As Qorri had read somewhere, the most perverse turns of events cannot be foreseen but are the product of coincidences.
Chapter XXXIX
An Alarmed Priest
Tirana appeared calmer on the day after the agreement. On his way to the Forum’s offices, Qorri was struck by the greater numbers in the streets. He headed for the Forum out of habit. He knew that nothing would happen there. Nobody had declared the Forum’s mission complete, but opposition politics had now shifted to the headquarters of the parties that had signed the agreement. Even those who were against, like Kalakulla, had gone back to their own party bases. Kurt Kola had resumed his struggle to repossess the Association’s headquarters.
There was nobody in Gjinushi’s office. He and Milo were now spending more time at the Socialist Party offices.
Qorri walked along the corridor of the wing of this bird which looked ever less likely to fly. The phone rang in the Forum’s office. A BBC correspondent wanted an interview about the agreement. Qorri made an appointment for a few hours later, and fired up the computer with the idea of setting down his objections to the agreement, which seethed in his brain. The program had still not loaded onto the screen when a knock came on the door. Clearly whoever it was would not enter uninvited.
‘Come in,’ he said.
The door opened and he saw a stranger, looking very shaken.
‘What’s happened?’ Qorri asked.
‘Good morning,’ the person said in a quiet voice, not to be overheard.
‘Who are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m a citizen of Tirana.’
‘And what are you worried about?’
‘I don’t know if you’ve been told, but some people in my neighbourhood, SHIK agents or PD people, are handing out guns.’
Qorri was speechless.
‘That’s all I have to say. I’ll go now,’ the man said, obviously frightened. He hadn’t even mentioned which neighbourhood.
Qorri started phoning people he knew. He tried Kurt, but there was no reply. Soon a second person arrived. This man was much more outspoken, declaring in a loud voice that weapons had been handed out at PD headquarters and at the United Officers School. He mentioned the names of the deputies of Berisha’s party who were organizing the distribution.
‘And you sit down to discuss reconciliation with these criminals,’ he said, and stalked off.
Qorri had not foreseen anything like this. He had thought that the double- game would continue, with on one hand a supposed dialogue to form a new Government of National Reconciliation, and on the other hand intrigue and treachery. But this duplicity was an unexpected move by Berisha, his last and most desperate and dangerous one.
Qorri met the BBC correspondent and asked if he knew anything about such reports. The correspondent said he had no information, but believed that these reports could be true. Qorri could not mention these things in an interview, because the sources were unconfirmed, but he spoke out even more angrily against the agreement. It would not work, even in the short term, let alone stand the test of history. The agreement asked for weapons to be surrendered within a week, but still more people were arming themselves: The politicians, from their behaviour at the discussion table, were not to be trusted. History would not call this step an act of national reconciliation, because the Albanian people were not divided among themselves.
***
That evening the State television carried a news item that looked very peculiar to those who did not know what was happening.
The television cameras had gone to a village near Kukës in the North and filmed a crowd of people storming two arms depots and stripping them of their contents. The screen showed people brandishing Kalashnikovs, gleeful at having secured such trophies and full of the elation of battle.
This was a strange report because there had been no protests in the North over the losses in the pyramids, nor police reprisals and threats. What need did these people have to attack the arms depots? Why was this happening? How did the television crews happen to be there?
It wasn’t hard to understand that this incident had been staged.
***
The next day, a Catholic priest from the village of Bushat near Shkodra was trying to find a foreign journalist. He got a man to stand by the main highway to flag down cars coming from Tirana and ask any who stopped if they had a foreign journalist with them. Few people were daring to drive to Shkodra these days. Finally an old Mercedes stopped and a German journalist with his Albanian fixer and a photographer got out. The man took them to the church.
The priest told them that he had certain information that the army had orders from Tirana to leave the arms depots open. They shouldn’t ask him about his source, but should take it on trust. The order was first to supply PD members with weapons in an orderly fashion, and then to leave the arsenals open for anybody.
‘What do you think the purpose of this operation is?’ the journalist asked.
The priest said that the people in the North were agitating to be armed to counterbalance the south. The PD militants had to be ready for any eventuality. As for the others, perhaps they did not intend to send these people into battle against the South, but merely create the impression that Berisha too had his supporters. But armed men of any kind were totally unpredictable. The priest therefore begged the journalist to warn the world that a catastrophe was imminent in his country.
As the priest spoke, gunshots and explosions were audible in the distance. In Shkodra and its surrounding villages and in Lezha further south, the arms depots were being opened.
***
The arsenals in the North were looted one after another. In Berisha’s birthplace of Tropoja not only Kalashnikovs but artillery and heavy munitions were taken. The army put up no resistance. The State television cameras were there too. The armed men were not heard to shout slogans against the South, but the unspoken message of these scenes was clear.
The shots into the northern sky continued all night. Many people were killed and wounded from random firing. The attacks were organized to give an impression of spontaneity. Wherever people gathered, at petrol stations, shops, or in the centre of villages, rumours were spread that at a given time there would be an attack on a certain depot. This was enough for people to head towards it. At the appointed time they would gather outside the depot, and rush in without meeting any resistance.
From the North, this operation moved to the middle of the country. Chaos spread from one town to the next, fuelled by rumours that were carefully planted and impossible to control. The military depots at Burrel were attacked and looted. The mob there also stormed a VEFA branch and the private warehouse of a hotel owner. The looting lasted several hours while armed men ran through the town, firing into the air.
In the little town of Gramsh the crowds set fire to the police station, attacked the arsenal and State reserves, plundering all they could.
A little further east in Prrenjas, close to the Macedonian border, armed crowds looted a tobacco factory that contained several million dollars’ worth of tobacco. After stealing what they could, even the doors and bathroom fittings, they set it on fire.
In Elbasan too the crowds stormed the military depots and took everything they found: grenades, mines, and artillery shells. Then the tumult finally reached Korça, a city famous for its high culture. Groups of armed men attacked all the arms depots round the city. A military division with its vehicles and a military hospital with its ambulances were looted. So were the State reserves of flour and foodstuffs in the outskirts, a supermarket, and the education authority.
Then the city’s electricity supply was cut off and the population was left in total darkness. The noise of tanks and armoured vehicles in the streets at first terrified the inhabitants until they realised they were being used to transport plunder.
Many children took part in the attacks on the arms depots. They had no idea how to use weapons and no conception of their danger, and there were many tragi
c accidents. Some depots exploded, blowing up the looters too. The explosions in tunnels used as depots were the most lethal.
A hundred people died and many hundreds were wounded on this first chaotic day. But this disorder spread beyond what the imagination could conceive.
Chapter XL
From Fatos Qorri’s Diary
Tirana, 11th March 1997
Yesterday afternoon I gave an interview for the BBC that was broadcast in the evening. I spoke against the agreement of 9th March. No more than half an hour later, I saw on the State television news Perikli Teta, the number three in the Democratic Alliance, appearing before the cameras with a rather odd expression. He looked as if he had been forcibly summoned to the television studios. He held a sheet of paper in his hand, from which he read a declaration by the three parties of the Forum that had signed the agreement, saying that from this time on any statement against the agreement was not a statement of the Forum, or at least not of these three parties. They fully stood by the agreement, which fulfilled the main demands for which the Forum was created.
This was clearly a response to my interview. It meant that the Forum now had to be dissolved, or nobody would be able to say anything that the three parties did not agree to. But I was astonished at the speed of the reaction.
This was why a meeting of the Forum was called today. Everybody came.
Teta, looking both smug and guilty, produced the statement and read it out, as if to show it meant no harm.
It soon came out that this statement had been drafted hastily under pressure from Berisha, who, after hearing my interview, had accused the parties of first signing the agreement and then using the Forum to repudiate it. I said that my interview was my own and not a statement by the Forum and that I couldn’t say things I didn’t think. Also, in my interview I had dissociated myself from these people, not spoken in co-ordination with them.
They told me that I inevitably represented the Forum of which they were also a part.
‘But the Forum also has other parties,’ Kalakulla interrupted.
They said that the demands for which the Forum was created had been met. I told them that the demands had changed as the situation had evolved. For instance, the Forum had not at the beginning asked for Berisha’s resignation, but after all that happened this had become a fundamental demand. Kurt reminded them that only two days ago they had said that they would only go to Berisha to speak as a Forum. Daut Gumeni added that they had signed a statement prepared by Berisha, to which they had been unable to change a comma, let alone stand up for the people in the South.
At one point in this exchange, Paskal Milo butted in and said that I had announced in the Rogner, ‘These people have always been rubbish, and always will be.’ Silence fell for a moment, which was interrupted by Kalakulla, who shouted:
‘He’s right. You’re turncoats, cowards, and double-crossers. You’ve gone back on what you said only two days ago.’
Deep down they know that they’ve committed an act of weakness. They know that the agreement has caused more disorder than it has settled, and that the South has rejected the agreement, while Berisha has distributed weapons and opened the depots in Tirana and the North. They therefore feel that they still need the Forum just as Berisha needs armed men in the North.
The spat ended with a compromise statement. The Forum considered the 9th March agreement to be a step forward out of the crisis into which Sali Berisha had plunged the country, but it also had reservations. The Forum agreed to say that representatives of the insurgents should also have been invited to the table. This demand was also in the declaration of 7th March that they had approved, but at the meeting with Berisha two days later it was forgotten. I’m sure they will forget it again.
We also added that we had serious reservations about calling the new government one of ‘national reconciliation’ because there is no conflict among the people. There is a conflict between the government and the people and it makes no sense to talk about reconciliation in a conflict of this kind.
‘A compromise is a good umbrella but a poor roof.’ We have an extraordinary ability to unfurl umbrellas like this, often because we are unable to face a storm with courage. But we also have to survive in this little society where everyone knows everyone else, as if we were all related. It seems that neither the law nor justice nor the truth can function in a society like this because our familial relationships distort all these things. A person does something disgraceful and then gives you a smile in your regular café, and you grin back because you know his brother, because he once did you a favour, or because he’s a friend of your friends. The prison guard who beat you comes up and embraces you as if he were your big brother who thrashed you when you were little, because he was told to do so by his father who is your grandfather’s friend. Your father dies in peace because you are obliged to respect him as your father but also because you behave exactly as he did. This is a society without genuine communication; people do not face up to other people or to themselves, but behave according to a code in which all that counts is who wins, who cheats, and who loses. That is how these people behaved in the agreement with Berisha, and how they are behaving now. They say one thing and do the opposite. They did not for instance say a word about Italian Foreign Minister Dini, who met several of them at Foresti’s residence before he left on 9th March. No doubt they promised him different things to what they signed today. This cannot even be called compromise, because a compromise may be a healthy thing when it is reached by two honest sides that genuinely communicate with one another. This is duplicity elevated to a principle of survival. This is pure irresponsibility.
I said these things to them just as plainly as I am writing them, but then went on to sign double-dealing documents with them. We are all products of this culture of survival at all costs, which became our second nature under communism.
Chapter XLI
Bullets in Tirana
At dawn on 12th March, Tirana finally erupted, like some forest finally engulfed by surrounding flames. Volleys of gunshots were heard from all sides, sometimes obscured by the dreadful detonations of shells or mines.
Huge crowds of people ran to the arms depots, both above and below ground. The depot in the Kombinat neighbourhood, one of the capital’s largest, was emptied in a few hours. Children were loaded up like mules with weapons of every kind: Kalashnikovs, rifles, pistols, machine guns, hand grenades, mines, bullets, shells. The same scene was enacted at Brar on the opposite side of the city. The soldiers guarding the depots had left the gates open.
After all these depots were emptied the crowds stormed the food reserves. Nobody stopped them from entering, and they loaded sacks of flour and wheat onto cars, bicycles, and old carts or even carried them away on their backs.
Nobody knows how, but while this was going on the gaols were opened and all the prisoners released. The simplest explanation was that the guards were no longer able to do their duty. Within a few hours nothing was left that resembled a State, neither an army nor a police force, but only armed groups, mostly teenagers and young men, who wandered the streets of Tirana with guns in their hands.
The shops and offices all closed and the banks stored their deposits in safe places. The gunfire was continual, with barely a second between one rattle of automatic rifle fire and the next. Handguns and artillery were fired in a senseless orgy of shooting in the hills round Tirana, in the outskirts, and in the streets of the centre. Nobody had expected this. The toll of casualties rose fast.
The city hospital reported that the morgue could no longer hold the dead, and the doctors could not cope with the numbers injured by stray bullets falling from the sky. One of the city’s best-known cardiologists appeared on television almost in tears and appealed for an end to the shooting,
Immediately after National Reconciliation, the Albanian state crumbled to dust.
***
On 13th March, the day after Tirana exploded, Qorri, Petrit Kalakulla, Kurt Kola, Daut Gume
ni and a group of others not included in the agreement met in the Forum’s office in the head of the bird, which to Qorri now seemed to have been killed. They had to act, but how? They felt powerless to do anything but draft an appeal, dissociating themselves from any responsibility for what was happening.
It did not take long to prepare a text. They pointed out that the situation was precipitating towards total chaos by the hour, and appealed to people not to turn the arms they had seized against one other. Citizens’ committees, where they existed, should preserve the peace and protect cultural assets.
They then noted down the points that distinguished them most from the signatories of the agreement.
‘Considering that the main culprit for the creation of this situation is Sali Berisha, and that calls for his resignation are growing louder from all sides, even from the international community, the Forum insists that he must leave politics as soon as possible.
‘His office must be replaced by a presidential council until elections. The basis of the new government should be extended, turning it into a Government of National Salvation that will also have the support of the insurgents.
‘The work of the Government of National Salvation must be supported by a political panel to include, besides the parties in the agreement, a broad representation of the Forum and the insurgents.
‘The Forum welcomes every form of sincere assistance from abroad to bring the country out of its present situation, but opposes any intervention that would affect its territorial integrity.’
At the end they noted that the Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party had not taken part in this meeting.
There was now nowhere the Forum could send its statements because the newspapers had shut down. Only foreign radio stations were operating. For the Forum only the BBC was left. Qorri phoned its Albanian correspondent, who said he was very busy and told him to bring the statement to his office. Kalakulla carried it to him and the correspondent said he would try to include it in his broadcast, but could not promise to do so because of the pressure of events.
The False Apocalypse Page 20