In the long Albanian transition from communism to... I don't know where, but even here where we are, the most difficult year was undoubtedly 1997.
Written by: Ruben Avxhiu
Hundreds of thousands of families lost their life savings in so-called pyramid schemes. Many had sold their homes, land, livestock, and inherited wealth, believing in promises of quick riches. The disappointment was so shocking that it sparked an even greater collective madness, this time accompanied by a cruel and cynical violence that spared nothing.
In much of the country, the state ceased to exist. Mobs of enraged people even attacked military bases to seize weapons and ammunition. More than a million Kalashnikovs were in the hands of civilians. A tank was parked on a side street with a “For Sale” sign hanging from the barrel. Gangs of armed teenagers terrorized the population. Hundreds were killed accidentally by bullets fired into the air, a daily pastime.
The population was at risk of starvation, the neighbors were nervous. Only a short time after the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region was again a headache for Europeans. NATO and the EU were ready to intervene to help with financial aid and food distribution, but first they wanted a national political consensus that would give permission to intervene.
The problem was that, as never before, the parties were locked in their political bunkers. The Democrats, led by President Sali Berisha, believed that the Socialists and the opposition were behind the violence and destruction that was taking place in the south. They were communists who could not come to power except through revolution. The Socialists and their allies saw Berisha as a dictator and accused the Democrats of having stolen the May 1996 elections by excluding them from the political system. With 90% of the parliament in their hands, let them now eat the soup they had cooked themselves.
Meanwhile, chaos was approaching Tirana. The country seemed poised for civil war. Hunger and fear prevailed in a place where the streets were no longer safe.
However, there was still one place in Albania where figures from different wings of politics, mainly journalists, still met. This was the Rogner Hotel. Opened two years earlier in 1995, as an investment from Austria, it served as a small island of civilization where it was still normal to sit and have a coffee with a political opponent you couldn’t catch alive anywhere else in the country.
Foreign journalists and diplomats also landed there, in search of the day's news, the latest gossip, to learn about a scandal, or to quench their thirst along with their curiosity.
Right there on a day in March 1997, two names in journalism, Preç Zogaj, poet and one of the expelled founders of the Democratic Party, now part of the Democratic Alliance, and Shpëtim Nazarko, publisher of the independent newspaper "Dita", pulled aside Mero Bazen, the biting columnist who at the time was reporting for "Voice of America" and after him Ylli Rakipi, publisher of the newspaper "Albania", where the author of this article worked as an editor.
Baze and Rakipi were known as among the rare people who could influence Berisha. (Ironically, today the relationships have been reversed, and Baze is even one of his fiercest opponents.)
The reason for the conversation was that Neritan Ceka, an archaeologist and former DP figure, now one of the leaders of the Alliance, had requested to meet with Berisha to break the ice, but was not receiving a response. Could they intervene to make the meeting possible?
In his memoirs “Intuitions of the Transition”, Zogaj tells how Rakipi took over and in the evening informed him that the President was ready to receive him along with Ceka. But he had asked that the socialists also come. The opposition had extended a hand, now Berisha was extending his. Zogaj writes how in the car of another newspaper publisher of the time, Aleksandër Frangaj, he had gone to the homes of Rexhep Meidani and Namik Dokle, even though it was the time when the families sat down for dinner. Both welcomed the invitation.
The next evening, Zogaj, Ceka, Meidani and Dokle appeared at the door of the Presidency where they were thoroughly searched by the guards, full of suspicion. Berisha welcomed them by shaking hands. With a frown on his face – he too was under great pressure. The conversation did not start immediately, but it was the meeting that finally established the channels of communication. After some not easy exchanges, they agreed on a roundtable of political parties the next morning. The turn had begun.
From there, Zogaj rushed to Rogneri, which is strategically located even today between the Prime Minister's Office and the Presidency on the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. As Fred Abrahams recounts in his book "Modern Albania," Zogaj found Mero Bazen there and told him about the meeting. "Albania was saved," he told him.
In fact, more difficult days would follow, and chaos would even grip Tirana for 2-3 days. But in the end, the process was crowned with a government of national salvation. There were no satisfied parties in that agreement. But this is the nature of political compromises. Many democrats were disappointed that the agreement seemed to them to somehow legitimize gang violence. But there were also protests from the left. The Forum for Democracy, an umbrella movement of activists that had taken up the banner of protests against the government, led by Fatos Lubonja, Kurt Kola and Daut Gumeni, denounced the agreement as betraying the revolt of the people robbed and deceived by pyramid usury. Some criticized it as a way out for Sali Berisha. But, beyond moralizing attitudes, the country was in desperate need of a political solution. Normalization of life would come slowly.
The elections that year returned the Socialists to power. Fatos Nano, imprisoned for corruption, found himself prime minister. Berisha and the PD, now in opposition, denounced the voting conditions that produced the “Kalashnikov parliament.” Albania stabilized enough to hold hundreds of thousands of Albanians expelled from Kosovo and served as a base for NATO operations in 1999. In 2005, the Democrats returned to power. Berisha became prime minister and in his first term, Albania became a member of NATO. Over the course of a decade, from one party to another, the country had recovered, democracy had functioned, the economy had stabilized. It was all evidence that the political agreement of March 1997 had been the right choice. The alternative could have been civil war, total chaos, the destruction of Albania.
This summer, as Rogner celebrated its 30th anniversary, the hotel remains a pleasant, conciliatory oasis in a capital of unresolved political grievances, where green spaces are under constant attack from a building mania that resembles a forgotten usury mania. The political scene also has a party that completely dominates both central and local government, but which, along with its triumph, risks full responsibility in the event of another major crisis. Despite extreme inequality, Albanians are much richer than they were then, less idealistic, and more cynical, but just as reluctant to learn from their history.
Every day, in the garden in front of the hotel, on the other side of the Boulevard, crowds of tourists regularly stop to visit a bunker, where the next tour guide talks to them about the history of Albania, about communism and changes. Beyond the symbolism, nothing concrete has happened in that bunker. Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, it is the place where at a historical crossroads, some Albanians found the right word, at the right time, starting the process of reconciliation, which, at least for a generation, saved Albania.
edition
t7 live
