The False Apocalypse Read online

  FATOS LUBONJA

  THE FALSE APOCALYPSE

  FOREWORD

  By Andrew Gumbel

  For a while, in the mid-1990s, Albania was as fascinating and tragic a place as anywhere on the planet. Imagine a jail break, only on an unimaginably large scale. Three million people had broken free from decades of repression, poverty and near-total isolation under the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha and his successor, Ramiz Alia, and they were in a frenzy to make up for lost time. Certainly, they yearned for an open society, a market economy, democratic institutions – everything that could propel them closer to the living standards of their European neighbours. But they were also impatient for more immediate satisfactions, to bring in a “boatload of money” as one Albanian friend of mine liked to say, and live like kings for a change.

  The pent-up creative energy was palpable. Many Albanians were street-smart and worldly. Some had acquired first-class educations, supplementing the politically tainted rigours of their formal schooling with smuggled books, tapes, contraband television signals – whatever could help them break through the artificial walls erected around them. Poverty felt like a needless aberration they could overcome now with just their wits and sheer force of will. After the nightmare of Stalinist totalitarianism, of labor camps, prison cells and an omnipresent fear, what new challenge could possibly stump them? They had natural resources, a temperate climate, a beautiful coastline and a population hungry for self-improvement. Decades of enforced collectivism made the lure of individual action irresistible. If they had to lie, cheat, steal, betray and trample over each other to get what they wanted, then so be it. Wasn’t that the way of the world? The Albania that emerged from the communist era thus became a teeming laboratory of illusions fostered and dashed, of optimism and abiding suspicion, of staggering ingenuity and monstrous corruption. When I first visited, as an eager and wide-eyed young reporter in the spring of 1995, I found it all exhilarating and oddly endearing. Tirana, the capital, was a maze of crumbling buildings and rutted streets filled with garbage and broken concrete where wild dogs prowled at night. Yet it was also covered in satellite dishes and “kiosks”, makeshift structures erected on street corners and in public parks in imitation of Italian terrace cafes, where you could order peach schnapps at eight in the morning, conduct business, meet friends and, if you so chose, linger late at night, at a piano bar without a functioning piano, and dance to Bulgarian bootlegs of Careless Whisper and other western hits.

  There were the disjointed signs of progress: a spanking new Coca- Cola bottling plant, a luxury hilltop restaurant financed by Kuwaitis, a picket-fence neighbourhood near the U.S. Embassy with perfect lawns and red-flagged mailboxes. And then there was the giant hole in the centre of town, the legacy of a Kosovo Albanian investor who had promised a luxury high-rise hotel, driven around in a white Rolls Royce raising millions of dollars and absconded with the lot.

  Tirana at that time was a city where everyone was living beyond their means. Everyone had an angle, a scam to pull, a bribe they were willing to pay, a corner they were happy to cut. There were fewer than ten miles of smoothly paved road in the entire country, yet the streets were choking with Mercedes and BMWs, many of them stolen in Italy or Greece with the connivance of organized criminals and sold for a few hundred dollars on the beach outside Durres, a short drive from Tirana. The country’s biggest brickworks produced exactly twenty perfect bricks a year – the twenty it was obliged to submit for official certification – and sold the rest to gullible foreign investors who invariably had to throw them away and start again. Government contractors paid such large kick-backs to maintain the dangerously low-slung telephone wires, or to repair the street drains, that they could no longer afford their own work materials. A few days or weeks later, they’d be bidding on the same job all over again when their jerry-rigged solution broke down at the first hurdle.

  To the outside world, curiously, this looked like an acceptably slapdash path to progress, in line with other former communist countries in Eastern Europe muddling their way towards free-market capitalism and an open society. In 1994, the World Bank dared to imagine Albania as a “small haven of peace and economic growth” – dependent for the moment on foreign aid and remittances from Albanians living abroad to keep its economy afloat, but heading emphatically in the right direction. Sali Berisha, the charismatic Albanian president who presented himself as a strident anti-Communist, won praise for his determination to purge the country of sinister remnants of the past and for accepting the economic “shock therapy” prescribed by the IMF. In certain conservative circles he was hailed as “the last Thatcherite”.

  In truth, the European powers and the United States weren’t paying nearly enough attention. Their priority was to prevent the violent collapse of Yugoslavia from causing further shockwaves across the Balkans, and the only thing they really wanted from Berisha’s government was a promise not to stir up ethnic Albanian tensions in Kosovo and Macedonia. Berisha gave them that promise. They failed to notice, or more likely chose not to care, that Berisha, far from throwing off the mantle of Enver Hoxha’s authoritarianism, was busy donning his own version of it. Soon after cementing his grip on power in a convincing election victory in 1992, he purged his party of anyone who challenged his authority, including many of his closest allies; he imprisoned the leader of the Socialist opposition, Fatos Nano, on corruption charges after a bogus trial; and he turned the secret police, known as SHIK, into his own political enforcement bureau.

  The economic growth the international community found so promising was built less on Thatcherite free market ideology - not even the banks were private - than on Albania’s involvement in criminal rackets. According to multiple observers in the intelligence and law enforcement worlds, the country was smuggling guns and oil into the former Yugoslavia in defiance of United Nations sanctions and allowing the transshipment of heroin and other illegal drugs to Western Europe. Berisha’s Democratic Party was directly implicated in sanctions-busting through its ownership of the country’s oil distributor, Shqiponja. Many of the rackets were said to involve members of SHIK, along with at least two senior government ministers. The government was also closely tied to the country’s largest private company, VEFA, which held a stake in a wide variety of economic pursuits: supermarkets, chicken farms, publishing, financial services and, according to intelligence sources, international arms trafficking.

  The political climate became ever more stifling in the run-up to elections held in May 1996. Berisha wheeled in one European dignitary after another to burnish his democratic credentials. Even as a car bomb detonated outside a VEFA supermarket in Tirana, Berisha pinned the blame on his political adversaries, without any actual evidence, and the police swooped on Albania’s leading opposition newspaper and detained the entire staff for an afternoon. On election day, ballot-stuffing by Democratic Party officials was so widespread and so blatant that some districts reported 100 per cent turnout and a 100 per cent vote for the party even as people stood in long lines still hoping to cast their ballots. Some of the vote totals were later adjusted to make the theft a little less glaring. But the opposition parties pulled out of the election anyway, saying the climate of intimidation and foul play was overwhelming and there was no prospect of a fair outcome.

  At a massive demonstration in Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square the next day, the police moved in with batons to bludgeon protesters without provocation and haul several prominent opposition figures off to jail. They did this within full view of visiting dignitaries holed up at the Tirana International Hotel, only some of whom seemed to think anything was seriously amiss. The election-monitoring arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe issu
ed a critical report, but it was not critical enough for a group of monitors from Norway and Britain who felt compelled to issue their own, much more scathing dissident statement. No European government challenged the legitimacy of the vote; a number of commentators were willing to point fingers at the same shadowy subversives and diehard communists cited by Berisha as the real threat to social order. Only the United States expressed real displeasure, but opinion in the U.S. embassy was split between a pro-Berisha ambassador and more critical voices on her staff. Comically, one of those who shouted loudest in the Albanian government’s defence was a British conservative activist, Anthony Daniels, who was himself picked up by the police in Skanderbeg Square - an understandable mistake, he said - and continued to make excuses as he was thrown into the back of a car next to the opposition’s leading economist and showered with baton blows en route to his holding cell.

  Many Albanians were furious at the international community’s failure to raise a stink about the theft of their fledgling democracy. While the Americans were growing markedly more impatient, the calculus in other western capitals didn’t change: as long as Berisha provided what they wanted, they were prepared to give him more or less free rein. What nobody yet realized was that the stolen election was a prelude to a far more serious crisis.

  Hajdin Sejdia, the Kosovo Albanian who had promised a high-rise hotel in central Tirana, didn’t just bilk a bunch of investors. His fund-raising scam was, in effect, Albania’s first pyramid investment scheme – a promise to deliver big, all the better to rake in more cash to steal. Other pyramids soon followed. Some were started by prominent small-town businessmen who had the trust of the local population, others by large companies like VEFA, with political connections and the clout, it was said, to tap into the revenue streams of Greek and Italian gangsters. It was hard to know with any precision what the financial basis of the schemes was, or how they managed to pay out interest rates of 6 percent per month and rising. Folklore and crowd-pleasing stunts took the place of hard information. One scheme in the port city of Vlora sponsored a beauty contest. Another, in Lushnje, lured a former Argentian World Cup star, Mario Kempes, to coach the local football team. Yet another scheme, in Tirana, purported to be the rags-to-riches brainchild of a gypsy shoe factory worker, known just by her first name, Sudja, who bought out her company when it was about to go under by convincing small investors to place their faith in her and hand over their life savings.

  Albanians didn’t necessarily believe such colourful stories, but they entrusted their money to the schemes all the same, on the basis that they enjoyed government backing. The rumours about them being money-laundering facilities for organised crime made them, if anything, more attractive. If the mafiosi of Sicily, or Naples or Bari were pouring in their drug money, or if – as one elaborate theory had it – the schemes were financing illicit oil exports to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, why shouldn’t Albanians reap the benefits?

  Until the stolen election of 1996, the pyramid schemes were Albania’s dirty little secret, barely discussed in public and certainly not advertised to visiting foreigners. Afterwards, they became Berisha’s biggest political raison d’être. “Vote Berisha and everyone profits!” read a poster widely distributed around Tirana - by VEFA, in its capacity as a billboard publisher - ahead of local elections in October 1996. For a short time, everyone did just that. Imports starting flooding into the country; businesses expanded; the housing market took off; there was a mini construction boom. VEFA ran an advertisement showing a man walking into one of its supermarkets with one bag of money and walking back out with four. Even Hajdin Sejdia made an unexpected return and started paying off the investors he’d cheated years earlier – by investing his own money in other pyramid schemes. Edi Rama, an artist and outspoken opponent of Berisha’s who would later launch his own political career, observed bitterly that the president had fed Albanians the illusion that they could be rich without being free.

  The end came swiftly, first with the lifting of UN sanctions on Yugoslavia in October 1996 and then, as that revenue stream dried up, in a few desperate weeks from December 1996 to January 1997. Sudja raised her interest rate to a staggering 100 per cent a month, only to announce from the balcony of her dilapidated apartment building in Tirana shortly afterwards that the game was up. The other schemes quickly followed her into insolvency. Rrapush Xhaferri, the most prominent businessman in Lushnje, a small town 30 miles south of Tirana, was arrested as the last of the millions he’d collected from his friends and neighbours dwindled to nothing. The two policemen charged with the arrest shared a nervous last cigarette before clapping him in handcuffs, because they knew they’d never see their life savings again. Bereft of everything, the town rose up in revolt, and when Berisha’s right hand man, the Democratic Party president Tritan Shehu, arrived to denounce the protesters as members of a “terrorist-Stalinist clan” - his idea of restoring order - he was hit over the head with a tire iron, held hostage for several hours in the Lushnje football stadium and, so the story goes, symbolically silenced with a leek stuffed in his mouth.

  Soon, the entire country was in turmoil, and Berisha’s government increasingly resorted to intimidation and force to try to bottle up people’s fury. In Lushnje, revenge for Shehu’s treatment took the form of special policemen in hoods bursting into people’s homes at three in the morning and rounding up suspected trouble-makers. In Berat, 20 miles further south, suspected anti-government subversives were crammed into a single room in the burned-out police station and beaten. In Tirana, Edi Rama was approached by members of SHIK, the secret police, late at night and pummeled with knuckle-dusters. A leading opposition politician, Ndre Legisi, was pulled out of his car and beaten so badly it was feared for a time he’d suffered permanent brain damage.

  The fury, however, could not be contained. By early February, Vlora was in flames, and the crisis had claimed its first death. Over the next month, the south of the country slipped from the government’s grip entirely as bands of young men looted police and army weapons depots and chased hapless officials away with Kalashnikovs. In Kucove, rebels seized a fleet of MiG fighters from a military airport. In Saranda, near the Greek border, they seized a warship. Tirana fell under near-martial law, with a strict curfew and a stifling presence of paramilitary police. The death toll rose into the hundreds. From any perspective, this was a living nightmare: the country was being ripped apart, piece by piece, and it seemed nothing could stop the momentum toward total destruction.

  This is the terrifying story Fatos Lubonja tells in The False Apocalypse. Lubonja is perhaps the closest thing Albania has to an intellectual conscience: a former political prisoner, publisher, writer and activist who has never been afraid to offer his frank opinions, even in the depths of the Enver Hoxha years, and certainly does not hesitate to denounce Berisha in these pages as a man cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Hoxha – a dictator at heart with only the rhetoric of a democrat.

  Lubonja captures the brooding, nervy mood in Tirana that took hold as the crisis deepened in those first few months of 1997 - the hastily convened meetings, the calls to action, the abiding fear of government thugs bursting in at any moment and arresting, maiming or killing people; the frantic attempt to understand what was happening before all was lost entirely. His narrative illuminates the desperation of Europe’s least known country in its hour of greatest need. And it makes clear that Albania is, in all senses, a small place, where everyone knows each other and almost every relationship has a history tainted by mistrust and fear stemming back to the Hoxha era. The civil conflict that erupted in 1997 could not help but have a peculiarly fratricidal edge. The slights and losses were deeply personal, as was the lust for revenge.

  And yet Albania did not tumble into the abyss, not entirely. The collapse of the pyramid schemes was a jolting wake-up call, a realization that people could not spend their lives simply buying coffee, whisky and Mercedes, as one Tirana lawyer put it to me at the time. Some Albanians continued to fri
tter away their days in video bingo parlors, but most of the country redirected its overwhelming bitterness and anger towards the government, and towards Berisha in particular. The rebels’ message was crystal clear. As long as Berisha remained in power, the country would continue to burn.

  The western powers understood this with painful slowness. For months after the stolen election of May 1996 and even after the pyramid schemes had collapsed, I had diplomats lecturing me on the virtues of continuity in a time of a crisis. In mid-March, that philosophy came to fruition in the form of a government of national unity, in which Berisha remained as president and a colourless middle-ranking Socialist, Bashkim Fino, took over as prime minister. Having tried and failed to retake the south by force, Berisha appeared to think he could outmaneuver his new rival and use the unity government as a cover to restore his diminished authority. But he was deluding himself, and the rioting only intensified.

  By this point, the south was not so much the stronghold of an organized rebellion as an embodiment of complete anarchy. Young men high on raki and marijuana drove around in stolen cars at high speed and unleashed automatic weapon rounds like they were Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris in one of the action movies reliably broadcast by Italy’s Canale 5 and consumed avidly across the Adriatic. In the north, meanwhile, Berisha had authorised the opening of weapons depots to his own loyalists. In the absence of some providential outside intervention, bloodshed beckoned on a massive scale.

  Two outsiders made the essential moves towards a resolution. The first was the former Austrian chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, who arrived as the OSCE’s special representative and convinced Berisha that he could not resolve the crisis through force alone. And the second was Italy’s prime minister, Romano Prodi, who largely sidelined his own ambassador in Tirana, Paolo Foresti, who had been Berisha’s biggest champion, and organized an ad hoc United Nations force to pacify the country. Both men then pressed Berisha to agree to new elections. The gambit worked: the violence subsided, new elections took place at the end of June with remarkable smoothness, the Socialists swept to power and Berisha, understanding that the eyes of the world were on him, stepped aside with barely a murmur.