The False Apocalypse

by Fatos Lubonja

  Hundreds of students of Tirana University had now abandoned their classes and were demonstrating in support of Vlora on the open spaces of the campus. High school students joined them. Reportedly, some of them had tried to start a strike in a lecture theatre, but the police had stopped them with the help of student groups linked to the PD.

  The fire kindled at Vlora was spreading throughout the country.

  ***

  As tension grew in Vlora, The Democratic Party’s National Council met in Tirana and decided that Sali Berisha would be the party’s presidential candidate. Of the council’s ninety members, eighty-five were in favour and none were against. The remaining five abstained.

  Of the fourteen signatories of the petition within the PD demanding the resignation of the Meksi government, described by Berisha as ‘has-beens’, only nine had taken part in the voting, because five were not members of the council. Of these nine, four had nevertheless voted in favour of Berisha, and the other five had dared only to abstain. This showed that Berisha was still very powerful in the party. Tritan Shehu, the party chairman, called him the man who had been able to develop democracy and institutions of government, to establish a market economy, and integrate Albania in the North Atlantic Alliance.

  The parliament decided that the president would be elected on Monday, 3rd March at ten o’clock.

  This decision convinced Vlora that the government would intervene to end the hunger strike. No president could be elected with a city in rebellion, demanding his overthrow day and night.

  ***

  ‘What we see today is a smouldering fire. The leaves are burning, but the wood has not caught fire yet,’ wrote Qorri that day in Koha Jonë. His article was a response to criticism within the opposition that the Forum no longer had a role, and it was time for the parties and their leaders to step forward. Qorri insisted that the fire being kindled by the fall of the pyramids would blaze for a long time, and it was important to stay together in the Forum. However, as he reread the article, the metaphor of something smouldering scared him. Had he meant to imply, even threaten, that what was happening was merely the start of a conflagration?

  The article’s ambiguity in fact illustrated a contradiction that the Forum had never resolved, and nor had Qorri, except through Charles Walsh’s judo metaphor. The Forum was trying at the same time to prevent the inferno that this smouldering fire augured and also to drive Berisha from power at all costs. However, to defend himself, Berisha would obviously threaten to set the country ablaze. He had already poured petrol on the wood. He was not going to turn back, especially now that he had hostages with him. He had no way out other than to pursue his adventure to the end, with his hostages. He would demand a route back from the precipice on which he and his hostages now stood. Otherwise they could expect a catastrophe. Everyone supposed that his macho code of behaviour also included the notion of a heroic death.

  It was hard to distinguish between empty and genuine menaces, between psychological blackmail and the threat of actual physical violence. The threat of violence could tip over into actual violence. The same analysis applied to the threats of the hunger strike, which could generate real violence. Both sides knew that if they were held back by fear of each other, they would remain hostage to each other. So they needed a lot of courage. Qorri was frightened that it was Berisha, who was looking over the precipice, who had the most courage. By what trick could he be made to shoot himself rather than his hostages?

  ***

  Reuters carried the news first. The spokesman of the Ministry of Public Order tried to deny the report, but its truth was soon established: in Vlora, there had been a gunfight between forces of the SHIK and protesters, and several people had died. Nobody in Tirana knew exactly what had happened, but speculation focused on the strike. So the fire was taking hold.

  On the night of 28th February there were more people than ever in the square in front of Vlora University, and some of them did not look peaceful. The news spread among the crowd that police vans were lying in wait in the darkness, ready to move in to forcibly evict the students. The crowd organized themselves, immediately forming a solid human wall facing the direction from which the vehicles might come.

  Was there really a plan that night, or was what happened merely the result of accumulated tension, the final confrontation that the crowd expected? Those attackers would not be able to tell the difference. The State denied the existence of any such plan, but nobody believed this after its display of intolerance. All the signs were that Berisha intended to use force to bring this crisis to an end. He had gone beyond blackmail.

  As soon as the headlights of an unidentified vehicle became visible in the darkness on one of the streets leading to the university square, the protesters thought that the SHIK had come to reconnoitre an intervention. They hurled themselves against the car. This threat had to be averted. The car accelerated and fled, perhaps in its intended direction, but its headlights alone were the spark that ignited the gunpowder.

  A mob ran after it, leaving the square and heading for the SHIK building, where many agents who had come from Tirana were said to be devising a plan to evict the students. This wild mob was not about to hold a peaceful protest. Demonstrations weren’t held at night.

  Nobody knew where the first shots came from, the SHIK building or the crowd, but it was the crowd who were more exposed to the bullets. Soon there came wails of ‘murder!’ A SHIK bullet had thrown a protester to the ground. There were shouts calling for revenge. The crowd threw grenades and Molotov cocktails at the building. Tongues of flame enveloped the SHIK headquarters, and the shots from inside died away. A protester signalled that the SHIK were trying to escape the burning building through the back door. The monstrous crowd stretched out a tentacle and seized three of them, while the remainder fled as fast as they could. The prisoners put their hands up and asked for mercy. But if an individual can grant mercy, an angry and vindictive mob cannot. The men were forced to their knees, and in this position were shot in the head. Someone howled that this was not enough. The bodies must be burned like the SHIK building. The petrol was soon found.

  But the crowd had no time to savour its victory as the bodies of the SHIK men and their headquarters burned.

  ‘Guns, get the guns!’

  This was no longer a rallying cry but an order from the mobsters who had taken command. They had to prepare for war, because the government’s retaliation would be swift. Some of the crowd ran through the darkness to the military barracks on the outskirts of the city. The soldiers there were disinclined to mount a heroic defence of their depot. The mob, now bristling with an entire arsenal of heavy weapons, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, hand grenades, pistols, and bayonets, ran through the streets of Vlora from the harbour to Flag Square, looking for the enemy.

  When they saw they had nobody to fight against, a few hundred headed for the President’s summer villa, where Enver Hoxha had once spent his vacations and Berisha now did the same. The handful of soldiers guarding it put up no resistance. The villa was looted, and everything that could be removed, down to the bathroom tiles and the window frames, was carried off. When there was nothing left to take, the mob attacked the other government villas nearby. That night the ecstatic crowd burned and pillaged everything that belonged to the State.

  It was only in the morning when they had sobered up that someone remembered to count the dead. Government sources reported that six SHIK agents had been murdered, four of them burned alive. The director of the Vlora hospital said that his emergency department had received four dead and twenty wounded. Only one of these had been a SHIK employee, and the others had been protesters.

  Nobody knew for certain how many had died on the bullet-scarred asphalt of the streets of Vlora, and how many of the killed were SHIK agents.

  That afternoon the funerals of three citizens were held. The dead no longer belonged to their families. The armed crowd, most of whom carried a weapon in their hands for the first time in their lives,
took over the organization of the ceremony. During the funeral, one of them fired an automatic rifle and accidentally hit someone in the stomach, killing him. Stray bullets fired into the air during the funeral fell from the sky and wounded four more.

  The cityfell totally into the hands of the rebels. They positioned heavy machine guns in front of the entrance to the university. The State media claimed that the rebellion had followed secret instructions, and that the clearest sign of this was the speed and determination of the attacks on strategic buildings. Radio Tirana repeatedly broadcast an ATA report headlined ‘Terrorist Gangs in Vlora attack Arms Depots and SHIK building.’ The radio also reported that a number of PD members in Vlora had been abducted from their homes and were being held in unknown locations, and claimed that the rebels were militants of the Socialist Party, the former communists.

  Albania claimed that groups of criminals guided by the left- wing opposition were executing people on a ‘death list’ in Vlora, and that representatives of the government, ordinary Vlora policemen, and the city’s intellectuals had been sentenced to death. Allegedly the list was circulating all over Vlora. The terrorists were hunting down everyone on this ‘death list,’ and the SHIK headquarters had been attacked after the terrorists discovered that three of the people on the list were inside.

  The report added that Vlora was without basic foodstuffs such as sugar, rice, and flour, and ordinary people were now the hostages of the city’s terrorists and criminals.

  Chapter XXV

  Doublespeak

  The victory of the guns in Vlora created a nightmare for the Tirana Government. Could Berisha weather these events? The government was on the brink of resignation, with dozens of deaths laid at its door. State institutions had collapsed, Vlora was in total rebellion with fighting in the streets, and the nation faced bankruptcy. Moreover, after what had happened, Albania was split in two, and Berisha’s people didn’t dare set foot in the south. The streets of Gjirokastra, Berat, Fier, and Elbasan, cities dangerously close to the border with Greece, were now seething. Reports came of clashes with the police. Armed men moved along the roads linking these towns, and nobody could tell if they were ordinary bandits or protesters intending to repel any forces sent from Tirana.

  Berisha realized that the time had come to throw Meksi to these hungry crowds, in the hope that would pacify them. He announced Meksi’s dismissal as Prime Minister and a reshuffle of the government.

  Meksi had already sensed that this might happen. A week beforehand, he had threatened: ‘If they force me to resign, I’ll tell all. Everybody should know that I was always against the pyramid schemes.’ The implication of this comment was that Berisha had been responsible, and had failed to act on Meksi’s warnings. But it had no effect. Meksi had been Berisha’s fellow traveller until the previous week, so his threat merely intensified the hostility between the government and the opposition.

  The question now was whether Meksi’s removal could prolong Berisha’s political life and avert disaster, or was it already too late. The majority felt that Meksi’s resignation was not enough. They wanted Berisha’s head.

  U.S. Ambassador Lino spoke out in support of Berisha. First she expressed her condolences to the families of the victims, and then appealed for rational dialogue that would lead to a realistic solution. ‘All sides must show restraint in their words and deeds to reduce the possibility of violence.’ ‘Extremist language and violence have no place in this process.’

  This manner of speaking left scope for both parties to interpret the statement in their own favour, but still ruled out any solution through violence.

  The Forum was not in fact a revolutionary party that permitted violence in pursuit of its goals, and neither was Berisha’s a dictatorial regime that would dare to suppress any opposition with bloodshed. Both sides were following a kind of middle path. The cult of bloodshed still prevailed among the Albanians, who had just emerged from a regime whose leaders had taught them for thirty-five years that power was won through blood and surrendered only through blood. But on the other hand, the propaganda of the last few years had repudiated this communist slogan, in the name of democracy and pluralism. Neither side was prepared to challenge Albania’s Western allies and justify the use of violence. To the north in Serbia too, a protest movement had caused headaches to another dictator, Milošević. Belgrade was buzzing with protests, but Milošević, even though he had gone to war in Bosnia, didn’t dare use violence in his own country. It was only in Africa that a violent revolution was currently taking place. In Zaire, Kabila was marching on the capital Kinshasa, and it looked as if violence would be decisive. Deep down the Albanians envied Kabila, but they were aware that they could not behave like him.

  So both sides perfected their doublespeak. Berisha condemned more and more strongly acts of terrorism supposedly led by the Forum, as intending to destabilize the country. The Forum talked about its determination to find a settlement through the dialogue that Berisha refused.

  Chapter XXVI

  Second Rally

  From Fatos Qorri’s Diary

  1st March

  Despite the heightened tension caused by the events in Vlora, we decided to hold a rally. Ten days before, we had been granted a permit for three o’clock on the field of Ali Demi. The police had issued the permit before the developments in Vlora, but had not dared revoke it.

  I set off on foot alone. As I emerged onto the ring road, several people joined me heading in the same direction. I felt more comfortable in a group. They seemed determined people of few words.

  At the bridge over the river Lana, we met a sight that left us dumbstruck. Here was an entire army: three or four ranks of policemen with shields, body armour, and truncheons. Alongside them were a large number of frightening-looking trucks. We had never seen such monsters. Their wheels alone were the height of a man. These terrifying creatures ,emerging suddenly from their lair greatly disfigured the aspect of our city and posed a definite threat to the lives of the people. In fact, many people who had come as far as the bridge, turned back when they saw these police behemoths blocking the roadway from one bridge across the Lana to the next.

  It was rumoured that the rally had been banned. I was in two minds whether to continue, but my group was determined to go ahead and I went with them, at least to reach the field and see what was happening.

  Apparently the police had been given double-edged orders: to mount a show of force to scare people, but not turn them back. After we crossed the bridge, we noticed that some people were avoiding the main road and making their way to the field through alleys. We went down a back lane but at a bend, just as we were about to come out on the square, some plain-clothes men stood in front of us. They were more frightening than the police, because they were at the same time backed up by the State, yet unaccountable.

  ‘You killed our people in Vlora, we’re not letting you past,’ one of them said.

  His dialect showed he was a northerner from the same district as Berisha, what Tirana people had started to call a ‘Chechen’. We stood hesitating for a while but we didn’t turn back. We turned into a side street between two apartment blocks and emerged on the field itself.

  We were astonished by what we saw. On the way here, we had thought that all these hindrances would have broken people’s will. We expected to find half a dozen individuals, but here in front of us stretched an unending sea of people. The atmosphere was exhilarating, without any of the fear and tension felt in the streets I had passed through. Joining this crowd made one feel safe from any threat of the police. Once again I felt certain that this mass of humanity was the true hero of this story. I made my way through the crowd to the rostrum of the stadium where the other Forum leaders stood. I climbed the steps and as I turned to face the field, I experienced a strange phenomenon. The sun’s rays fell into my eyes and for a moment the strong light and that ocean of people became one. I could not distinguish between them. After a few seconds I discerned the different groups
singing and shouting slogans, the placards they were holding, and the true extent of the crowd, which seemed less containable than ten days ago. Again I felt like a little boat tossing on a stormy sea. Shouts of ‘Hang Sali the dog’ and ‘Out with the scumbag!’ alternated with the songs ‘Vlora, Vlora’, ‘Reach for your guns, boys -- freedom or death’ and then the most thunderous shout of all, ‘To the square! To the square!’ The waves of this sea seemed to swell and break as the crowd called for a final showdown on Scanderbeg Square.

  I have described these people sometimes as a ‘crowd’ and sometimes a ‘mass.’ In fact they were something between the two. A mass recognies its leaders and obeys them. Without leaders it can revert to being a crowd and dissolve into scattered clumps. We were on the cusp, the dividing line between a mass and a crowd, because our authority over these people was minimal, and their respect for us was also slight.

  We had no loudspeakers because the police had turned back the vehicles with sound systems. Without loudspeakers to address this mass of people, and under pressure to attack Scanderbeg Square, it became difficult for us to remain where we were. Finally we managed to divert the crowd’s uncontainable energy into another direction. For these people, Democracy Square at the university campus was a historic site, and an occupation of this square could also be called a victory.

  Reaching Democracy Square meant taking a street with five-storey apartment blocks on each side. This canyon frightened us because in Vlora the SHIK reportedly had thrown stones down on demonstrators from blocks of flats. We had just entered these straits when I heard a gunshot close to me. The mass of people bristled. It was like a shiver passing through the body of an enormous beast. Someone said the shot had been aimed at Neritan Ceka from an apartment block. Another person pointed to a man on a balcony that they thought was the culprit. Some people rushed up to attack him but he escaped to another balcony. He turned out to be the chauffeur of a PD deputy, who had fired into the air to scare us. Seconds later stones were thrown, shattering the windows on his balcony. The crowd’s panic and fury reached a new peak.