CURFEW IN TIRANA

AIM Titana, 2 April, 1997

The watch shows 19.00 h, and while inside the room one hears the famous announcement of the BBC news program in Albanian, the first shots can be heard outside. "London speaking, we are beginning the evening news program in Albanian language". Ra-ta-ta-ta, ra-ta. Now there is not a single pedestrian in the streets of Tirana any more. The BBC has the largest audience in the world in the Albanian capital.

Nowadays, even the office in charge of censorship in Tirana listens to the news from London. This office has nothing else to do. Only one newspaper is published in Tirana, Rilindja Demokratike, journal of the Democratic Party in power, which now seems as if it were not in power. The other journals are not published at all. They have refused to be published under conditions of censorship, but even if it were abolished, God only knows when printing could begin again. Journalists feel threatened.

The lack of newspapers is replaced by rumours or some kind of oral journalism, something that resemles folklore more than journalism. In Tirana nothing and everything is true at the same time. The Rogner Hotel which used to be something like a meeting-place of journalists, where they came to hear or tell each other news, is closed for them since "unidentified persons" physically attacked the manager of the largest daily in the country. When a few days before that, some other persons, not as unidentified, threatened to set Rogner on fire, and even the American Embassy, nobody had taken them seriously. However, when the place mockingly called "Austrian land", that is the territory of Rogner, turned into a place where one could get beaten up, management of the hotel decided to shut it down.

The BBC reports that another meeting about the Albanian crisis is being held in Europe. "To go to Albania or not to go, that is the question". The telephone rings and a friend ironically says: "How many more meetings will be held in order to reach the decision about soldiers who will protect 2-3 million ECUs of aid". "It seems to me that they have spent twice as much money only for hotel expenses and airplane tickets", I reply: "But, it's their money. It's nobody's fault but ours".

Radio London informs about the situation in Kosovo, while shooting in the suburbs of Tirana evidently intensify. In fact, the same thing happens every evening, as soon as the curfew begins. Later on they quiet down. Police car sirens can be heard and heavy rumble of armoured vehicles which are mostly demonstrating that the state still exists, at least in Tirana. People have already got used to this ritual and it seems that they are not impressed by it any more. Usually, armoured vehicles run between police cars. However, last week, in the streets of Tirana, few citizens witnessed an almost absurd, but unforgettable scene.

A line of about six cars was moving along the main square of Tirana, in a deafening noise of sirens. Everybody thought that an urgent case from the central hospital was being transported or that they were small police jeeps. In fact, it was neither one nor the other, but just a line of wedding guests. More precisely, they were six mercedes-benz cars. The seventh was a tank on a regular patrol at noon. A wedding at the time of armoured vehicles, as Garcia Marqes would say.

In Tirana nobody invites guests for supper because it is simply impossible to do it. Restaurants, cafes, and even hotels close their doors after 19.00 hours, and even a little before. Discotheques have become a luxury which cannot even be imagined. Time has come when everyone speaks only about flour, visas for travelling to Italy and Greece, about prices of Kalasnykov machine-guns or automatic Simonov carbines.

In the meantime, news began on Albanian Television. Berisha, tired and crushed, meets the Prime Minister who is returning from Rome. Is that really Berisha or is it his shadow? The head of SHIKA who has at least ten times been said to have submitted his resignation, speaks about a big conspiracy against Albania planned by foreign secret services, and only later it turns out that they are Greek chauvinist circles. A certain plan called Lotos is mentioned, which was written in 1990 and which was aimed at secession of the southern part of Albania or Vorio Epeiros, as the Greeks like to call it. The solemn tone of deputies who are accusing America and Greece, is broken by one deputy who ironically says that "for the sake of the truth it should be said that the enemy had given us five years, and even aid for reforms, army, secret police". Another deputy, not completely accidentally, reminds of surprisingly similar situations when Enver Hoxha was revealing conspiracies of foreign and domestic enemies.

Nevertheless, the evening passes. If one has a telephone at home, it is possible to learn another piece of news or two. Eighteen persons were killed in Fiero after a conflict provoked by a gang of criminals. The whole village attacked the gang which had killed the village elder and with a whole arsenal of arms, shells, and even mortars, destroyed it completely. In the meantime, from the other side of the Adriatic a deeply moving news arrive: an Albanian ship, one of those which are not fit even to be in a museum, loaded with almost 100 refugees, sank in the Adriatic after a wrong manoeuvre of an Italian patrol boat which had demanded from the Albanian ship to turn back. The news begins with the information that 36 persons were saved, so as to avoid saying immediately that 64 have remained on the bottom of the sea. Indeed, just as the day before Miss Irena Pivetti, former chairman of Italiam parliament, had wished when on the pages of journal Il Tempo she demanded that Albanian refugees be sunk under the sea. Perhaps that was to be a reward for what the Albanian peasants had done 50 years ago for Musillini's soldiers, when instead of throwing them into the sea they hid them in their homes to save them from being killed by their former German allies and after the war saw them off to the other side of the Adriatic with tears in their eyes.

It is getting late, but one can still try to read. Ismail Kadare's book called "The Evil Year" is fashionable, which has not been read by anyone as a sad futuristic book, but as a historical work which is after all symbolic. Nevertheless, a friend recommends me to read Albert Camus's "The Plague" again. Does not it seem that Tirana and Oran have something in common: closed cities. I do not know why I prefer Bucati's "Tartar Desert". I increasingly remind myself of lieutenant Dogo who is at the window of his home waiting and waiting.

AIM Tirana Arjana LEKA