Chaos Reigns as Albania Violence Spreads

The upheaval sweeping Albania finally engulfed this capital Thursday. Gunfire erupted, looters ransacked arms depots and food warehouses, police vanished and U.S. military helicopters swooped in to rescue Americans.

Dozens of people were killed or wounded nationwide as violence, which began as a revolt against President Sali Berisha and the losses many Albanians suffered from fraudulent pyramid schemes, crumbled into nationwide mayhem.

“The situation has degenerated into total chaos and anarchy,” said Zef Camaj, a leader of Forum for Democracy, an opposition coalition. “I doubt the government is capable of resolving the crisis.”

Automatic gunfire echoed around the capital most of the day and became constant Thursday night, as orange tracer fire crisscrossed the sky and the thump of helicopters startled residents. Most of the shooting appeared to be directed into the air and was not the result of combat.

About 50 Americans, principally families of diplomats, were evacuated aboard four CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters Thursday night, and another 110 were to be airlifted today, U.S. officials in Washington announced. More than 2,000 American citizens live in Albania.

The helicopters brought in a contingent from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit to reinforce the U.S. Embassy and provide direct communications with three U.S. Navy vessels in the Ionian Sea off the Albanian coast. The evacuees were flown to the ships.

The Pentagon reported that apparently there had been no violence in the vicinity of the embassy.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, announcing the evacuation, cited the rapid “breakdown in public order” in Tirana. The closing of the airport, apparently by gunfire in the area, eliminated the principal means of departure for stranded Westerners.

Burns warned Americans in the city: “Keep your heads down. Don’t leave your homes.”

In an admission that the Albanian government had lost control of the country, Berisha issued a plea to the European Union for international peacekeeping troops to restore order.

By late Thursday, armed gangs roamed most of the country. City after city, first in the south and then the north, has fallen in the past two weeks under violent, mob-style rule. Weapons have been seized from many military bases--often with the encouragement of authorities.

In Shkoder, northern Albania’s biggest town, raids on armories Thursday left four dead and at least 22 wounded. In Durres, the country’s main Adriatic port, widespread looting was reported and the city was without electricity.

In the capital, law and order simply melted away. Uniformed police virtually disappeared from Tirana’s major downtown streets, which were largely deserted by Thursday afternoon. The handful of police and army vans that circulated were carrying men in civilian dress. The army, which has been retreating from the widening insurrection, has evidently refused to act, and many soldiers have deserted.

Bedlam reigned on Tirana’s wide Rruga Durresit street, which leads to the airport. Hundreds of looters were having a field day at a mammoth food warehouse. On bicycles and donkeys, in pickup trucks and wheelbarrows, they made off with countless 110-pound sacks of Swiss flour under a hail of bullets fired into the sky.

Some of the looters were white-faced, powdered with flour that had escaped. A noisy traffic jam developed in front of the warehouse, trapping a police van carrying civilians who were firing AK-47 assault rifles. Trucks were piled high with flour sacks; one driver filled his car trunk to overflowing and then roared up the wrong side of the highway to get away.

Tirana had the feel of a city going to war. Two tanks patrolled the city center late Thursday. Taut-faced men filled oil drums and plastic canisters with gasoline at service stations. Long lines formed at bakeries, and panic buying cleared the stalls at Tirana’s open-air markets. Few stores opened, remaining instead shuttered behind iron grills.

“We would like Berisha to go, but we don’t care so much about the government,” said a 30-year-old unemployed mother named Zana, whose neighbor was wounded in Thursday’s gunfire. “The problem is that everyone has weapons. . . . You go on the streets and a bullet comes and hits you.”

“The situation is deteriorating so fast and the fear is spreading,” said Camaj of the Forum for Democracy. “The people are arming themselves out of self-defense because they are afraid of what will happen tomorrow.”

Berisha is under pressure to resign, even after forming a government with the opposition and naming a prime minister from the rival Socialist Party.

Associated Press quoted an Italian coast guard officer as saying that Berisha’s son and daughter and five other family members arrived in Italy aboard a ferry, and rumors circulated that Berisha will attempt to escape the country as well.

But diplomats and some politicians debated whether his removal would calm the situation by satisfying opponents’ demands--or create more anarchy by leaving a power vacuum.

Opposition politicians accuse Berisha’s ruling Democratic Party of deliberately provoking the chaos to undermine the new government and continue his rule.

Berisha and the government called for Western help in quelling the unrest. They requested “military intervention to guard the integrity of Albania, restore peace and safeguard the nation’s institutions in this dangerous situation,” according to a statement read on state television.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization met in emergency session in Brussels, while at the U.N. in New York, Albania and neighboring Italy asked for a special Security Council meeting to discuss the crisis.

However, military intervention appeared unlikely from an international community exhausted by the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Washington and Western Europe were until recently enthusiastic supporters of Berisha, and they have been reluctant to get dragged into a confusing Albanian mire.

Yet the arrival of new refugees on European shores and the possibility of violence spilling over into Albania’s Balkan neighbors have gotten the West’s attention. Macedonia, which has a large Albanian population, and other neighboring countries were reported to be on high alert Thursday or to have closed borders. And with so many stolen weapons floating around Albania, the concern now is that they will filter into the world’s black market.

The opposition is in disarray and has been pitifully unsuccessful in challenging Berisha. Following a meeting with the president on Thursday, opposition leaders said they were stunned when Berisha conceded that he had neither army nor police to restore order to the capital. Berisha told the parties that he didn’t have the 200 or so soldiers necessary to safeguard the airport and the harbor at Durres.

Few opposition leaders have the stature necessary to lead Albania’s political struggle. Arguably the country’s most respected politician, Fatos Nano, was released Thursday after having been jailed for four years on purportedly trumped-up charges. Ramiz Alia, the last Communist president of Albania, was also among those freed.

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.