Albania Moves to Depoliticize Armed Forces, Police, Courts

Albania announced Friday that it was drafting a new law taking the army, police and courts from Communist control, meeting one of the main demands of the opposition.

The official news agency ATA, monitored in Vienna, said the government “is charged to organize the drafting of laws regarding the place and role of the army, the organs of the interior and justice in the conditions of a political multiparty system.”

“The armed forces belong to and are only in the service of the homeland,” the announcement said, quoting a decision by the presidium of the People’s Assembly.

ATA said the draft would be forwarded for approval by the new Parliament to be elected in the country’s first multiparty elections on March 31.

When asked in a telephone interview about the report, Gramoz Pashko, co-founder of the opposition Democratic Party, said: “Excellent, excellent.”

Pashko, an economist who helped found the country’s first opposition party last November, said it had pressed for the depoliticization of the army and security forces at a meeting with the government of President Ramiz Alia last Sunday.

“As long as they were under Communist control, anything else but a Communist victory in the elections would have led to a contradiction. It could have been civil war,” he said.

Pashko said his party had also reiterated its demands for more state support for their election campaign by providing buildings and equipment.

Albania decided Friday to allow foreign observers to monitor the Balkan country’s first free elections since Communists took power in 1944.

ATA said the presidium of the People’s Assembly approved the presence of observers. It was not immediately known who would participate as election monitors.

Student protests in December forced the Communists to reverse 46 years of hard-line Stalinist policies and permit the formation of alternative parties.

Students in Tirana, the Albania capital, staged strikes for the third day in a row Friday to protest against economic backwardness and to demand the resignation of the government.