Albania’s Ex-Leader Exhorts Backers to March

The nation tottered on the brink of chaos Thursday after another day of protests in which former President Sali Berisha called on his supporters to defy a government ban and stage the biggest demonstrations in the country’s history.

In a speech to about 2,000 supporters, Berisha told backers to march peacefully throughout the country today. However, Albania is awash in weapons looted from armories last year, and diplomats who are trying to resolve the crisis fear a repeat of last weekend’s street battles in the capital, Tirana.

Berisha hopes to draw on the stature he won in Albania’s first democratic election in March 1992 after the fall of one of the world’s harshest Communist dictatorships.

“We are the people who fought for freedom,” he told reporters as more than 2,000 supporters cheered from the street below. “We will never accept limitations on our freedoms.”

But a bitter memory of Berisha’s rule is fresh in many Albanians’ minds: the collapse of investment schemes that robbed thousands of their savings and plunged Albania into anarchy last spring.

With foreign governments trying to isolate Berisha, his political fortunes appear to be fading.

A parliamentary commission recommended Thursday that lawmakers strip Berisha of immunity from criminal prosecution, and the full parliament is expected to agree in a vote today. The government could then charge Berisha with leading what Prime Minister Fatos Nanos claims was a failed coup attempt and try to arrest him.

Foreign diplomats hope that they can calm the tensions and convince Nano that arresting Berisha would only make him a political martyr, increasing the risk of plunging the fragile country into all-out anarchy for the second time in 18 months.

Berisha can only count on about 500 or 1,000 people to back him, Foreign Minister Paskal Milo claimed.

“We don’t believe the Albanians and members of the Democratic Party want to destroy totally this country,” Milo said in a television interview. “We hope they won’t support a man who is trying, in an unconstitutional manner, to come to power.”

Milo insisted that Nano’s Socialist government wants to find a peaceful way out of the standoff, but Berisha’s supporters must first put down their weapons. “We are not going to discuss, and start a dialogue, with terrorists led by Berisha,” Milo said as a European Union delegation tried to mediate a negotiated solution.

Today’s protest will not only test Nano’s willingness to defuse the standoff. It also will allow him to gauge whether Berisha overplayed his hand.

At Berisha’s rally, a few supporters waved U.S. and European Union flags, while others held up pictures of Azem Hajdari, a Berisha ally whose assassination provoked riots over the weekend that killed seven people.

The crowd cheering Berisha was small by Albanian standards, but he claims that his supporters have been blocked from entering the capital by police.

Several men in black balaclava masks and carrying AK-47 assault rifles stopped cars at one police roadblock on the outskirts of Tirana on Thursday.

Berisha insisted that he won’t back down unless Nano hands over power to a “technical government.”

“We will increase our daily protests until the league of Fatos Nano is ousted from power,” Berisha shouted in a raspy voice over the chants of his supporters in the street below.