The False Apocalypse

by Lubonja, Fatos; Hodgson, John; Hodgson, John

  The director and the correspondent sat down and ordered a coffee.

  Zogaj started to describe the meeting between Berisha and his sworn enemies. Ceka and Berisha had absolved each other of responsibility for the past. Ceka had spoken indulgently and in touching tones. Berisha had been self-critical, Dokle mild-mannered, and Meidani courteous and almost silent.

  Zogaj said that the next day, 6th March, the leaders of ten political parties would meet Berisha and reach a political agreement to solve the crisis. Ceka had promised to bring his people into line. When they stood up to leave the lobby of the Rogner was almost empty.

  ‘Fingers crossed!’ said the director, the correspondent, and Zogaj before they parted.

  ***

  The next afternoon on the 6th of March, Meidani was the first to emerge from the Presidency gates. He refused to make any statement, and looked upset. Paskal Milo came out after him, proclaiming loudly that Berisha had tricked them. Skënder Gjinushi, coming out next, echoed him. Zogaj, blushing, tried to explain.

  After them, the chairman of the Monarchists, a party allied to Berisha, came out with the agreement in his hand. The VoA correspondent grabbed it from him and cast his eye over it: ‘The political parties support the re-establishment of the constitutional order, which guarantees public order throughout the country. They ask their supporters and all citizens to surrender their weapons and ammunition within forty-eight hours, starting from 06.00 hours on 7th March 1997...’ ‘They ask the President of the Republic to pardon all those who surrender weapons during this time, unless they have directly perpetrated crimes. They ask the Defence Council to suspend for forty-eight hours all offensive military operations in areas where they are planned, starting at 06.00 hours on 7th March...’

  The correspondent’s joy knew no bounds. This was Berisha’s victory. He was a great man. He had persuaded his opponents to sign a document asking for the people in the South to surrender their weapons within forty-eight hours, without a word about early elections and with no conditions for the government except that the President would appoint a person who enjoyed as broad a consensus of support as possible. What could be better? The correspondent contacted his Washington studio immediately to arrange a live broadcast. At about a quarter past four, Neritan Ceka emerged from the Presidency building. The correspondent asked him to speak to Voice of America. Ceka agreed with enthusiasm and praised the agreement as historic.

  From the Presidency, the group made its way to the Rogner where journalists and opposition members were gathered, including Qorri, whose face was as black as thunder. Still the correspondent asked him for an interview as one of the three leaders of the Forum for Democracy. But Qorri was in the depths of despair at the treachery, cowardice, insincerity, and double-dealing in this agreement. It left the country in the mire. He couldn’t express all these things in the interview, but he said that the agreement showed contempt for both the Forum, where the parties were committed to making decisions together, and for the people in the South. How could decisions be made while ignoring the people who had risked and sacrificed most in this whole history?

  Qorri was not alone in his anger. More and more people in the Rogner lobby expressed their disgust at the agreement. Journalists of Koha Jonë snorted that Berisha had tricked them. Zogaj became the whipping boy, and his old cover name as a Sigurimi agent, Çiftelia was passed from one indignant group to the next. The disconsolate Zogaj apparently overheard this.

  Meidani and his people, confronted with the resistance of the Socialist militants, were also understood to have repented.

  ***

  That evening a journalist of RAI3 invited Qorri to talk about the agreement in a live broadcast. He had set a meeting at the Italian journalists’ hotel. They went outside as little as possible at that hour. Qorri entered the hotel and was told the journalists were waiting for him on the first-floor terrace.

  On the terrace he saw the cameras positioned on tall supports, with a view of the deserted Scanderbeg Square behind. He went towards them, and saw Tritan Shehu, the PD chairman, whom the journalist invited to speak first. Qorri was not close enough to hear what he said. He looked round in the terrace and into the empty darkness of Tirana and wondered what he himself would say. He would repeat that they were still a long way from the solution they were looking for: early elections and a new government. He would insist, so that the Italians would be aware, that the South had to be represented in its own right.

  At that moment Neritan Ceka arrived, worried that he might be late. He had been invited as a signatory to the agreement and Qorri realized that his own turn as an opponent of it came last. He greeted Ceka coldly but nevertheless drew close to him to hear what he would say after listening to Shehu. He imagined that he would repeat what he had said to VoA, but was surprised to hear Ceka angrily appealing through Italian television to all the Albanians not to trust this agreement, because it was a trick.

  Chapter XXXIV

  From Fatos Qorri’s Diary

  Finally after several days’ absence we all gathered at a meeting of the Forum.

  ‘He’s a cheat. He’s deceived us. We won’t talk to him any more as a party, but only as the Forum,’ Ceka wailed.

  ‘He’s deceived himself, not us,’ added Zogaj, sitting quietly next to him like his shadow.

  Listening to their indignation, I thought that these two genuinely felt to blame for the failure of their enterprise. But I could not tell if they also felt ashamed at having acted secretly behind the Forum’s back.

  Gjinushi and Meidani sat silent at first. When they spoke, they described what had happened as like being drawn into a trap. But if there had been a trap, it was not clear where. Berisha had not forced them to sign. It seemed that the trap was that Ceka and Zogaj had pressed them into entering Berisha’s lair, and there they had been unable to resist his power.

  A livid Kalakulla was determined to point out their treachery to the Forum. They explained that Berisha remained adamant about not meeting with the Forum.

  ‘But now, he will have nobody else to meet except the Forum,’ Ceka repeated. He had prepared a renunciation of the previous day’s declaration.

  We passed round Ceka’s text, which repudiated everything done and said the previous day, but it was purely emotional and without style or ideas. It mostly reflected Ceka’s state of mind. Nobody knows who these people really are or how many different faces they can display. I remembered the Katowice dream. These people are bound by a kind of solidarity that outsiders do not understand, just as I share a feeling with other former prisoners that only people who have been in prison can understand.

  I proposed that the entire meeting with Berisha should not be dismissed, as Ceka’s statement proposed, but that it should be considered a first step, bearing in mind that the international community is calling for dialogue. They immediately accepted this proposal. We drafted a statement that maintained a critical but moderate attitude to the previous day’s meeting, not disowning but downplaying the document that emerged from it. We said that it was only a ‘first step’ towards finding a real solution to the crisis, not a document that would give a sufficient guarantee to the people in the South that the government had pulled back from using violence. We asked for the removal of the State of Emergency and the restoration of rights and freedoms, especially of the press. These freedoms could only have meaning if early, free elections were held.

  In a separate paragraph the Forum protested that the people of the South should not be branded as ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’ and that their fate should not be decided without hearing them speak. The Forum therefore recommended inviting a representative of the political parties of Vlora to the discussion table. We agreed on all the points and signed. We distributed the statement wherever we could.

  In fact, the Forum started to crumble away several days ago. It is now clear to me that some of its leaders have used it as a poker to stoke the fire, useful for a while, but to be set aside when the fire dies
down. They have come back to the Forum because they see it is still necessary. The problem is that it was created precisely because these people had no faith in the parties they represented. When they saw that not even they themselves could be trusted, they scurried back to the Forum at once.

  So many people have been coming to our little office informing us that they have launched branches of the Forum in their workplaces or towns on their own initiative. I have been obliged to tell them that the idea of the Forum was not that it would be turned into a party, because the parties would continue to exist. But seeing people organize voluntarily around a name, I have come to understand better that genuine movements begin when there is a vacuum and a lack of trust. But we are no such movement. These poor people do not understand what a fragile construction of politicians this is, no longer united even by their common hostility to Berisha.

  Chapter XXXV

  The Internationals in Action

  The capital city lost contact with the South. Reports of what was happening there came from people arriving in Tirana, from private Greek television stations, and a few correspondents of the Albanian Telegraphic Agency. ATA was now the only national medium that still functioned. Its reports were increasingly distrusted, though they were news of a sort.

  After the statement of 6th March, all sources, including ATA, reported that the ultimatum to surrender weapons within forty-eight hours had further inflamed the rebellious South. There were no signs anywhere of weapons being handed in.

  In the streets of Vlora there were even more barricades with weapons in combat positions. The population remained shut within their houses and only armed men moved about the city. According to ATA, many Vlora families who were known to be linked to the Democrats had left and sought refuge in Tirana, Elbasan, and other quieter cities. All the shops were shut and there were rumours of a bread shortage.

  In Saranda, hundreds of people, mostly armed, had gathered in the city square, where orators repeated their demands. Armed men still patrolled the city. Armoured vehicles in the hands of the insurgents were moving on the Saranda-Delvina road. Emergency medical teams had been set up at the Saranda hospital, which was also in the insurgents’ hands. A policeman from Vlora was being treated there, handcuffed to the bed.

  No weapons were being surrendered in Tepelena either. Men armed with high-calibre weapons and heavy artillery had taken up key positions, expecting a confrontation.

  In Gjirokastra, a crowd of two or three hundred people gave a hostile reception to a number of army helicopters. ATA claimed they were on a routine mission. The rumours that soldiers from Tirana were coming to occupy the city enraged the townspeople, who attacked the helicopters and forced them away before they could land.

  ***

  While some in the South prepared for war, others were looking for escape routes. The Italian News Agency ANSA reported that a sailing boat with fifty Albanians on board, including fifteen women and eleven children had been stopped twenty-five miles north of Otranto, off the shores of Lecce. A few hours later, RAI reported that the women and children had now been brought to land. They were all friends and relatives of the crew of the ship, who had left Vlora out of fear of the situation there. They told the Italian journalists that many people were planning to escape.

  The Greek Defence Ministry reported that seven Albanian soldiers had sought political asylum in Greece. They would be considered political refugees until the Foreign Ministry and the Public Order Ministry decided if they should be granted asylum status. ATA commented, ‘These are the first Albanian soldiers to seek political asylum in Greece since the rebels first clashed with the Albanian Army at the beginning of this week.’

  The prospect of a new mass exodus of Albanians frightened the internationals. One delegation after another was sent to Tirana to defuse the situation. The public spaces of the Rogner filled with ruddy-faced statesmen in expensive suits, whose pale, well-shaven necks bulged over their shirt collars. Rene van der Linden of the Council of Europe arrived in the capital the day after the agreement of 6th March. He met with Berisha immediately and expressed his satisfaction at the establishment of dialogue and the amnesty in exchange for the surrender of weapons. He announced after the meeting that Berisha has assured him he would appoint a prime minister who enjoyed the broadest possible support.

  So events were turning in Berisha’s favour. He had various options. He started to show magnanimity, leaving the tough work to the chairman of the Parliament, who told the Westerners that despite the imposition of the State of Emergency the government forces had not killed a single rebel and were still asking for the surrender of weapons without bloodshed.

  There was no way the foreigners could know that in fact Berisha and his parliament no longer had an army that obeyed their commands.

  But the person who would lead the foreigners in their decisions would be the former Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitzky, who arrived in Tirana at the head of a large delegation. He spoke in the same tones as his colleagues, but added a demand for Berisha to extend the ceasefire to give people a chance to hand in their weapons. Berisha conceded another forty-eight hours.

  But who would collect these weapons? What institutions enjoyed such trust? Whoever collected the weapons would in fact hold power, and it was a struggle for this power that was going on. Vranitzky thought that a transitional government could do it, stabilizing pubic order and preparing for early elections. The Forum had asked for a transitional government before any weapons had appeared on the scene.

  The idea of a transitional government was gaining ground even though it was not mentioned in the 6th March agreement. Berisha could see that it would be hard for him to oppose this idea, even though it was a way of easing him out of power. He told Vranitzky that the elections could be held within forty-five days if the rebels handed in their arms. He felt that the longer they were postponed, the more difficult it would be to maintain control, because his people were become increasingly discouraged as the days passed. But if the weapons were handed in quickly, he would know what to do in those forty-five days. Of course, he had gained most from Vranitzky’s visit, bearing in mind how close to the abyss he had been: to secure the elections, and enter them as an electable choice, even remaining as president -- this was the maximum that was within his grasp now that the overwhelming majority of Albanians wanted to see him ousted.

  ***

  Qorri was indignant to see that the Westerners did not even think of looking for who was responsible for the country’s tragedy. Their policies were dictated purely by fear that Albania might explode, and their own countries be swamped by emigrants. So they talked about national reconciliation. Berisha had succeeded in touting the myth that the conflict was between the ex-communist South and the anti-communist North, whereas in fact it was merely a conflict between the deceived people and the government, which had not merely failed to protect them from the fraudsters of the pyramids, but had been complicit in fleecing them. Instead of forcing the culprits to face up to their responsibilities under the law, the Westerners were endorsing them, for the sake of their own interests and out of their fear of regional instability. So the Albanian body politic would not be purged, and injustice would be condoned. The Albanians, instead of being helped to grow up, would be kept in the role of obedient children, not mature enough to create a court of law or appear before one.

  This was Qorri’s worry in those days, even though he also felt his reasoning was faulty. It was not the fault of the Westerners. This injustice was taking place because the main culprit, Berisha, was powerful enough to disguise his personal responsibility as a national tragedy. As the internationals saw it, the prospects of holding a fair trial in Albania were poor. It was much more likely that the turmoil would continue. It was less the short-sightedness of the internationals than the weakness of the opposition that led to this conclusion. When Vranitzky arrived in Tirana, there was still a possibility that Berisha would be forced to resign. This could be achieved by making the insu
rgents in the South participants in the dialogue. But the people who had talked to Berisha did not want them to take part, some because the discussions would then slide out of their control, and others because they lacked the courage to enter the unknown territory that the discussions would then enter. So Vranitzky did not even ask to meet the Forum, who themselves again forgot the promise they had made after the debacle of 6th March, that they would go to meetings only as a Forum. Vranitzky confined his attentions to those who had talked to Berisha. When foreign journalists asked Vranitzky about the chances of inducing the ‘third party’, meaning the armed men of the South, to lay down their weapons, he said that some representatives of the opposition had told him they believed that the south would surrender its weapons if a political settlement were achieved. Many people attached no importance to Vranitzky’s reply, because after the repudiation of the statement of 6th March there was an increasing belief that the ‘political settlement’ could not be in the teeth of the South’s opposition. This was the decisive point. Qorri insisted that the Forum should tell Vranitzky that the South would not give up its weapons without Berisha’s resignation because with the imposition of the State Emergency, the South had lost all trust in him. Or at least the Forum should tell him that they could not speak for the South, and the South should be invited to the table, instead of implying that their own decision would be sufficient and acceptable to everyone. The exclusion of the South was the betrayal of a struggle, which, despite the dangerous anarchy it had caused, was in essence a just one, because for the first time in their history the Albanians were showing their rulers that they were able to punish them for the havoc they had caused. This could open a new era and create a new type of politician.

  However, if the South yielded up its weapons, and was left leaderless, did it not mean that this was as much as they deserved, and that they were not capable of creating their own leadership? Qorri was afraid that this second interpretation was closer to the truth. But still, he argued, this did not mean that the Forum had no chance to change this reality. By asking that the south should speak for itself, they would be taking a step towards democracy and breaking the habit of expecting decisions from above.