Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 22:02:06 -0500
Subject: M-G: Wall Street J on Albania


Behind Albania's Chaos

By MARK ALMOND

On Thursday the Albanian government lost control of the Tirana airport and
the port of Durres, prompting its plea that the United Nations Security
Council take up the crisis in the country. This heightened state of
emergency follows two months of rioting after the collapse of pyramid
investment schemes. Naturally, television crews have swarmed into this
scarred Balkan country, but their reporting is based on an unreliable
hack's standby: When you arrive late on a story, pick it up from the
loudest mouth on the scene.

Contrary to the media's characterization, the people rampaging through
Albania's streets and displaying captured Kalashnikovs are not "The People"
who toppled Ferdinand Marcos in Manila or the velvet revolutionaries of
Prague in 1989. Rather, they are driven by an unlikely coalition of
unreformed Communists and the Albanian Mafia that threatens to plunge the
country into civil war.

It's easy for today's jet-setting journalists to make the Draconian state
of emergency their story. No one likes the suspension of the right to
demonstrate, however poorly it's enforced. But it is the police who have
been at the receiving end of the violence. Earlier this month they were
chased out of Vlore, just 40 miles east of the Italian coast. Some media
cast Vlore in the romantic light that 1960s leftists showered on Fidel
Castro's Sierra Madre: the birthplace of a popular uprising against an
unpopular government. But like many who have been to Vlore recently, I must
question that facile assumption.

President Sali Berisha and his supporters are today paying the price for
the disappearance of communism's enforcers. When the heavy hand of an
unrepentant Stalinist regime was lifted in 1992, Vlore, like the rest of
Albania, fell into anarchy. Ironically, many of the uprising's leaders are
former members of the Communist secret police, the Sigurimi. Everything
>from the notorious pyramid investment schemes to drug and people smuggling
flourished as the new democracy in Albania struggled to find its feet.


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Anyone doubting that a Mafia-Marxist linkup can seize power in our
post-Cold War world should remember what happened in the former Soviet
republic of Georgia in 1991.


------------------------------------------------------------------------


After 1992 any kind of state authority was easily decried as a return to
communism--even hypocritically by the former Communists. But contrary to
the claims of Mr. Berisha's left-wing critics in the West, his government
has been too weak in asserting authority, not too strong. The conversion of
Vlore into a smugglers' haven shows that.

Last autumn, emboldened by his Democratic Party's re-election, President
Berisha's government suddenly took firm steps against the Vlore Mafia. It
impounded 100 high-powered speedboats used in the trans-Adriatic smuggling
operations. The Mafia was not pleased, and found allies among Albania's
ex-Communist rulers, the renamed Socialist Party. The link isn't as strange
as it may seem, since many Mafia men once served in the secret police.

<Picture: Media>

The collapse of the pyramid schemes was a godsend to both parties--too good
to be true, some have said, given that the Populli Foundation was offering
60% per month at a time when the pro-government Vefa scheme offered only
8%. Since the Populli Foundation's boss was a member of the opposition
Forum for Democracy, some Albanians suggest that his scheme was intended to
suck pro-government rivals dry before collapsing and leaving the government
to face the mess.

The government's intervention to stop Populli and other groups offering
absurd rates of interest sparked the crisis. Simple-minded Albanians
accused the government of denying them the opportunity to get rich quick.
The Socialist-led opposition backed up such complaints. The mobsters of
Vlore have posed as local Robin Hoods, demanding "the people's money back"
and threatening Mr. Berisha with an early grave if he does not pay up.
Their heavy-caliber weapons, many smuggled from Italy, have been a central
factor in frightening off the local police and enabling Vlore's
Lumpenproletariat to seize Kalashnikovs from the city's police and army
arsenals.

This itself would not threaten Albania's constitutional order. But unlike
elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Albania's communists have difficulty
renouncing their revolution. It was only last August that the Socialists
voted to remove Marxism from their party program. Many of the rank-and-file
Socialists whom I have met did not agree with that decision; the party
congress only carried it as window-dressing after its steering committee
was elected with a clear neo-Stalinist majority.

Last week I spoke by phone with an Albanian student whose family lost money
in the pyramid failures. He feared that they could now lose everything if
the former Communists and their Mafia allies shoot their way back to power.
He had little time for the opposition leader's sweet words about making a
"revolution with flowers not stones." Albanians pay more attention to the
men in dark glasses and fast cars shooting their machine guns in the air,
for they've driven away President Berisha's police.

Anyone doubting that a Mafia-Marxist linkup can seize power in our
post-Cold War world should remember what happened in the former Soviet
republic of Georgia in 1991. Groups like Helsinki Watch and Amnesty
International criticized the new Georgian government for heavy-handed
suppression of its opponents. When the opponents were released they took up
arms and seized power. They were, in fact, the local Mafia. Human-rights
groups and Western governments should be cautious about repeating that
unhappy precedent in Albania. When the mob takes over, human rights groups
will have something serious to protest.


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Mr. Almond teaches Balkan history at Oxford University.


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