bashkim Gazidede, Minister of Defense Safet Zhulali, Chief of the Army’s General Staff Adem Copani, Minister of the Interior Halit Shamata, and State Secretary for Defense Leonard Demi. The police arrested six men on charges of crimes against humanity, only two of whom had been named in the report: Zhulali and Shamata. According to the prosecutor, the two had approved the use of phosgene, a chemical agent used in World War One, against the crowds in Vlora.
Whatever crimes the accused might have committed, the outlandish crimes against humanity charge never stuck. After some time under house arrest and in prison, the state dropped the charges in 2001 due to lack of evidence, although it did not inform the defendants until the next year.
Berisha was never charged. The new government denied it in public, but top officials told me that the international community pressed them to let Berisha off the hook. His arrest, the West feared, would threaten Albania’s fragile calm. At the time, the U.S., OSCE, and others could not have imagined that the tireless doctor would one day return.”
Socialists Back in Power
“A referendum in November 1998 finally approved a new constitution. The DP complained of manipulation, but the OSCE gave its stamp of aproval. Forbidden throughout Berisha’s rule, private radio and television stations began to broadcast.
At the same time, Nano and the Socialists kept tight control. They understood that the way to silence the press was not through violence or jail, but with money. Elections would not get rigged on voting day, but manipulated with funds during the campaign.”
“With help from the CIA, Fatos Klosi and SHIK bugged telephones and confiscated computers and documents from suspect Islamic organizations, and sent the material to Langley. The Americans never returned the material and the organizations protested, Klosi said. The Saudi and Pakistani ambassadors complained, but there was nothing Klosi could do.
In June and July 1998, SHIK ran its first major operation with the CIA, capturing five suspected members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad led by Ajman al-Zawahiri’s brother. A SHIK agent who worked on counter-terrorism at the time told me that one of the wanted men was married to an Albanian woman but was having an affair with the woman’s mother. When SHIK agents neared the apartment where one of the suspects was living, the man hid in a washing machine, the agent said. As SHIK approached, the man opened fire, killing a member of the team. A senior CIA official corroborated the washing machine attack in his book. The suspect, a “primary al-Qaeda forger, had removed the working elements to create a hiding space, he wrote. The Albanians handed the five captured men over to the CIA, which interrogated them at a remote air base before sending them covertly to Egypt-an early case of illegal rendition by the U.S.
Just after the operation, the Islamic Observation Center in London wrote an open letter to President Meidani warning against the detainees’ return to Egypt. “We warn that these suspect practices that contradict the most basic tenets of human rights and the teaching of our true religion will lead only to defeats and the wrath of Allah and Muslims, the letter said. Around the same time, the Albanian embassy in Warsaw reportedly received a call threatening Americans in Tirana. On August 5, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper published a letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri in which he vowed revenge for the arrests in Albania in a “language they will understand. Two days later, bombs exploded at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people.
On August 14, the U.S. embassy in Tirana sent home nonessential staff. The government deployed two hundred Marines and ten Navy SEALS to protect the Rilindja Ridge housing complex that was serving as a temporary embassy until the proper embassy could be reinforced. The State Department urged Americans against travel to Albania and U.S. officials spoke of a “credible threat from an Islamic terrorist organization.””
“The domestic political scene stayed fraught. On Saturday night, September 12, 1998, it got markedly worse.
Sali Berisha was working late in the DP office. A party official was briefing him on a recent trip when they heard shots. Both men jumped. It was normal to hear gunfire in Tirana, but rarely so close. Someone opened the door and informed them that a person near the office had been shot.
Party officials ran outside but Berisha stayed upstairs. Less than one hundred meters away, a cluster of people gathered around a husky man. It was Azem Hajdari, aged thirty-five, bleeding heavily and unconscious. Four bullets had ripped through his chest. Next to him lay his two bodyguards, also bleeding. The men were rushed to the Military Hospital but Hajdari and one of his bodyguards died on the way.
Thirty minutes later, Berisha issued a statement accusing the police chief from Tropoja of murder. By 11:00 p.m., he declared that the culprit was Prime Minister Fatos Nano and his bloody communist clique.”
“Meanwhile, mourners began to fill Skanderbeg Square. The coffins of Hajdari, his bodyguard, and the demonstrator killed near the Interior Ministry lay on the Palace of Culture steps for an all-night vigil. The next morning, thousands packed the square despite a steady drizzle.
“Kill, kill, kill Fatos Nano!” they chanted. “Revenge!”
“You could feel that something would happen,” said DP official Ylli Vejsiu, who had been briefing Berisha at the time of Hajdari’s murder. Berisha and other DP leaders addressed the crowd. “All the world knows the murderer of Hajdari,” Berisha told the excited mob. “This is Fatos Nano.”
Around midday, the crowd began to move. Instead of heading to the city cemetery, it turned up the boulevard, carrying the coffins of engraved wood. The crowd split into two, with one group curling behind City Hall. They merged on the boulevard and flowed towards Nano’s office. “We will not lay Azem in his grave until the government resigns,” they screamed, at which point Berisha left the crowd.
The three coffins landed outside the prime minister’s office on the boulevard. The crowd scaled the steps and then retreated. Two men kicked the front doors. The nervous guards inside opened fire as a warning, followed by those on the roof. The mob panicked and stormed the doors.
Three ministers — Thimjo Kondi, Arben Malaj, and Bashkim Fino — were inside at the time. “After the National Guard shot, they got furious,” Fino recalled. He and his colleagues scurried out the back. Fino and Malaj crossed the boulevard unnoticed and found refuge in Fino’s home.”
“The DP commandeered two tanks. By afternoon, rioters had broken into the state auditing office, the constitutional court, and the ministries of justice and finance. At the offices of parliament, a crowd used a piece of wood as a battering ram to break the door.
A few blocks away, protesters stormed the state radio and television building, among them Berishas bodyguard, Izet Haxhia. A captured tank rumbled outside while employees hid in the studios and bathrooms. Guards took off their uniforms and mingled with protesters. A TV manager during Berisha’s rule got on the radio and announced that the DP had liberated the station from Nano’s clique.”
“The Socialist government eventually recovered. It never arrested Berisha and managed to bring security under control. To appease critics, in late September Nano tried to reshuffle the cabinet. He failed to garner support in the party and was forced to resign. Gunfire echoed through Tirana’s streets when television announced the news.
In part the resignation stemmed from outside pressure, especially from the U.S., which believed Nano’s departure would help bring calm. According to Socialist Party leaders, however, Nano was also betrayed by young party members who saw their chance at the chair, taking advantage of his having fled the country in a time of need. Nano’s replacement was the Socialist Pandeli Majko, who at thirty years old became Europe’s youngest government head.”
Kosovo
“In Kosovo, the Serbian police harassed and arrested ethnic Albanians for waving their flag and forced them into a second-class life.”
“In November 1995, U.S, secretary of state Warren Christopher and chief Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke gathered the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia at a peace conference on an army base in Dayton, Ohio. A key member of the team was Holbrooke’s deputy Chris Hill, who had helped open the U.S. embassy in Tirana. The Dayton Accords, as the agreement became known, brought NATO into Bosnia and created a bifurcated Bosnia with one part for the Croats and Muslims and another for the Serbs.
After Dayton, Albanians in Kosovo began to question their nonviolent approach. For five years they had listened to Rugova promise that the West would address their cause. Now a major international peace conference had come and gone. The United States had rewarded the Bosnian Serbs with a quasi-state after genocide; it had ignored Kosovars’ patience and restraint.
The KLA took advantage. Its fighters had staged sporadic attacks in the early 1990s, mostly targeting the Serbian police, but three months after the Dayton Accords, the young rebels launched coordinated strikes.”
“The KLA continued its attacks on Serbian police and civilians. The guerilla group smuggled arms through the mountains from Albania and got training from sympathetic officers in the Albanian army. The goal from the beginning was to start a fire so the West would be forced to act, Haliti and other KLA commanders told me. They knew the KLA had no chance to defeat the Serbian state on its own. Fighting in Kosovo, everyone feared, could spill over the border to Macedonia and destabilize Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece. To preserve regional stability, the KLA hoped, the West and above all the United States would intervene on its behalf.”
“To win trust, Haliti said he opened the books. He shared information on KLA bank accounts and promised to buy guns from U.S.-approved sources, even if that cost more. In April 1998, the KLA and CIA, with facilitation by SHIK, reached an agreement on three essential points, Haliti and Klosi separately said. First, the KLA agreed not to use violence outside of Kosovo, including attacks in Serbia proper. Second, it promised not to cooperate with armed Islamist groups. It would refuse fighters, arms, and funds. Third, Haliti promised to block funds from drug trafficking and other illegal sources. Albanians in the Balkans and Europe had a reputation for dealing heroin and prostitution, and none of this should finance the KLA.
The KLA leadership was reluctant to tell me what it got in return. “Absolutely nothing,” Haliti snapped when lasked. “We pursued our policy and they pursued theirs.” In all likelihood, there was more. To start, the State Department never put the KLA on its list of terrorist groups. This made it easier to raise funds abroad. More concretely, evidence points to training by U.S. and British military experts at KLA camps in northern Albania. Most importantly for the KLA, it was building trust. The three-point agreement was the start of a partnership, a parallel running of interests that culminated in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999.
With CIA consent and SHIK support, money and guns flowed. By the spring of 1998, the KLA had expanded its presence across Kosovo. Serbian civilians in these areas got harassed and expelled, and the KLA sometimes killed those who refused to leave.”
“Emboldened by its Western contacts, the KLA continued to expand, assuming loose control of approximately 40 percent of Kosovo. Military police in uniform confidently stopped cars in KLA areas to check documents. KLA spokesmen talked about liberating Prishtina.
In its exuberance, the insurgency forgot that the Serbian police and Yugoslav army were among the best-trained and well-equipped forces in Europe. And they considered Kosovo their holy land. Milosevié had sparked his political rise via the Kosovo issue. He and others in Serbia would not cede Kosovo without a fight.
The KLA tried to take its first city, Orahovac, on July 19, 1998. The operation badly failed. Serbian forces retook the city in two days. In a counter-offensive from July to September, government forces swept through the areas of KLA control, sending the rebels to the hills. Shelling and shooting displaced 250,000 people.”
“To get attention and Western support, the group needed sympathy, and civilian deaths helped the cause. The KLA frequently attacked Serbian forces and then retreated through a village, exposing civilians to the predictably overaggressive response. The three turning points in the conflict — the Drenica killings, the Gornje Obrinje killings, and a January 1999 massacre in the village of Rack (Raçak) — all came at civilians’ expense.”
“The turning point came in the village of Rack. KLA ambushes near the village on January 8 and 10 killed four Serbian police. In response, Serbian forces stormed the village where the KLA had been active, killing forty-five people. International monitors found many of the bodies in a gully, where they had apparently been executed. The OSCE mission head, U.S. diplomat William Walker, called it a massacre by government troops.
The evidence suggests that Walker was right, but details of the killings remain a matter of debate. A Human Rights Watch investigation pointed strongly to executions, but someone might have altered the scene for maximum effect. The U.S. government highlighted the killings and President Clinton called Rack a “deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder.” Later, when explaining the bombing of Yugoslavia, he evoked the vil-lage. “Make no mistake, he said at a press conference. “If we and our allies do not have the will to act, there will be more massacres.” With Rack, the “two streams” in the U.S. government merged. Madeleine Albright and the State Department agreed to bomb, as did NATO’s top commander, U.S. general Wesley Clark. The time for talks had passed.”
“The Albanian delegation returned to France and signed the agreement on March 18, 1998. After three years, the agreement said, an international meeting would “determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each Party’s efforts regarding the implementation of this Agreement, and the Helsinki Final Act.” The Serbs refused to sign.”
“NATO planes conducted their raids from the safety of fifteen thousand feet. The KLA served as eyes and ears on the ground, helping to identify targets. A former Pentagon official told me that KLA members sometimes pointed targeting lasers at a rival’s house. Xhavit Haliti met General Wesley Clark at least three times.
Under cover of NATO bombs, Milosevic unleashed a brutal attack. Serbian and Yugoslav forces systematically expelled more than 850,000 ethnic Albanians, mostly to Macedonia and Albania. Police and soldiers rounded up villagers, separated the military-age men, and in some cases killed them on the spot. An estimated ten thousand Kosovo Albanians lost their lives.
Colleagues from Human Rights Watch and I traveled to Albania and Macedonia, sitting at the borders as the flood of refugees arrived. In both countries, sprawling tent camps grew in the dust and mud. In one village, five witnesses said, Serbian police had lined up more than sixty men in a stream and opened fire.”
“The NATO campaign lasted for seventy-eight days. Realizing that the coalition would hold, on June 9, 1999, Milosevic ordered his generals to stop. They signed an agreement on the withdrawal of Serbian and Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, the entrance of NATO troops, and the province’s administration by the United Nations. NATO soldiers, journalists, and refugees poured into Kosovo before the Serbian troops had left. The Serbs of Knsovo fled in droves to avoid revenge.”
“In Kosovo, the KLA established a provisional government and tried to assert control. It went after the remaining Roma and Serbs, and Albanians it viewed as political foes. Eager for stability in the region, the international community turned a blind eye.”
Conclusion
“The movement struck a chord. On the surface, Albania looked better, with new roads, two cell phone companies, and skyscrapers in the Block. But the skyscrapers looked down on large swaths of the capital without light. In summer, the water was frequently cut. Outside of Tirana, the roads crumbled. The schools, the hospitals, and other social services were inefficient and corrupt.
The first demonstration took place on February 7, 2004, when an angry crowd threw stones at the prime minister’s office. Guards shot in the air, injuring some protesters. Workers built a metal barrier around Nano’s office, with the excuse that the building was under construction. At night someone cleverly spraypainted an ironic sign: “Beware, Above No One Working.””
“In July 2005, Albania was set for its sixth parliamentary elections since 1991. Fatos Nano and the Socialists had amassed enormous wealth, and they wanted more. Sali Berisha and his coalition were feeding on Albanians’ frustration. Only eight years after the calamitous pyramid schemes, the doctor was poised to return.
On one level, the campaign had a serious tone. Both sides hired American consultants with ties to the Republican Party. The parties staged elaborate rallies and ran slick ads. On a deeper level, the campaign involved the same dirty tricks as before. Albanians had learned how to buy votes and stuff the ballot boxes. A campaign advisor to the Socialists told me that a candidate could buy one electoral zone for between $100,000 and $300,000. One vote cost between $1.50 and $4, he said, but I heard of one candidate paying up to $300 in a contested race.
Some parts of the country were staunchly Democrat, mostly in the north, and some were strictly Socialist, mostly in the south. In the swing zones, the candidates typically bought off a local businessman, who paid voters. In the past, parties had given voters a premarked ballot. The voter took the ballot into the polling station, dropped it in the box, and brought a clean ballot for the next person. By 2005, voters used cell phone cameras to prove they had voted for the candidate who paid.”
“The only glitch came later that day, when video spread on the Internet that showed Bush losing his wristwatch in the Fushe Kruje crowd or, some claimed, having it stolen. The White House said the president had discreetly passed the watch to a guard. Bush critics joked that a thief had saved Albania’s dignity.”
“In 2014, the poverty rate — people living on less than about $1.25 per day — was 12.4%.”
