Albania's cappuccino coup.

• Author: Sunley, Johnathan
• Position: Ex-communists' victory in June 1997 election

'Oh, I know all about the Albanians', cried a lady; 'they are those funny people with pink eyes and white hair.' But the Albanian is not so quickly explainable; and of all the Balkan peoples he is least known to the English.

- Edith Durham in The Burden of the Balkans

To people only glancingly familiar with it, Albania is the country that put the a's into Ruritania. With its all-too-familiar pretensions to antiquity, a language that appears to have remembered its p's and q's but not many other letters, and an interwar ruler - King Zog - who can be considered the last word in eccentric, self-styled (and in his case self-appointed) Balkan monarchs, it is perhaps understandable that even educated audiences tend to think of Albanians in terms of the outlandishly dressed impostors in Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte.

Having to live down such a reputation has not helped Albania to be taken seriously during the political crisis that has swept over it this past year. Most reports have stuck to variations on the following formula: impoverished people (divided into two main irreconcilable tribes) become even more impoverished as a result of ruler's fecklessness, and revert to ancient custom of shooting wildly at anything that moves until both tribes are pacified by an outside force as bewildered as everyone else. Throw in a few references to the country's bizarre communist-era dictator, Enver Hoxha, its half million concrete bunkers that look like a set from a 1950s science fiction film, plus (as a particularly exotic touch) a group of lifelong virgins in the north who dress and behave like men, and you have the makings of a hilarious 5-minute or 500-word "Letter from Tirana."

Unfortunately for Western interests in this region, not to mention those of the Albanians themselves, some rather more serious-minded people have taken advantage of this approach to advance an agenda that is far from amusing. The Albanian ex-communists' victory in the June 1997 election, applauded by their fellow-traveling friends in the West on the one hand and actively assisted by their not-so-naive in-country allies on the other, represents a startling success for a coalition of interests that is sure to gain strength and momentum from this coup. Today, Albania; tomorrow, other European countries sleepwalking their way to self-destruction.

Democracy Derailed?

The story starts in May 1996. Visiting the country for the first time in five years, there was little doubt in my mind that the Democratic Party (DP), the anti-communist movement that had taken office in 1992 following the final collapse of the one-party system, would be returned to power in that month's elections. The reason was general prosperity.

Back in 1991, Albania looked like a land suffering the effects of a nuclear winter. People wearing charity handouts stood around abjectly, waiting for something to do. A shop was an iron grill in a wall, through which something might occasionally be shoved, and utilities barely functioned. By the spring of 1996, by contrast, Albania had the appearance of an energetically developing country trying to yank itself out of poverty and desperation by its own bootstraps: on the make, yes, but still definitely on the up. The capital, Tirana, was a chaotic, round-the-clock building site, choking with traffic. Businesses, shops, hotels, and cafes had sprung up, and there was no mistaking the restored dignity and morale in a people whose existence under communism had been close to serfdom.

Though the DP could not take all the credit for this transformation, it had certainly done more for the country than the opposition Socialist Party (SP), the leader of which - Fatos Nano - was still in prison, having been convicted of misappropriating aid from Italy during a spell as premier in the twilight years of the communist system. Polls showed the Democrats headed for victory and this was obviously also the assumption of the Socialists, who responded to early returns on election day that confirmed their unpopularity by walking out of polling stations and refusing to recognize the result.

The Socialist Party's allegations of intimidation and fraud were vague and not very convincing to observers of other elections in the former Eastern Bloc who had witnessed genuine examples of multiple-voting and count-rigging. They were enough, however, for the body charged with verifying the outcome, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (giving the horrendous acronym OSCEODIHR). Its debriefing session the next day was dominated by a sequence of earnest Scandinavians taking the floor to remonstrate about the "atmosphere of coercion" they claimed to have sensed. One British observer (now a Liberal Democrat MP) went further, telling the Daily Telegraph, "In no other country have I seen the ruling party using the machinery of state and police like I saw here."

While such a statement probably says more about this individual's limited experience (and grammar) than anything else, there was a less innocent explanation for the vehement protestations of other OSCE-accredited observers. A letter sent before the election by the Norwegian Labor Party's youth organization, on behalf of nine of these election-watchers, asked the Socialists for assistance in the form of transport and interpreters for "the comrades who are coming." This request gave the SP a perfect opportunity to organize for the sake of their impressionable young Scandinavian friends the kinds of violent incidents mysteriously unrecorded by anyone else. Once picked up and recycled by the international media, reports of these staged clashes then provided the sP with the excuse they needed for pulling out of the election and rejecting the legitimacy of the newly elected parliament.

In fact, the DP won a modest 56 percent of the vote, down from their 62 percent four years earlier. The Albanian electoral system being predominantly first-past-the-post, this gave them 87 percent of seats in parliament - a figure deliberately confused with the party's share of the vote by commentators keen to assert a blatant cooking of the books (for example, Alex Standish's "Albanian Adventures" in the Summer issue of The Salisbury Review).

The DP's real misjudgment at this stage came when the interior minister banned the Socialists from holding a protest rally in Tirana's main square. In full view of the Western journalists and observers gathered for their usual pre-lunch drinks on the terrace of the Tirana International Hotel, police dispersed a few hundred demonstrators using batons and tear gas. More than the appalling brutality of the communist system itself, more than its legacy of deprivation and fear, this turned the stomach of an "international community" worried about missing their flights home, and thus destroyed the DP's reputation in their eyes once and for all.

A Dutch observer caught in the melee (who had obviously lived a sheltered existence in his own country) told the New York Times, "I have never seen the totalitarian face like this, people being beaten, cameras taken." "Democracy Betrayed in Albania", shrilled the headline in the next day's issue of London's Independent, while the Guardian expostulated, "Albania Faces New Tyranny." Increasingly, these media attacks concentrated on the country's president, Sali Berisha, the tone being set by an article in that week's...