Observing the Albanian Powder Keg
Carlson, Richard W.
0 n the grass along the Boulevard of Martyrs in Skanderbeg Square in central Tirana, a French Foreign Legionnaire, with a shaved head and beret, an automatic rifle in his outstretched hand, was...
...At the end of the voting at our "primary" polling station, we were to watch the counting of the votes and then the signing of the proof of the results— a "protocol" — by the local election commissioners...
...There are an estimated 800,000 of them: in front yards, along roadsides, strewn on the beaches...
...We were not to wear red or blue on any poll visits as they were colors used by the two major political parties and it might be seen as dangerously inflammatory...
...None of the other commissioners, all dark and cranky men, paid any attention to Mr...
...In Tirana the population—now somewhere around 55o,000 — has almost doubled in the few years since crowds toppled Hoxha's gold statue downtown...
...Eli and the commission chairman were arguing...
...barrister briefing us on Albanian election law said the election had been "stolen...
...I told him the details of the broken tank and our uncomfortable exit from Memeliaj...
...They were built by Hoxha to repel the invasion he was convinced the U.S...
...Skanderbeg is just about Albania's only hero.' 1 Although Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in nearby Skopje, Macedonia...
...was one of about sixty American observers I from IFES to arrive in Albania in late June, a week before the parliamentary elections...
...Eli, the interpreter, was also upset...
...A dozen feet away a sergeant with a red bandanna tied around his neck stood behind a .3o caliber machine gun, his head and shoulders jutting through the top of the APC...
...Twenty-eight votes were divided among small parties, including the Monarchists who got just a couple...
...We were to observe voters' thumbs being sprayed with invisible dye, after the same thumb was checked by ultra-violet light—battery operated, as many polling places were without electricity—for signs of previous voting...
...He recently returned to Albania and hopes to re-establish a monarchy...
...Our delegation included a tough rugby-playing gynecologist from Boston, the registrar of voters of Pinellas County, Florida, the tax assessor of San Mateo County, California, and a couple of former Peace Corps volunteers who spoke some Albanian...
...At 7 a.m...
...A year later the Islami sisters were broadcasting daily to Albania from VOA headquarters in Washington, D.C., using pseudonyms to protect their parents in Albania...
...The American Spectator • November 1997 47...
...Mounds of garbage and abandoned junk and trash on side streets are affecting air quality...
...Their tales of Orwellian cruelty and isolation—of a fierce and pervasive secret police and informer system, of a personality cult around Hoxha that was more Stalinist than Stalin—were troubling to even the hardest of VOA news cases, people who chewed on samizdat literature with their morning coffee, broadcasting as they did to millions trapped in 43 the nightmare legacy of Marx and Lenin in China, the USSR, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam...
...The purpose of "international observers" was to reduce fraud and intimidation...
...He was held on a chain by a small Gypsy man in a tight blue suit...
...and NATO were plotting against him...
...The Gypsy was holding the photographer's rifle...
...The two got in the car and drove to the end of the yard where they parked next to a tethered cow...
...Gashi, wearing a maroon Tuborg Beer sweatshirt and missing many of his front teeth, appeared to be emotionally challenged...
...It was busy with black flies and the smell of rancid meat and milk...
...In early spring the country had been propelled into anarchy by the collapse of financial pyramid schemes which sucked-up as much as $2 billion in personal savings...
...Water is available in Tirana for four, at most five, hours a day and it is often thickened by the raw sewage that leaks into it...
...I felt like one of those padded carnival dolls with the fringe of hair waiting to be hit by a baseball...
...Her mother and husband had warned her she would be killed if she went to the south...
...Its red wires ran across the wall like a crack...
...We drove past fields of dead sunflowers and the husks of stripped vehicles...
...The OSCE briefers, some British, some Romanian, tended to talk like CNN news readers, saying things like the "climate" in Albania is "tense and polarized...
...The driver was a big man, about 5o, wearing khaki shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and purple plastic sandals...
...Electricity is off every day for hours at a time...
...We were also given diplomatic immunity in case the card didn't work and we were arrested anyway...
...The 6' -5" King, whose at-home name is Lek Zogu, is a South African arms dealer who favors camouflage clothing and wears a Sam Browne belt and sidearm...
...We had gotten to the school at 5:45 that morning, watched the opening of the poll and the first votes, then visited nine other sites in nearby villages and communes in the mountains near Greece, and returned to Memeliaj at 5 p.m...
...Another Italian tank and APC had joined us in front...
...There were a lot of political parties involved in the pending election, many of them small, some of them coalitions...
...Occasionally we found them...
...Near a place called Tepelena, Nick, Eli and I, along with the driver Allesandro and a handful of other observers, moved into tents behind concertina wire and sandbags in an abandoned Albanian army camp destroyed during the spring riots...
...All the political parties had similar platforms...
...The tank had broken down...
...The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had put pressure on President Berisha to hold the parliamentary election as a way of bringing stability to a country careening out of control, and they pressured him further to accept international observers...
...We needed people knowledgeable about the country's history and culture who also could write and speak perfect Albanian...
...Skanderbeg had briefly wrenched some Albanian land away from the Ottomans in the 15c.o's...
...Outside the town we approached a farm house on a hill a hundred yards above a dark pasture...
...Any more delay, he said, and we would be trapped for the night by the curfew...
...Back at our camp the election night sky was lively and bright with machine gun tracers...
...Two men in a yellow four-door Mercedes-Benz drove up...
...The rent for many apartments in Tirana recently doubled from $ioo to $200 a month...
...It was an early morning in June...
...The shooting was intense...
...We were not alone...
...The man in the shorts began to taunt the soldier and Antonio, calling them girls, telling them to go home...
...His friend, a young fellow with a rodential face, was carrying an AK-47, its banana clip wrapped in grimy surgical tape...
...When we were twenty-five yards away he fired a long burst into the sky...
...Of course the parties with any political significance were mainly run by the same former Communist party intellectuals everyone made a point of being against...
...Late that night, after a group shower in a tent rigged Rube Goldberg–style with thick hoses and a rubber bladder the size of an early Bella Abzug, I went to the chow hall for something to eat...
...Another Legionnaire was taking the pictures...
...It was not lost on campaign workers that President Berisha had a hand grenade thrown at him during a campaign rally in a village twenty-five miles from Tirana...
...Though the council professed to be Socialist, and demanded Berisha's resignation, their political objectives, other than an aspiration to power, are confused and unclear...
...Prisons were opened and convicts turned loose along with political prisoners...
...I was assigned to oversee voting stations in an area deep in the south...
...Their popularity both as toys and intimidators has been high...
...Later, after he was seated as PM, he flatly denied making the promise...
...The mayor of Tirana, a fellow by the name of Al Brojka, has said publicly that bars like Belushi's (its old druggie namesake was of Albanian descent) and the new and unlovely La Dolce Vita won't be pulled down even if they are on city property because the economy needs all the tax revenue it can get...
...Antonio and the soldiers spilled from the APC...
...A few dusty fig trees and camouflage netting supplied the only shade from the hot sun...
...The pyramid schemes were the country's informal financial market...
...The man bowed to me and said something to his friend who tossed his beer bottle near Antonio's feet...
...Memeliaj is Mama Mia...
...For more than three hours we had been watching the six Memeliaj "election commissioners" shout at voters and each other...
...hen I was at the Voice of America in the 198o's, a recurring problem was finding broadcasters for our Albanian language radio service...
...The ruling Democratic Party recklessly supported them and exempted them from regulation...
...Nearby, dirty kids were begging at car windows...
...I was sitting on a low wall, waiting to leave for the southern part of the country...
...Nick agreed...
...Most of the parties did little or no campaigning since they couldn't afford to pay armed escorts, and running around with placards touting a candidate was considered a deep provocation to the gun-toting supporters of other candidates...
...The thumb of his cupped hand appeared to have been amputated...
...He was drunk and a pistol was shoved in his belt...
...There is no modem highway system, not a surprise since no private cars were allowed in Albania until 1991...
...The temperature was close to go degrees...
...One wore a Rambo-like black kerchief pulled tight over his head...
...One summer in Greece we found two young women, intelligent and educated Albanian sisters named Isabella and Zamira Islami, who had fled with their brother from a collective farm in the Albanian mountains...
...He was very agitated...
...We're out of here...
...We were eating cold spaghetti with carrot sauce, slices of cheese, bread and jam, and drinking warm beer...
...Mostly, one supposed, or hoped, this was men firing in the air...
...Now, Berisha's Democrats were expected to lose...
...The only light came from a single bulb dangling from the ceiling...
...Berisha promised to resign...
...They are trying to make it too late for us to leave," she said to Nick and me...
...State radio and TV enthusiastically Hacked for them, giving Albanians, dazed by the luxury they could see on Amer-ican and European television shows, the idea that money in always brings more money out...
...Vecerdea Clausil, our good-natured Romanian camp commander...
...Armed bands had terrorized the south since the spring, and had taken control of much of it...
...For the second time in a few minutes, Antonio, the Italian army lieutenant squad leader, opened the door and demanded that we leave...
...Their brother had disappeared in the water...
...The State Department security briefer who gave it to us said that if we were hurt we would be taken by helicopter to a hospital in Italy, an hour away...
...A U.K...
...Last year President Berisha bragged that there were more Mercedes-Benzes per capita in Albania than anywhere else in the world...
...Bars and cafes are springing up...
...The pyramids started from a small lottery in a shoe factory on the edge of Tirana...
...The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ran the briefings for observers and was responsible for our assignments to polling stations...
...Masty and the other commissioners arguing...
...The city (and country) is a financial and social disaster, mired in a kind of Haitian poverty...
...Much of it came from a nearby box-like apartment building and from heavy grass on the surrounding hills...
...Finally, we were to keep the laminated strip in our pocket that said in Albanian, in effect, "Don't shoot me or arrest me, I'm an international observer...
...Many of the current policemen themselves are released prisoners...
...It would be a six-hour drive...
...Approximately one million AK-47 assault rifles, along with mortars, rockets and tons of ammunition, were looted from Hoxha's enormous munitions dumps...
...This is a country of only 3.3 million people...
...One stood in front of the closed door...
...after dark, it would become hundreds of shots...
...Lethal chemicals and some radioactive materials were also looted from military bases...
...Some 7,000 soldiers from Austria, France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, and Romania, led by Italy, had arrived by air and sea in late spring but their orders were vague...
...Now the voters were gone but the shouting continued...
...Two Romanian soldiers were the anti-sniper snipers at the camp...
...His face was like one of those ethereal WASP children in the Ralph Lauren ads...
...They took the man away and we never saw him again"—was comparable to horror stories that occasionally filtered across the 38th parallel from North Korea...
...As we passed the light in the house went out and a half dozen shots were fired from a window...
...For the elections, the soldiers of "Operation Alba" were there to protect foreign observers, not to enforce Albanian laws or protect Albanians, and units were careful to avoid mixing it up with the locals unless they were forced to by direct attack...
...After dark there was some retaliatory sniping...
...Since the beginning of the Cold War, Albania had been sealed from the rest of the world by its vicious and paranoid Communist leader Enver Hoxha (pronounced ho-ja...
...A hand grenade bounced from an alley forty feet away and exploded...
...I opened the door and an Italian soldier whacked me on the hip with his rifle butt...
...Heavy shooting was coming from directly behind the school...
...When the bottom dropped away, more than $500 million disappeared immediately in a puff of mirrored smoke, and a lot more followed...
...When atom people beneath you purchase tickets you receive $2,000 in cash...
...My "partner" was a friendly but nervous 29-year-old lawyer from Athens named Nick Kotakis...
...we set out for Gjiralkaster, a town near the Greek border seized by rebels in the spring and still dominated by them...
...I sat down with Maj...
...We were to watch for signs of cheating, for bullying of voters, for broken seals and other tampering with ballot boxes or ballots themselves...
...9, a shabby middle-school in Memeliaj, a dry mud-brick town near the Greek border that was our "primary" poll...
...They want them to stay here to protect them...
...Since the collapse of Communist rule, poor country people have flocked to Tirana, transforming a small ugly town with horse carts, some bicycles, and decrepit buses into a large ugly town where bingo and video-game parlors have popped up like bad mushrooms and cheap goods like plastic slippers and second-hand clothes are hawked on the sidewalks...
...Three policemen had been shot to death in the southern port city of Vlore...
...The Socialists, direct descendants of the Communist Party, were strongest in the south, Berisha's Democratic Party dominated the north...
...46 November 19 9 7 • The American Spectator Outside the whack-whack-whack of automatic-rifle fire had begun...
...Unfortunately, the most likely candidates lived in Albania...
...I stepped outside...
...he said, laughing and banging the steering wheel of his midgety car...
...The other commissioners sat silent, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke...
...Every year during the hot Balkan summer, a VOA team would travel through Greece and lower Yugoslavia trolling for escaped Albanians who might be qualified to broadcast back to the country from which they had run...
...They had been with us all day...
...Government buildings were bombed and burned, entire army bases sacked...
...We were to stay for a couple of hours, visit the other assigned polls, and return to our primary polling location for the final hour of voting, the poll closing, and the ballot counting...
...Ultimately, they took 107 seats out of 155...
...This summer, when Charles Manatt, chairman of the International Federation of Electoral Systems (IFES), a democracy-building outfit with offices in Washington and a half dozen countries, asked me if I'd like to be an observer at Albania's parliamentary elections in July, I said, yes, of course, and canceled a planned family vacation in Maine...
...Our military convoy, led by armored personnel carriers (APCs), followed a narrow pot-holed road out of Tirana...
...Antonio and his men dragged two long iron rods and some chains from the rear hatch of the APC and labored to hook one tank to the other...
...They waved...
...His Memeliaj supporter, Mr...
...As a group they were like Balkan crows, pushing and yelling and muttering threats to each other over the road-kill of voting procedure...
...Many years later the thought occurs that if Dodi and Diana, or some of their teddy bear–carrying retinue, had been aboard they would have, for a refreshing change, encountered women with genuine courage and genuine character...
...The pay of a middle-aged schoolmaster in Tirana is $ioo a month...
...They don't want to give us the results because we will go and the soldiers will go with us...
...Shrapnel, or a bullet, hit the APC with a ding...
...And we were to watch The American Spectator • November 1997 the local "election commissioners" — usually six of them, representing various political parties—sign each ballot...
...He said we wouldn't want to go to an Albanian hospital...
...Many policemen around Gjiralkaster went home and found something safer to do...
...Among the commission members were two Democrats, a couple of Socialists, and a monarchist named Avni Gashi from the Legality Movement Party...
...The lieutenant ran up...
...President Berisha had ordered the polls closed at 6 p.m...
...The bear had black Happy lips and was toothless...
...We had been assigned to ten polling places in the region, all within a radius of about thirty kilometers...
...They are not counting the votes...
...for fear of violence, and two-and-a-half hours later the six were still trying to count and verify the ballots in the yellow cardboard box...
...I suggested we abandon the car and take refuge in a building twenty feet away...
...Coupled with almost a half-century of poverty and isolation under Enver Hoxha, the devastating Ponzi loss rubbed Albania's psychic boils raw...
...Thousands of newly arrived peasants squat in shacks on the northern rim of Tirana in a vast slum without sewers, water, or electricity...
...for the poll closing and final count...
...They are finished...
...More than 9,000 people were killed or wounded by gunfire from March through May...
...Concrete military bunkers shaped like mushroom caps, and of varying sizes to hold one to a dozen militiamen, mar the landscape everywhere...
...No problem there...
...They probably thought you were the last of the Albanian army...
...Using false travel papers to pass security roadblocks, with jerry-rigged life vests under their clothes, hiding from patrol boats with soldiers who would kill them, they attempted to swim the Ionian Sea, at night, to the Greek island of Corfu...
...The tiniest of the parties were called "taxis," meaning all the members could fit in one...
...Americans could not travel there and Albanians could not leave...
...He neglected to say almost all of them had been stolen, brought in by the thousands through Greece and Macedonia, and by boat from Italy...
...He is a former director general ofthe Voice ofAmerica...
...They had missed but it made soldiers like Antonio, who rode in APCs, a little tense...
...Fatos Nano, who had campaigned promising to return the money lost in the pyramid schemes would become Prime Minister...
...A white statue of Skanderbeg could be seen over the boy's shoulder...
...The camp was now made up of about 240 Romanian infantrymen—veterans of forays in Somalia, Bosnia, and Angola —and a company of Italian special forces...
...Eli began sobbing and shaking...
...An abandoned building, one with a roof, served as a chow hall...
...We clanked over cobblestones and pavement...
...Short-wave radio reports said the Socialists had swept the parliamentary elections...
...He pushed the door into my leg with his body, yelling to get back...
...In mid-March a retired general named Agim Gozhita had been elected chief of Gjiralkaster's 150 man "rebel council...
...Gashi...
...We passed the two men in the yellow Mercedes sitting by the road...
...National insecurity erupted...
...He said they were going to try to tow the tank and get back to camp, to stay in the car...
...Simultaneously, Nano campaigned shamelessly on a bogus promise: to refund money to the 300,000 pyramid losers if the Socialists won the election...
...Around us were the hulks of smashed Chinese troop carriers, dismembered Czech motorcycles, and the ruins of buildings whose walls and roofs had been collapsed by furious Albanians who attacked the army base and drove Berisha's soldiers away...
...We came to a stop in the lighted square...
...They both carried Chinese-made sniper rifles with large scopes and hunkered down on the camp perimeter after dark with night-vision goggles...
...Every man and boy has a gun, probably two or three...
...Buy a $5 ticket, then sign up four other people to do the1same...
...They wanted them alive, to keep them around as a joke...
...A passing luxury yacht picked up the women in Greek waters...
...What we would be told by escaped Albanians about daily life in Albania —"A man whispered to his neighbor about the potato shortage...
...The Memeliaj square was deserted...
...Eli walked angrily into a dark classroom...
...In Tirana the two of us and an interpreter, a plump 40-year-old Albanian woman, a school teacher named Eli Shkurti, squeezed uncomfortably into an Italian Army Fiat driven by 24-year-old army corporal Allesandro Barone...
...The American Spectator • November 1997 This isolated mountainous country on the Balkan Peninsula north of Greece, across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, has been the anvil to someone else's hammer for more than a thousand years...
...The caravan began moving slowly through the narrow streets, past heavy gunfire, the two-tank contraption in the lead announcing our arrival a block or two in advance...
...He pulled them from his shirt pocket and pushed them across the table...
...He had a Heineken in his other hand...
...Many of them, like the John Belushi Bar—perched on the fetid banks of the Lana River—which carries tons of untreated sewage through downtown Tirana, have been built on public land...
...The ratty man poked the barrel of his AK-47 through the open window...
...They lie...
...It was impossible to slide lower in the Fiat's front seat...
...Stop" and "Drop the gun" were at the top of the list...
...He is the son of the self-crowned King Zog, who fled Albania in 1939 with the Italian Army at his heels...
...At the corner of the schoolyard, looking like a weird toy left in the litter from the Soviet-quality apartment buildings ringing the yard, was an Italian tank...
...Nick, Eli, and I were slumped on a wooden bench in the hot school lobby...
...The Socialists had won by a landslide: 431 votes to the Democrats 92...
...Albanians had fired an antitank rocket at an APC the night before in Tepelena...
...Professionals don't make much more...
...The Albanian army had mostly disbanded throughout the south and its troops also wandered back to their towns and villages...
...T he Albanian elections of last year, won by the Democratic Party of President Sali Berisha, had flunked the smell test...
...Three days after we arrived, at 8:40 p.m., it was almost dark outside polling station No...
...In many instances "rebel" forces are simply bandits and opportunists, their leaders old-fashioned war lords...
...Now she thought they might have been right...
...On the way back, Allesandro had showed me his army guide of Albanian words...
...Every afternoon we would hear dozens of random shots nearby...
...It was dark...
...0 n the grass along the Boulevard of Martyrs in Skanderbeg Square in central Tirana, a French Foreign Legionnaire, with a shaved head and beret, an automatic rifle in his outstretched hand, was posing for photos with one knotty arm around the neck of a large brown bear...
...They didn't kill you on purpose, I think;' he said, laughing...
...In the lighted school window I could see Mr...
...They succeeded and winched the disabled tank partly off the pavement, its cannon pointing toward us, its tracks running up the back of the lead tank...
...Rockets launched from a nearby hill crossed over the army base with a whoosh...
...I copied down the figures...
...I confronted Yethu Masty, the chairman, and demanded the polling numbers...
...For fifty years Albanians were forbidden to move without government permission...
...That is, each was opposed to the former Communist regime, and each was in favor of freedom of speech and a "market economy...
...But after generations of totalitarian Communist rule, who knows who owns what, is the general attitude...
...I could see red tracer bullets going over the yard...
...One of them, a blond boy about eight, was wearing a girl's Madras dress and limping about on a swollen bloody foot...
...RICHARD W. CARLSON is president and CEO of King World Public Television of New York and Los Angeles...
...Not that those services are always available to residents of longer standing...
...We were to be present at the primary poll when the commissioners brought the sealed ballot box in at about 5:45 a.m...
...Led by Fatos Nano the Socialists gleefully punched Berisha senseless over the Democrats' support for the financial pyramid schemes...
...He had been bursting into fits of giggling and self-conversation while hopping inexplicably around the commissioners' plywood table on one foot...
...Screw the protocol," said Nick, some of whose English had come from watching American movies...
...A squad of Italian army rangers, plumes of black feathers fixed to their steel helmets, walked back and forth with automatic weapons outside the school...
...With our tank and APC pressed to the Fiat like bookends we headed for the town square...
...Gashi was a fervid supporter of King Lek...
...The empire took it back almost as quickly...
...45 People squatted along the road selling bottles of motor oil, plastic furniture, sewing machines, and mounds of carrots, peaches, plums, green peppers, and figs...
...The average Albanian's income, in a Europe luxuriating in money, is about $70 a 44 November 1997 • The American Spectator month...
...The sounds were moving closer...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
