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FATOS LUBONJA
THE FALSE APOCALYPSE
FOREWORD
By Andrew Gumbel
For a while, in the mid-1990s, Albania was as fascinating and tragic a place as anywhere on the planet. Imagine a jail break, only on an unimaginably large scale. Three million people had broken free from decades of repression, poverty and near-total isolation under the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha and his successor, Ramiz Alia, and they were in a frenzy to make up for lost time. Certainly, they yearned for an open society, a market economy, democratic institutions – everything that could propel them closer to the living standards of their European neighbours. But they were also impatient for more immediate satisfactions, to bring in a “boatload of money” as one Albanian friend of mine liked to say, and live like kings for a change.
The pent-up creative energy was palpable. Many Albanians were street-smart and worldly. Some had acquired first-class educations, supplementing the politically tainted rigours of their formal schooling with smuggled books, tapes, contraband television signals – whatever could help them break through the artificial walls erected around them. Poverty felt like a needless aberration they could overcome now with just their wits and sheer force of will. After the nightmare of Stalinist totalitarianism, of labor camps, prison cells and an omnipresent fear, what new challenge could possibly stump them? They had natural resources, a temperate climate, a beautiful coastline and a population hungry for self-improvement. Decades of enforced collectivism made the lure of individual action irresistible. If they had to lie, cheat, steal, betray and trample over each other to get what they wanted, then so be it. Wasn’t that the way of the world? The Albania that emerged from the communist era thus became a teeming laboratory of illusions fostered and dashed, of optimism and abiding suspicion, of staggering ingenuity and monstrous corruption. When I first visited, as an eager and wide-eyed young reporter in the spring of 1995, I found it all exhilarating and oddly endearing. Tirana, the capital, was a maze of crumbling buildings and rutted streets filled with garbage and broken concrete where wild dogs prowled at night. Yet it was also covered in satellite dishes and “kiosks”, makeshift structures erected on street corners and in public parks in imitation of Italian terrace cafes, where you could order peach schnapps at eight in the morning, conduct business, meet friends and, if you so chose, linger late at night, at a piano bar without a functioning piano, and dance to Bulgarian bootlegs of Careless Whisper and other western hits.
There were the disjointed signs of progress: a spanking new Coca- Cola bottling plant, a luxury hilltop restaurant financed by Kuwaitis, a picket-fence neighbourhood near the U.S. Embassy with perfect lawns and red-flagged mailboxes. And then there was the giant hole in the centre of town, the legacy of a Kosovo Albanian investor who had promised a luxury high-rise hotel, driven around in a white Rolls Royce raising millions of dollars and absconded with the lot.
Tirana at that time was a city where everyone was living beyond their means. Everyone had an angle, a scam to pull, a bribe they were willing to pay, a corner they were happy to cut. There were fewer than ten miles of smoothly paved road in the entire country, yet the streets were choking with Mercedes and BMWs, many of them stolen in Italy or Greece with the connivance of organized criminals and sold for a few hundred dollars on the beach outside Durres, a short drive from Tirana. The country’s biggest brickworks produced exactly twenty perfect bricks a year – the twenty it was obliged to submit for official certification – and sold the rest to gullible foreign investors who invariably had to throw them away and start again. Government contractors paid such large kick-backs to maintain the dangerously low-slung telephone wires, or to repair the street drains, that they could no longer afford their own work materials. A few days or weeks later, they’d be bidding on the same job all over again when their jerry-rigged solution broke down at the first hurdle.
To the outside world, curiously, this looked like an acceptably slapdash path to progress, in line with other former communist countries in Eastern Europe muddling their way towards free-market capitalism and an open society. In 1994, the World Bank dared to imagine Albania as a “small haven of peace and economic growth” – dependent for the moment on foreign aid and remittances from Albanians living abroad to keep its economy afloat, but heading emphatically in the right direction. Sali Berisha, the charismatic Albanian president who presented himself as a strident anti-Communist, won praise for his determination to purge the country of sinister remnants of the past and for accepting the economic “shock therapy” prescribed by the IMF. In certain conservative circles he was hailed as “the last Thatcherite”.
In truth, the European powers and the United States weren’t paying nearly enough attention. Their priority was to prevent the violent collapse of Yugoslavia from causing further shockwaves across the Balkans, and the only thing they really wanted from Berisha’s government was a promise not to stir up ethnic Albanian tensions in Kosovo and Macedonia. Berisha gave them that promise. They failed to notice, or more likely chose not to care, that Berisha, far from throwing off the mantle of Enver Hoxha’s authoritarianism, was busy donning his own version of it. Soon after cementing his grip on power in a convincing election victory in 1992, he purged his party of anyone who challenged his authority, including many of his closest allies; he imprisoned the leader of the Socialist opposition, Fatos Nano, on corruption charges after a bogus trial; and he turned the secret police, known as SHIK, into his own political enforcement bureau.
The economic growth the international community found so promising was built less on Thatcherite free market ideology - not even the banks were private - than on Albania’s involvement in criminal rackets. According to multiple observers in the intelligence and law enforcement worlds, the country was smuggling guns and oil into the former Yugoslavia in defiance of United Nations sanctions and allowing the transshipment of heroin and other illegal drugs to Western Europe. Berisha’s Democratic Party was directly implicated in sanctions-busting through its ownership of the country’s oil distributor, Shqiponja. Many of the rackets were said to involve members of SHIK, along with at least two senior government ministers. The government was also closely tied to the country’s largest private company, VEFA, which held a stake in a wide variety of economic pursuits: supermarkets, chicken farms, publishing, financial services and, according to intelligence sources, international arms trafficking.
The political climate became ever more stifling in the run-up to elections held in May 1996. Berisha wheeled in one European dignitary after another to burnish his democratic credentials. Even as a car bomb detonated outside a VEFA supermarket in Tirana, Berisha pinned the blame on his political adversaries, without any actual evidence, and the police swooped on Albania’s leading opposition newspaper and detained the entire staff for an afternoon. On election day, ballot-stuffing by Democratic Party officials was so widespread and so blatant that some districts reported 100 per cent turnout and a 100 per cent vote for the party even as people stood in long lines still hoping to cast their ballots. Some of the vote totals were later adjusted to make the theft a little less glaring. But the opposition parties pulled out of the election anyway, saying the climate of intimidation and foul play was overwhelming and there was no prospect of a fair outcome.
At a massive demonstration in Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square the next day, the police moved in with batons to bludgeon protesters without provocation and haul several prominent opposition figures off to jail. They did this within full view of visiting dignitaries holed up at the Tirana International Hotel, only some of whom seemed to think anything was seriously amiss. The election-monitoring arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued a critical report, but it was not critical enough for a group of monitors from Norway and Britain who felt compelled to issue their own, much more scathing dissident statement. No European government challenged the legitimacy of the vote; a number of commentators were willing to point fingers at the same shadowy subversives and diehard communists cited by Berisha as the
