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Comment: Berisha’s Year of Blunders Already Cost Albania Dear

02 11 2006  

Leader’s final attempt to make a mark on history is close to ending in disaster.


By Erion Veliaj in Tirana (Balkan Insight, 2 Nov 06)

After roughly eight years in opposition, one failed coup and hundreds of thousands US dollars’ worth of American consultants, Sali Berisha returned to office as prime minister of Albania in July 2005.

By then, Albania’s economy had enjoyed a boom for five years and independent institutions were growing in strength.

One year into his new government, the economy has stalled and independent bodies have suffered one blow after another.

Building on the past tactics of resorting to personalised politics, Berisha started with an attack on the Mayor of Tirana, Edi Rama, who doubles as the new head of the opposition Socialist Party.

Berisha launched a campaign aimed at stripping local authorities of municipal powers and transferring the competences to central government. This includes areas such as building permits, zoning arrangements and public works.

Berisha has also sparked conflict with the civil service, the independent media, the judiciary, academia, private business and now, finally, with the president.

EU agencies and the World Bank have all voiced worries over the prime minister’s stated plans to “clean up” the public administration, ostensibly to reduce corruption.

This has been seen firstly as a waste of the investments of foreign donors who had picked up all the capacity-training bills for new civil servants over several years.

Secondly, it is imposing a major financial burden on the government, which is having to pay compensation packages to all those who have since won appeals to be readmitted to the public administration.

Independent television stations and newspapers that have tried to probe these issues have suffered harassment in the form of threats that they will be expelled from their premises or closed by the financial police.

The government has again politicised the once balanced Broadcasting Council and has taken full control of public television networks.

As a result, many leading journalists and writers have joined Civic Action, a coalition of NGOs and journalists united in protest against the increasing climate of authoritarianism in the media.

The failed attempt by Berisha to dismiss the prosecutor-general has increased tension in politics. Lacking firm arguments, Berisha resorted to trying to pressurise President Alfred Moisiu in what has become known as “Albatrosgate” - the biggest scandal in Albania’s modern history.

The name refers to the government’s decision to close down Albatros airline, which the president’s nephews owned, in order to increase pressure on the head of state to agree to dismiss the prosecutor-general.

With international support, President Moisiu has decided not to comply. Having lost several battles on this front, Berisha is now trying to divert attention from his public humiliation by claiming that judges, the media, civil society and the president himself are “all in bed with the mafia”.

The ministry of economy, meanwhile, merely shrugs at the fall in GDP growth and growing number of unemployed. Berisha’s tactics of publicly intimidating businesses who go to court rather than comply with his zealous tax officers have also not proved successful.

Putting police cars at the front door of every brewery and hampering the movements of ships owned by government-unfriendly businesses have proved counter-productive.

Even the glossy initiative to attract foreign investment, named “Albania for One Euro”, has been widely discredited as a speculative venture arranged for the benefit of Berisha’s party. It has yet to draw in any serious investors.

Growing discontent over the water shortage this summer, electricity failures last winter, the purging of the National Academy of Science and the attempt to exert control over universities and even book publishers will most likely be reflected in next year’s local elections.

However, scandals over falsified birth certificates - and the government’s insistence on holding the polls in mid-winter’s freezing weather - do not bode well for free and fair elections.

Indeed, Berisha has a record of presiding over troubled elections. The last ones he managed in 1996 produced an outcome in his favour of well over 80 per cent of the vote - only later to be dubbed the most flowed elections in post-communist Europe.

Berisha’s international allies are now few, and with the recent defeat of the conservatives in Austria, he lost one of the last. His decision to support the US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon has not won him any favours from the American authorities in Tirana.

At home, repeated attempts to break the law have corrupted the very notion of an anti-corruption campaign. It all leaves Berisha in a dire situation.

As his last attempt to make his mark on history nears failure, Albania stands at a crossroads. Fortunately, it is not the same country that it was in the mid-1990s and will recover.

Erion Veliaj is executive director of activist group Mjaft (Enough). Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.