Ex-Leader of Albania Loses Legal Shield

Parliament on Friday stripped former President Sali Berisha of his immunity from prosecution for an alleged coup attempt, pushing him to the wall in a dispute with the Albanian government.

Just hours after Berisha failed to mobilize his promised mass protests, parliament--which his Democratic Party is boycotting--cleared the way for the government to order his arrest.

Foreign diplomats were trying to talk the government out of acting.

Prime Minister Fatos Nano’s Socialist government is split over whether to risk more bloodshed by arresting Berisha, Dutch diplomat Daan Everts said.

“There’s a discussion going on, I’m sure, in the ruling party over whether to move fast, which the hard-liners definitely want and have very much said so,” said Everts, who heads the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s mission here.

“Others are saying, ‘Let’s be a little more careful and see what the international opinion is,’ ” he said.

Berisha had called on supporters to stage the biggest protests in Albania’s history on Friday to press demands that Nano step down immediately.

He managed to rally only about 3,000 demonstrators in the capital, Tirana, and any marches in other Albanian cities were “nothing worth mentioning,” Everts said.

If the protesters’ large U.S. and European Union flags left any doubt about the intended audience, their freshly painted placards did not. They were all written in English so foreign cameras could relay slogans such as “Prime Minister Nano, Mastermind of Political Murders.”

Berisha repeated Friday that he is not afraid of arrest and insisted that he will never negotiate with Nano, whom he blames for last weekend’s killing of Azem Hajdari, a key Berisha ally.

Although Western governments are wary of Nano, they prefer him to Berisha, who openly supports the ethnic Albanian rebellion in the neighboring Serbian province of Kosovo.

“We will make no bargain with the blood of Azem Hajdari,” Berisha told reporters as Hajdari’s 14-year-old son stood behind him. “We will make no bargain with fake accusations of armed insurrection.”

Nano deployed army commandos to guard government buildings, and police wearing black balaclava masks searched cars and buildings for weapons as protesters gathered near Berisha’s headquarters.

Donika Dervishi, an unemployed teacher, passed through police roadblocks with her 18-year-old daughter to get a closer look at the protesters and then quickly left for safer ground.

“I don’t like the people who are demonstrating, or the organizers,” she said through an interpreter. “They are making a mistake. People want this stopped in a legal way, not just by demonstrating.”

Dervishi moved to the capital from southern Albania to find work. Albania’s economy is in such a mess that she ended up selling clothes in a curbside stall.

She earns about 1,000 leks, or $7 a day, more than three times her state salary as a teacher. Like many Albanians, she wants leaders to stop tearing the country apart and start building a real economy.

Two days of rioting erupted last weekend after Hajdari was killed outside his Democratic Party headquarters.

Berisha accuses Nano of ordering the assassination, while Nano says Berisha tried to overthrow him during the violence that followed Hajdari’s death.

Albania’s parliament fudged the immunity issue by asking the Constitutional Court whether it has the legal authority to demand Berisha’s arrest and detention, Everts said.

But Albania’s general prosecutor has the power to act on his own, “so he could arrest [Berisha] in five minutes if he wants to,” Everts said.

As the first protesters gathered Friday, Sabri Neli paused at a sidewalk shrine to Hajdari, where blobs of dried candle wax mixed with ashes of cigarettes left as gifts to the dead.

Neli, 35, was just back from Greece, where he took a job three years ago in a butcher shop because he could not find anything better in Albania.

Neli wanted to honor Hajdari as “a brave man and a national hero, the leader of the good people here.” But he did not stay around long enough to join Berisha’s demonstration.

“With this government, and without a political resolution, things will not get better,” Neli said before hurrying away.