RTSH in defense of Janullatos P. 4

Parliament rejects the request of 13 parties PD to the Assembly: Say no. The People’s Assembly has told 13 parties “no” on the electoral law. In the joint request of the electoral parties, the first article stated that Parliament should examine the draft electoral law by 20 January. But this week too, the deputies will continue their democratic holiday. This was confirmed yesterday by the deputy speaker of the Assembly, Shaqir Vukaj. Meanwhile, the Press Office, with its interim head Koçi, is unable to provide any information. Speaker Arbnori himself came to work yesterday for the first time in ’96, returning from Russia, to continue the parliamentary routine. Apparently, his agenda for this week does not include a presidium meeting that would set the work program for January. January was the deadline that Arbnori had specifically promised the other members of the Presidium at its last meeting for resolving the issue of the electoral law. But later events became more complicated. While the opposition was demanding legislative debate on its proposal, the PD and the Government were preparing another draft. The head of the PD parliamentary group said then in “Republika” that their draft law would be submitted to Parliament within January. But that is not being confirmed. From the Ministry of Justice, which gives the final signature on the Government’s draft laws, Braca states that even within a month this ministry does not expect such a draft from the Kosovars of local government, in whose office the next electoral draft law is being prepared. Meanwhile, the PD was the only party that did not sign the parties’ declaration. Shehu stated at the 9 January round table that he had to consult the highest levels on this matter. After three days, which was also the deadline for signing, he did not place his signature under the declaration. “We do not agree with many of the points of that declaration,” explains the PB leader for not signing; “we are still discussing, and by the end of the month we will give our opinion on the electoral law, in the form of the Government’s draft law.” So the Assembly’s wait and its “No,” whose majority belongs precisely to Shehu’s party. Aurel Simoni

Meisi

We could be left with fingers in our mouths P. 5

The former head of the Internal Affairs Branch in Ersekë in handcuffs Arrests begin in the list headed by R. Alia The border killings in 1989-91 have produced a third accused, after the arrest of two soldiers in December 1995. The Kukës Court has arrested 50-year-old Kadri Ibaj from the city of Kukës, who in 1989-90 was head of the Internal Affairs Branch in Ersekë. Complaints against the former head of the Internal Affairs Branch were filed in the town of Ersekë by 10 families who had lost their children at the border, and it was established that the deaths had occurred while Ibaj held the senior post. After these complaints, the prosecutor’s office in Ersekë issued an arrest order for him, and on 14 January 1996 he was arrested. Along with Ibaj, 34 other people are also accused in the list, starting with former president Ramiz Alia; former interior minister Hekuran Isai; and 34 other officials in senior posts in the border service. Complaints have been filed against all the district officials, and the parliamentary committee on Defence and SHIK gave the green light to the Prosecutor’s Office to indict these former officials, who are responsible for carrying out Ramiz Alia’s order to kill around 40 young people along the border with Greece. Ma. Be.

The Democratic Party even further to the left! The process of socialization of the Democratic Party definitively shows its irreversible character. After a continuous, public refining of naïfs and calculators in the distribution of votes through declarations about the social character of the PD’s policy, about the social state and the interests of the little people, the PD’s latest national council definitively sealed its neck-burning. Even if we did not believe that such a political psychology is a remnant of a political past for its leaders, at best we would say that everything is being done to win the electorate’s votes. Perhaps pressured by the false idea that poor peoples naturally move toward the left, and by the fixed notion that this practice led to socialist victories in Eastern countries, the PD is abandoning what its policy has long been striking: the right-wing spectrum of the Albanian political universe, aiming at the uneducated. To fight the socialists with their own weapons is more than a paradox. Not only because they know how to use these weapons effectively against adversaries who do not obey them, but also because it has now become customary for such ideas to be called left-wing ideas and to be believed more when they come from the left. It is up to the PD to decide whether it will settle into the position of the center-right or cross the boundary that separates that position from the center-left, sterilizing the PS toward its extreme. But it is not within its competence to deny the existence of the right by turning its attacks against it into a frontal assault. Because if the electorate were to believe that, after the PD’s obvious positioning in left-wing waters, the PD-PS struggle has no real character beyond the rhetoric of the parliamentary group, then the PD’s attacks on right-wing ideas in Parliament are a genuine attempt to eliminate it. Whether this people needs the conservative right-wing alternative to radical capitalism, as expressed in the PR’s program, or the left-wing alternative of the social market economy, brought into the market of political ideas by the PS, the end will tell, and from the PD this cannot be a topic for another article. What is politically clear is that these two assumptions are fixed, that the PD is increasing the contingent of left-wing forces entering the campaign, moving even further away from the base of its ’92 voters, who no longer identify it at 75%—and not even at 50%, according to journalistic test percentages. G. C.