BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Beginning next week, the Militant will carry eyewitness coverage from Albania from an international team headed by staff writer Argiris Malapanis.

The revolt in Albania against the procapitalist regime of President Sali Berisha has spread. Government forces have lost control of most of southern Albania. A heterogeneous array of armed rebels - including thousands of workers, peasants, and young people, backed by an increasing number of army units that have joined the insurgency - have extended their hold over about a third of the country.

Beginning March 11, the unrest spread in the northern part of this workers state. Four people died March 13 as insurgents stormed a heavily mined armory in Shkodra - the largest city in the northern half of this Balkan country, 55 miles north of the capital, Tirana. According to the Associated Press, the dead include two military officers. At least 22 people were hurt from mine explosions in that incident. Rebels burned a garrison and stripped three armories of weaponry there.

A showdown also loomed inside Tirana, where gangs, reportedly backing Berisha, took guns from a vacated military academy. The police looked on calmly as the men walked out with AK-47 automatic rifles slung over their shoulders on March 12. Hours later, Albanian state television reported that a group of people had stormed the Yzberitsht barracks in a Tirana suburb and seized weapons, though it was not clear whether they were supporters or opponents of the regime.

According to Greek TV network Antenna, an Olympic Airways plane on its way to Tirana to pick up Greek Ambassador Constantínos Prevedoulákis could not land at the Tirana airport. Albanian authorities said March 13 that the country's main airport is now closed.

With the situation growing more grave for the Berisha administration, which Washington has backed with economic and military aid since 1992, the U.S. State Department announced March 12 it is ordering home more than 160 nonessential U.S. government personnel in Albania. Several European Union governments took similar steps.

At the same time, imperialist powers are hunting for a pretext for direct intervention, aimed at shoring up Berisha or another regime to Washington's liking and eventually restoring capitalism in this workers state through naked military force.

An article in the March 12 Financial Times of London concluded with the following statement: "Western military intervention may be needed to ensure the June elections are carried out fairly and to disarm supporters and opponents of the government, western observers said."

Socialist Party joins new cabinet
On the evening of March 11, Berisha named 35-year-old Bashkim Fino of the opposition Socialist Party as the new prime minister. Fino was mayor of Gjirokastra, one of the rebel-held towns in southern Albania, from 1992 to 1996. A day later the president announced a new caretaker government and said he agreed to new elections by June. The cabinet includes Belul Celal of Berisha's Democratic Party, who was given the post of Interior Minister, and Shekir Vukaj of the SP as Defense Minister.

On March 9, the state-run television announced that its director, Qemal Sakajeva, had resigned. Protesters had demanded he step down because the station had been calling the rebels "terrorists."

In another attempt to quell the revolt, Fino met with rebel leaders in the south on March 12. He acknowledged, however, that it is impossible for now to force rebels to put down their weapons.

Meanwhile, the Albanian parliament declared a general amnesty for all insurgents the same day. According to the law, rebels have until March 20 to turn in their weapons, which insurgents have so far refused to do until Berisha resigns. "I'm keeping my gun until we have a new leader in Tirana," said Kosta Kutzi, a 31-year-old protester in Vlore, the port city in southern Albania that has been the focal point of the rebellion. "There is no way we can trust Berisha."

Acknowledging the value of luring the Socialist Party into salvaging Berisha's presidency, imperialist governments heaped praises on the newly named administration.

Marisa Lino, the U.S. ambassador to Albania, made an appeal on Albanian state television, saying that Washington backed Fino's appointment as prime minister. "Democracy cannot be built from violence," she stated.

"You can't replace somebody with nobody," U.S. Rep. Eliot Angel, a Democrat from New York who specializes on U.S.- Albanian relations, told the Associated Press, referring to Berisha. "At this juncture, I don't see anyone else."

The SP is the former Communist Party, or Albanian Workers Party, which ruled the country until the opening of the 1990s. The former Stalinist regime shattered under the pressure of mass mobilizations for democratic rights and better economic and social conditions. Berisha's Democratic Party came to power in March 1992.

Since then Berisha has implemented measures aimed at a more rapid integration of Albania into the world capitalist market, including loans from the International Monetary Fund and austerity measures such as slashing social services. These "market reforms" fueled a deep economic crisis in one of the poorest countries in Europe.

Both the SP and the Democratic Party represent competing interests among the petty-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois layers that form the ruling bureaucratic caste. This caste has been in power since the degeneration of the Albanian revolution in the late 1940s. At the end of World War II, workers and peasants in Albania defeated the occupying Nazi armies.

Through a popular uprising they installed their own regime, nationalizing the major means of production, carrying out a radical land reform, and instituting a monopoly of foreign trade and economic planning - establishing a workers state by 1946. Despite the subsequent degeneration of the revolution due to the Stalinist misleadership of the Albanian Workers Party, the noncapitalist social relations remain to a large degree in place until today.

Berisha's most recent capitalist venture, promotion of and enrichment from "pyramid schemes," sparked the current rebellion. Over 500,000 Albanians out of a population of 3.2 million invested in these get-rich-quick scams - many selling their houses or land or depositing savings from jobs abroad - which began failing in January, ruining financially hundreds of thousands of workers. Working people are now demanding their money back and the resignation of the president.

Who is leading the revolt?
"We won't rest until there is a new government, and our money is returned," Albert Shyti told a recent rally of 3,000 people at the main square of Vlore.

Shyti, 27, worked in Greece as a laborer, like hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. He returned to his hometown in January to see what was happening with his remittances home that he had deposited in one of the pyramid schemes. But the owners of two of these fraudulent funds based in Vlore, known as Kamberi and Gjallica, had fled to Italy and Turkey, apparently taking the depositors' money with them.

Shyti now heads the citizens council that runs the rebel- held city, where the uprising began after a February 28 gun battle between antigovernment protesters and agents of SHIK, the hated secret police.

Jane Perlez, reporting for the New York Times from Vlore, described this worker as a "nattily dressed man in red shirt and black leather jacket." In an article published March 9, Perlez stated, "Mr. Shyti appeared suddenly as a rebel leader on Friday [March 7], apparently because none of the better known politicians from the political parties wanted to come forward."

"We have been asked to give up our weapons, but until our demands are met we will not," Shyti told an applauding crowd of thousands at the main square of Vlore. The military arm of the citizens council includes army defectors and retired officers and is organizing the defense of this port city of 100,000. An effort by Berisha to send in loyal army troops by helicopter against the insurgents failed when the soldiers ran into the hills after being confronted by armed and angry residents.

Tons of ink has already been consumed by the big-business press to describe the capitalist rulers' contempt for people like Shyti and other workers involved in the rebellion. The March 12 article in the New York Times, by the same reporter, was headlined "Anarchy of thugs menaces Albania."

Here's another diamond from Perlez's collection of "news that's fit to print," as the front-page Times logo goes: "While others were searching for food, the leader of the so- called Committee to Protect Vlore, Albert Shyti, a 27-year- old laborer who drives a new Mercedes with a Kalashnikov in the front passenger seat, enjoyed vermouth on the terrace of a hotel at 10 this morning [March 11]. He was talking with a group of associates about how to divide the spoils of the revolt." Perlez did not offer any quotes from Shyti or his associates to support her claim.

While most reports in the capitalist media describe the rebels as "mobsters," "looters" and "criminal bands," some articles acknowledge that thousands of working people are among those who have taken up arms to bring down Berisha, angry about government collusion in the pyramid fraud. "The same chaotic conditions that enabled Albania's emerging criminal element to flourish also ensured the downfall of honest working people," said an article in the March 11 Washington Post, titled "New world disorder."

"Strangers to capitalism, with no experience with investments or securities, they leaped at the impossibly high profits promised by the pyramid schemes," the article continued, "but did not realize that the schemes would collapse when the pool of new investors dried up."

There is no indication that the rebels are led by any political party or that they are homogeneous politically. In fact, in the northeastern town of Tropoje, about 9,000 people reportedly took over armories in preparation to defend the faltering regime of Berisha, according to AP and the Financial Times. "Political parties apparently are getting out of the game," said Pandeli Mjko, foreign affairs secretary of the Socialist Party. "It's a very grave situation, we don't have contact with our local leaders [in the south]."

In the south, however, the center of the revolt, there is increased cooperation of rebels groups from a number of cities.

Defense councils form coalition
Eight rebel town councils met in Gjirokastra March 12 and formed a "National Front for the Salvation of the People." The coalition demanded Berisha's resignation and said Front representatives must be part of the negotiations in the capital if any political solution is to be found, according to Greek TV network Antenna.

Some of these newly formed councils appear to be well organized. "Saranda already has a leader, a defense council, and a surprisingly effective chain of command," said an article in the March 10 Christian Science Monitor. "Communication and supply channels have been established with the Greek island of Corfu less than two miles away, and there's a ban on careless waste of ammunition." Saranda is another major port city in the south, near the Greek- Albanian border.

"There's a very simple order: no one can shoot unless it is against Berisha's people," said Gjevat Koucia, a retired army colonel who was called upon to organize the defense council. More than 5,000 heavily armed men from the town's population of 25,000 now take turns for security and enforce the self-imposed 10 p.m.-to-dawn curfew. "Vlore, Delvina, and other towns are starting to do now what we did from the beginning," Koucia told the Monitor. "People know that we are organized and ready to fight. We will not attack, but we are not letting anyone near here until Berisha resigns."

Former Albanian army officers who have joined the rebellion are part of defense councils in other cities. "Berisha knows what type of weapons we have. That's why he is scared to attack," said Enver Sadicu, an army lieutenant who stayed in Vlore.

As an increasing number of army units have deserted the government, rebels have been taking control of towns closer and closer to Tirana. In Kucove, for example, 60 miles south of the country's capital, armed local people took over an air base, capturing more than a dozen Chinese-made MIG fighter jets. They were aided by 25 pilots who defected from the air force. Defecting army units have also handed over tanks, heavy weapons and thousands of guns to the rebels.

On March 13, insurgents overtook the armory at the oil refining center of Ballshi, just 50 miles south of Tirana. "Chechnya, Chechnya!" shouted some youth in the area, in identification with the popular and successful struggle for independence of Chechens in Russia. The government's hold on Elbasan, a strategic center on the road to Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, only about 33 miles from the capital, appeared shaky March 11, according to the New York Times.

Hunting pretext for intervention
Meanwhile the imperialist powers, in awe of a mushrooming insurrection, have poised themselves to intervene militarily if they can find the appropriate pretext. Some are courting rebel leaders to see what mileage they can get. Some editorials in the big-business press are also trying to dismiss the rebellion as a ploy of the Socialist Party to regain power.

"There is persuasive evidence that what we are witnessing in Albania is not the popular uprising that broadcast reports have described, but instead an underhanded strategy of the Albanian Socialist Party that has so far been astonishingly successful," said an editorial in the March 11 Wall Street Journal. "And claims that Albanians have lost faith in free market capitalism are right out of the Socialist playbook," the editors of the financial daily quipped.

The Italian press reported that eight rebel leaders met with Rome's ambassador to Tirana, Paolo Forresti, aboard the Italian warship San Giorgio in the Adriatic just off the port of Vlore recently. A subsequent Italian government statement said the rebels "undertook to favor the immediate handing back of weapons in the hands of the citizens of Vlore and to ensure public order and progressively restore normal administration to the town." Italian authorities reportedly tried to lure the rebels to give in by offering "humanitarian aid" to a city that already faces food and other shortages.

Rebel leaders, however, quickly denied that any such deal had been struck. They said they simply tried to see if they could secure some food and other needed supplies for the city's residents.

U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, visiting U.S. troops at NATO bases in Italy, said Rome and Washington are "prepared to work together to help resolve that situation," referring to the revolt in Albania.

An article in the March 12 Washington Post said that anonymous diplomats from "western countries" are increasingly saying that "an international force of some kind would likely have to coordinate the recovery of weapons."  
 
 
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