The Illusion of Albania Exposed

After the fall five years ago of Europe’s oddest brand of communism, Albania blossomed in the West’s eye.

Its garrulous president, Sali Berisha, talked a good game of democracy, reform and the free market. Tiny Albania’s location gave it strategic significance in the volatile Balkans, and under Berisha, Albania promised to be a willing host to U.S. and NATO naval and air bases.

Yet just below the surface lay Berisha’s penchant for autocratic rule and a disregard for civil rights that culminated in fraudulent elections in May.

Today the illusion is exposed. The stability that the West thought Berisha’s government provided is shattered; the relative prosperity that Albanians apparently had begun to enjoy in recent years was shown to be based on shady pyramid schemes that burst like a punctured balloon.

“The slogan in the Balkans was ‘Stability first, democracy later,’ ” said Agim Isaku, a political analyst with a human rights foundation here. “No one was really taking care of democracy. That was the biggest mistake of all made by the international community.”

Like other Balkan strongmen, or strongman wannabes, Berisha had apparently convinced the United States and other governments that he could play a vital role in maintaining regional peace. He welcomed investment from abroad, although the increasingly visible and pervasive corruption of his government limited foreign-financed projects. And he filled his rhetoric with slurs against the opposition Socialist Party, the renamed Communists who had ruled Albania for 45 years.

“We all wanted to believe that the country had reached a certain level of stability and democracy,” said a European diplomat.

“Everybody was trying to support Berisha and his government as the lesser of two evils. We didn’t want the ex-Communists in power. And while his record on the economy and on human rights was not good, everyone said, ‘Well, it’s a transition. We’re in the Balkans.’ ”

Placated by the money they thought they were making in the pyramid schemes, few Albanians objected when Berisha expanded the secret police, harassed journalists and filled the judiciary with unqualified political appointees given a three-month crash course in how to be a judge.

Relations with the United States flourished. The U.S. military, especially, saw in the Adriatic country a staging ground for operations in the Balkans. U.S. spy planes flying over the former Yugoslav federation took off from Albanian bases. Albania became the first East Bloc country to apply for NATO membership.

Parliamentary elections in May were the breaking point. Fraud and intimidation of opposition candidates were so extensive that the Clinton administration finally spoke up--but it was virtually alone among Western governments in doing so.

Still, the United States went ahead with joint military exercises with Albania following the election fiasco: The largest exercises, a multinational NATO operation dubbed Peaceful Eagle ‘96, were staged in July in Albania and co-hosted by the United States and Albania. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps participated in amphibious exercises with Albania in its Adriatic waters in August.

Reluctant still to challenge Berisha too directly and wary of the power vacuum his removal might create, the international community and Albanians are stymied over what to do with the problematic president.

While ordinary Albanians, especially in the rebellious south, insist Berisha must go, some of his staunchest political opponents have backed off that demand. Leaving him in place until emergency elections, tentatively planned for June, would smooth the transition, they say.

But the dangers in such a scenario are that Berisha--with the Interior Ministry and secret police still under his Democratic Party’s control--would be in position to rig the elections. Moreover, the vote is not likely to occur until much later in the year because of the collapse of governmental institutions and the violence sweeping the country.

Both Berisha and prominent Socialist Party leader Fatos Nano emerged from the Communist Party, which under dictator Enver Hoxha wrapped Albania in backward isolationism that feared attack from East and West and imposed all sort of social restrictions.

Hoxha died in 1985, and the system he created finally fell in 1992, when Berisha’s Democratic Party won Albania’s first democratic elections.

The pyramid schemes began about the same time. Their collapse in December unleashed the anger and frustration over the Berisha government that had been building. Riots escalated into armed insurrection that devastated parts of Albania and emptied army arsenals into the general population.

Berisha was valued by the West for his perceived ability to prevent his people from unsettling the ethnic balances in the Kosovo region of neighboring Serbia, where Albanians outnumber Serbs 9-1, and Macedonia, where one-quarter of the population is ethnic Albanian.

Macedonia, patrolled by about 600 Americans who form half of a U.N. peacekeeping force, is especially fragile, experts say. A threat there to ethnic Macedonians, who are Orthodox Christians, would inflame passions throughout the Balkans.

“The international community and Berisha signed a Faustian deal,” said Fred Abrahams, a specialist on Albania with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The irony is now you have in Albania the greatest threat to regional stability since the signing of Dayton”--the Bosnia peace accord negotiated in Ohio in late 1995.

In many regions of Albania, the uprising was hijacked by thugs and Mafiosi who exploited the chaos to their criminal advantage. But at its core was a legitimate discontent with a government and a system that was portrayed as democracy to a post-Communist population.

The question now is whether Albania’s 3.4 million people, many of them fleeing across the Adriatic to Italy, have soured altogether on democracy, or whether the country is irreparably split into city-states and regional fiefdoms that no central government can control.