Albania Rivals Told to End Violence

A delegation of senior European diplomats has warned Albania’s bitter political rivals to take their battle out of the streets and start making democracy work.

The diplomats criticized both Prime Minister Fatos Nano and opposition leader Sali Berisha for Albania’s political crisis but made it clear they don’t want to see Berisha arrested for last week’s riots.

“We think the place for the opposition is in parliament, not in prison and not in street demonstrations,” Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek told reporters here Saturday.

Nano’s Socialist government can have Berisha arrested at any time because parliament lifted the former president’s immunity Friday. Nano accuses Berisha of trying to unseat him in a failed coup last week.

Berisha insists that it was a popular uprising provoked by the assassination of his ally, Azem Hajdari, outside their Democratic Party headquarters. Berisha says Nano ordered the killing.

The European diplomats did not make a public judgment either way but did say they told Berisha “in no uncertain terms” that foreign governments will isolate him if he does not change his tactics and take his fight with Nano back to parliament.

“We expect a genuine political dialogue will be restored,” said Geremek, who headed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s fact-finding mission. “We emphasize also that any repressive measures should be avoided. It would create an obstacle to any political dialogue.”

Although about 3,000 of Berisha’s supporters continued their daily protest marches in the capital Saturday, Tirana remains relatively calm after two days of riots that left at least seven dead last week.

After 50 years under the most repressive Communist rule in Europe, Albania’s democracy is so unstable that it could collapse into anarchy again in the flash of a gun, a Western diplomat cautioned.

“There is not a clear sense yet” that stability is taking hold, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition he not be named. “The tension may have calmed down in the last two days, but the problem is the components for a mess--a disaster--are all still there.”

Average Albanian wages run about $32 a month, and getting any job often depends on having friends or relatives in power, so political stakes are dangerously high.

Political rivalries can turn bloody quickly because there is an abundance of weapons in Albania, where stolen AK-47 assault rifles sold for $15 a year ago.

By the government’s official estimate, about 700,000 guns and 1 billion rounds of ammunition, hand grenades and other ordnance are still missing a year after Albanians looted the nation’s armories.

Add to that volatile mix an ancient tradition of blood feuds, and it becomes clear why the measured tones of diplomacy may not be as persuasive in Tirana as they are in other European capitals.

As the senior envoys from the OSCE and Council of Europe left Saturday after their discussions with Berisha and Nano, they admitted that they had given no hint of imposing sanctions if the two do not limit their battle to verbal sparring in parliament.

They simply left Albanians to see that making peace is in their own best interest, Geremek said.

He also chastised Nano’s government for doing too little to stop organized crime, corruption and smuggling, the very problems that have made Albanians so angry.

When the Stalinist dictatorship imposed by the late Enver Hoxha collapsed, it was replaced with a democracy in which name-calling and outrageous accusations pass for political debate, the Western diplomat said.

“Here there are no issues. It’s, ‘He’s a Communist’ and ‘He’s a Communist,’ ” Geremek said. “The trouble is that everybody came out of that same background.

“But there are many issues that would appeal to average Albanians that are desperate for attention. Ask any Albanian and the three things that come to mind right off the start are water, electricity and jobs.”

Foreign governments, such as the U.S., are trying to help build a civil society with aid and advice, the Western diplomat said, but Albanian leaders are better at learning the right things to say than actually doing them.

“They were locked in the closet for 50 years,” he said. “They really don’t have any idea how the outside world works.”