Albania ( 2 )

Albania 

David Binder 

…Vijon nga pjesa e pare 

    In the spring of 1990, as Communist parties had painfully demonstrated
elsewhere, the ruling party here was utterly incapable of engendering reforms that would allow it to survive even after four decades in power. (Considering that they claimed descent from Marx and Engels, the fathers of radical social change, this was a striking irony.) Meanwhile Tirana's pillbox isolation so completely cut off connections with diaspora Albanians that they played practically no role in their ancestral land as it began to open up.
This was a sharp contrast to the highly visible activities of the Polish, Hungarian, Croatian diasporas and those of the Baltic nations in the wake of the Cold War.
    At the time of de Quellar's visit, Ramiz Alia was meeting with a group
of intellectuals, including Kadare, to explore whether and how to dismantle the all-encompassing Communist state structures. The intellectuals urged him to get rid of the party's monopoly. But he was caught between their growing demands and pressure from the old guard to resist change. Trapped and frightened. We visitors had scarcely a hint of that dilemma except to note that he had tried to co-opt some of the Hoxha era grandees like Manush Myftiu, while circumventing others.

    We were summoned on a Saturday morning to the Presidium
of the People's Assembly, a modest three-story structure on the tree-lined main boulevard that was the Tirana equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue. With a fluid gait Ramiz Alia entered the small reception room. Fairly tall, one could believe stories that he was an avid tennis player. He made a short speech declaring, ''All the processes of development of Albania are unstoppable.''  Then he bantered urbanely with us, saying that he had read some of our articles and heard our radio broadcasts. Apparently he neither approved nor disapproved. Among the developments that could not be stopped was unrest.
    That evening on the main boulevard the "korzo" promenade common to all Balkan countries began with hundreds of strollers. There were also knots of students from Enver Hoxha University excitedly arguing about how and when to leave the country. For many Ramiz Alia's promised reforms were too modest and too late. ''Don't believe what he says,'' said one student. ''It's all demagogy, lies.'' Another young man handed me an appeal, hand-written in French, with phrases like ''the tranquility of Albania is superficial, We are a terrorized people, Albania is near civil war, Help us!''
    Not that these sentiments were universal. Artan Duri, a 21-year-old 
student of literature, even parroted the old party line handed down
before Alia set out on his new course: ''Marx, Lenin and Stalin are one. We
love Albania. We love Socialism. We love our party. We love our government.'' He flatly rejected the idea that Albania appeared to be on the brink of great changes.
    Shkelqim Beqari, who sat in on the gathering, murmured that ''the word
'change' makes many Albanians nervous. It makes them think of what happened in the other East European countries.'' Andi Dervishi, an art student, said ''It is a big change,'' he said. ''As a student of art, I want to see the masterpieces of the world. I want to go see the Louvre.'' For Majlinda Muqrca, a student of electrical engineering, the most significant change involved ''freedom to express thoughts, and the rights of the press.''  These were some of the sentiments I heard on the last night of my first visit to Tirana. To many the announcement two weeks earlier that people were now
free to leave Albania seemed to be an invitation to try their luck at getting asylum on Skanderbeg Street - Embassy Row. The first few were repelled by security police who even entered the French and Greek embassies to seize asylum seekers. Police beat the French ambassador and his wife when they intervened. This was the prelude to thousands more storming the chanceries in early July. Meanwhile hundreds of young Albanians simply walked to the nearest frontier and attempted to cross north and east into Yugoslavia or south into Greece. There were reports of carts carrying bodies of young men killed by border guards. Others were dragged handcuffed down border village streets.         
While these incidents were not mentioned in the Albanian press, they were
publicized in foreign news broadcasts, which sufficed to stir still more to flee. A Tirana intellectual lamented, "Never since the 15th and 18th century have Albanians abandoned their land in such great numbers.''
    Among those who decamped was Ismail Kadare, the best-known and
most popular Albanian of the day. On October 25 he announced from Paris
that he had sought political asylum in France. It was granted immediately.
    The impact in his homeland was enormous. "Comparable to Mark Twain's
asking for political asylum in England," an Albanian intellectual remarked.
The more so because it occurred on the final day of the Tirana conference
of six Balkan foreign ministers, for which I had returned to Albania.
The unprecedented Tirana meeting endorsing "pluralistic democracy"
had been designed to demonstrate Albania's new openness, but it was
instantly overshadowed by Kadare's defection. In a letter to Ramiz Alia,
explaining his action he wrote that in meetings with him the previous spring:
"I expressed very clearly the necessity for a rapid, profound and complete
democratization of the country. Because there is no possibility of legal
opposition in Albania I have chosen this course which I never wished to take."
    Kadare was alluding to those meetings between President Alia and
intellectuals on the future direction of Albanian politics. That group
included Sali Berisha (1944 - ) a prominent cardiologist who had treated several top-ranking Communist leaders including Enver Hoxha. (Just before
Kadare left the country, Berisha published a critique of the privileges
accumulated by the Communist rulers.)
    The official reaction to the defection was remarkably mild. Just a few
sour remarks by second-level Communists. The government's news agency said the act was "condemnable" and that he had "allied himself with the enemies of Albania." Two of his writer colleagues, Dritero Agolli and Nezhat Tozaj, declared their continuing admiration for him. The effect was to declare Alia's efforts at superficial reform a failure. Other forces would decide the country's destiny.
    Driving the next day through the gritty industrial town of Kavaje, population 20,000, scores of citizens greeted me with a V-sign. When I stopped hundreds gathered. A truck driver explained that the V-sign was their way of expressing contempt for the Communists. Kavaje, 18 miles southwest of the capital, was already notorious for violent anti-party demonstrations. In July, when security policemen attempted to wrench 
away crosses worn by demonstrators, there were clashes. A youth was shot and a policeman lynched.
    After a few minutes in downtown Kavaje four cars carrying uniformed and plainclothes policemen surrounded me and escorted me northward for interrogation. All at once an official from another government department appeared and told them to let me go with a warning not to stray from a prescribed route to Tirana. Kavaje had been placed "under heightened surveillance" by the Sigurimi several weeks earlier, a friendly citizen explained.
    But it was too little and too late for police measures, even for the draconian measures of the border police who killed dozens of young people trying to cross frontiers (some 5,000 gained safe passage out of Albania in July by storming Western embassies).
    Driving out of the country I stopped again with the Grudas in Shkoder
and one of Asim's sons remarked, "We are confused and frustrated,
but we are less fearful. All of us young people want to get out." (The average age of Albanians at that point was 26 - one of the youngest populations in the world.)
    In many conversations Romania cropped up as a metaphor for a violent
end to Communist rule - something of an irony - only 11 months earlier Radio Tirana described the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu as the richly deserved fate of a "revisionist." Albania was teetering toward anarchy.
    On December 5 Ismail Kadare, responding to questions I had transmitted
to him, spoke of his sense of urgency in defecting to France. "The pace
of change is a matter of life and death," he wrote, saying he had departed
"out of the conviction that more than any action I could take in Albania, my
defection would help the democratization of my country...a delay in this
direction will be fatal."
    His urgency was justified. Three days after the interview a demonstration
in Tirana against power outages in dormitories of the university still named
for Enver Hoxha suddenly became a political protest. Students shouted "Down with dictatorship!" and "Liberty or death!" A firebrand leader emerged. Azem Hajdari, a 27-year-old philosophy student, soon mobilized some 7,000 and kept them going as clashes spread to Shkoder, Kavaje and the industrial city of Elbasan. On the third day of rioting Ramiz Alia capitulated to demonstrators' demands and endorsed formation of new political parties. He also dismissed three Politburo members, presumably opponents of reforms. On the fourth day Sali Berisha, Gramoz Pashko, Azem Hajdari and others called the Democratic Party into being at a huge rally. Amazingly, I could telephone Tirana from Washington to interview my new acquaintances about the unfolding turmoil.
    On December 20 the Alia government ordered removal of the statue of
Stalin, in his field marshal's uniform, from the main boulevard. It was done
during the night. Next day Dr. Sali Berisha, called me in Washington to voice an appeal that the United States normalize diplomatic relations with
Albania as a means to "strengthen democratic forces." I told him it wasn't my line of work, but that emissaries of Tirana and Washington had already begun that procedure. Another three months were needed to formalize relations. Meanwhile, thousands of Albanians crossed borders into neighboring Greece and Yugoslavia, while thousands more attempted to reach Italy by boat.
    Of the more than 100,000 Americans of Albanian origin, most
of them were utterly baffled by the developments in their ancestral homeland, I learned. They had devoted so much of their ethnic
energies to the completely different situation of Albanians in Kosovo
and the cause of independence for that Yugoslav province that they had neither time nor money for Albania itself. "We'd like to help although we don't know how to do it," Sergio Bitici (born Sejdi Byty) a kindly Manhattan restaurant owner who was co-founder of a Kosovo aid organization, told me.
    Certainly the pell-mell pace of events was confusing. The first
opposition newspaper started publication in January. A few weeks
later Tirana's Lenin statue that had faced the Stalin statue was
removed just as quietly as its counterpart. On February 20. a mob of
young people tore down the gilded 40-foot Enver Hoxha statue on Skanderbeg Square  and dismantled a huge sign praising the ruling party. Piles of Hoxha books were burned.
    President Alia declared on television that he would meet protestors' demands and replace the 23-member government of Prime Minister Adil Carcani. An interim government was named, headed by Fatos Nano (1952-), an economist. For the third time in seven months hordes stormed aboard barely seaworthy craft in a half dozen Adriatic ports to set out for Italy. Martial law was introduced, suspended, reintroduced. Multiparty elections were scheduled for the end of March. Every time the new opposition made a demand, Alia conceded. He also ordered security forces to refrain from firing on demonstrators, mercifully limiting fatalities to a handful.

    The government tried to reduce tensions by releasing 127 political prisoners, soon to be followed by twice that number. Suddenly there were widespread shortages of milk. At 2:30 a.m. flocks of women were gathered waiting for dairy stores to open six hours later. Such was the scene when I arrived in Tirana a few days before the vote.

    Among the released political prisoners were two gaunt sons of Mehmet Shehu, Their father had been murdered nearly 10 years earlier on orders of Hoxha. Bashkim, 36, and Skender, 41, told me they were "jobless and homeless" like most other former prisoners, and were staying with friends. Their elder brother, Vladimir, committed suicide in prison and their mother also died behind bars. All were victims of the cruelty toward extended families that animated Hoxha's imitation of his mentor, Stalin. Shehu's sons still did not know the details of their father's fate "The general opinion is that he has been killed." said Bashkim Shehu. "Enver Hoxha's phantom is still around." (The Hoxha ghost continued to haunt Albanians, and so did the ghost of Mehmet Shehu's ghost. Ismail Kadare wrote a novel, "The Successor," about the two, published in 2005.)
    Less than a week before the national elections I hitched a ride with
Sali Berisha and Genc Pollo, his young multilingual press spokesman
to get a taste of their first campaign. Bucketing over the bumpy roads I asked
the candidate where he had learned his still elementary English. "Up in Tropoje," (far in the north) he replied. "I took an English grammar, herding sheep. I got so deep in it that the sheep were all over the mountain." Sharp-nosed,.sharp-chinned, with a shock of dark brown hair, Berisha was quite handsome. From my meager studies I knew that the Berishas formed one of Albania's oldest clans. The image of him chasing sheep while memorizing English was so appealing I thought of writing a portrait of him. Then I heard him bellowing on the hustings in the familiar pose of the demagogue and decided to wait. His voice hoarse from 40 previous rally speeches, he roared imprecations against the Party of Labor of which he had so recently been a member. A crowd of  7,000 was gathered in the main square of the drab chrome mining town of Peshkopi where the rally had begun with a somber recital of verses of the long-banned Gjergj Fishta. But as Berisha sought to evoke cheers with his slogans roughly a third of the crowd stood silent, hands folded. "They are afraid," a teacher ventured, adding that local Communists had threatened any who voted for the opposition.
    The whole country lay beneath clouds of uncertainty and buzzed with rumors fed by a breakdown of trust in state radio, newspapers and politicians. A continuing exodus by sea and land had taken 80,000 citizens to Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia since the summer. Unrest divided families with the old largely holding on to the Communist party and the young flocking to the new opposition, or fleeing abroad. Kestrina Budina, a 21-year-old student, remarked, "In my family, it's three to one for the Democratic Party. Only my father is for the Communists."                   
    In the midst of this chaos, two days before the national election, four officials of the U.S. State Department and four members of Congress turned up in Tirana, the diplomats to take formal possession of the American Embassy on Labinoti Street that had been occupied by the Italians since 1939 (they spitefully gutted it at the last moment) and the legislators to make noises about themselves. In the chaos of the moment the two delegations went practically ignored.
    Election day, which Albanians said brought the first free, contested voting
since 1923, had some unusual twists. President Alia lost in his electoral
district to a virtually unknown geologist, while his anointed prime minister,
Fatos Nano, had a close call in his district. Sali Berisha swept his in the
fiercely anti-Communist city of Kavaje with more than four-fifths of the vote. Over 95 percent of the 2 million registered voters participated, roughly the same as the percentage in Communist elections when non-voting was a
punishable offense.
     I spent a few hours at the makeshift headquarters of the scarcely three-
month-old Democratic Party. A single fluorescent bulb hung above two
computers being used to register precinct votes and calculate projections.
The floor was unswept, the desks and chairs scarred. Robert Manchin
of the Gallup organization said he was astonished that Albanian activists
had caught on to computers immediately.
    The Democratic Party won almost all of Albania's cities, some by huge
margins but the Communists swept the countryside and gained a
two-thirds majority in the parliament.
    Two days later I headed north, picking up a young hitch hiker with bright
red hair. He had purchased an imported jar of plum jam which he proudly
showed me. I was perplexed. Couldn't Albanians grow plums, make plum  jam? And where did the red hair come from in a predominantly swarthy people – possibly a trace of the prehistoric times when there were Celts in the Balkans?  He hopped out before I could ask.
    Several miles outside of Shkoder the two-lane highway was blocked - a
hastily constructed barricade manned by armed men in uniform. I showed
my passport and press credential and was waved through. A few hundred
yards further, a second barricade, this time manned by civilians red-faced with rage, most of them young.  About 3 p.m. I reached Shkoder's main square where two Russian-made armored personnel carriers still smoldered, sending up plumes of acrid oily smoke. They had been set afire by young men with gasoline bombs after army and police units shot at demonstrators outside Party of Labor headquarters on Bulevari Stalin seven hours earlier. I was told that three people were killed and 30 more wounded. Hundreds of young people were still gathered shouting slogans like "Down with President Ramiz Alia!" and "Down with the Communists!"

  Fifteen years after my initial trip, many of the first Albanians I had met
were prospering. Shaban Murati, the Zeri i Poppulit journalist whose last
words to me in Tirana were "I have wasted my life" went on to become
Albania's ambassador to Macedonia and later to Sweden. His colleague,
Shkelqim Beqari, emigrated to the United States and became news
research coordinator for station WBUR in Boston. Briseida Mema,
a cultural news reporter, rose to be chief of the Agence France Press
bureau in Tirana. Kestrina Budina earned a masters degree in international relations
at Columbia University and is a banker. Remzi Lani became the director of
the Albanian Media Institute. Ismail Kadare was awarded the 2005 Man-
Booker prize for foreign author. But the brilliant Gramoz Pashko who had returned from politics to teaching economics, was killed in a helicopter crash in July, 2006.
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