p. 7

When the great Ernest Hemingway wrote this sentence fifty years ago, despite his brilliant intuition, he did not foresee that over the years it would become a proverbial question for entire generations. Nevertheless, its warning message against every sense of fatalism and belief in the future of peoples has been translated into dozens of languages of the Euro-world. The same is true in Albanian, albeit censored and with considerable delay. But why are the bells ringing today? Almost instinctively, this question compels you to say it, giving the interrogative tone a striking emphasis: Why are the bells ringing? We are all living through a time of such questions, when the moving sirens of alarms sound more and more in our streets, in the morning, at noon, at midnight, before [unclear]. We are all living in modern times, when bells have now turned into sirens, sounding urgently and in alarm. Semantically, a siren is explained as a source of high-level noise that warns of something abnormal. In Albanian usage, on the threshold of 2000, a siren means: a murder by “rival gangs,” a funeral procession accompanying personalities and “authorities,” a foreign delegation that visits us, sometimes in a flash as it did 20 years ago (rare visits by high-ranking and well-known dignitaries?), from Albania to [unclear]. Indeed, lately foreign sirens are hardly seen at all, and local ones are sounding less often; in short, a siren in Albania warns of a crime... We, the people, the citizens, experience them in different contexts, without realizing that in this way we only add to the noise of those ominous bell-sirens and alarms. Why are the bells-sirens really ringing? The bells ring for those who have ears. They ring for those who have eyes. They ring so that we do not keep stepping every day over garbage and refuse, holes and puddles. The bells ring to announce that human patience and civic endurance must come to an end; they ring so that the wave of crime that has covered this country may end; they ring to remind us that this is the consequence of an old bill, the fifty-year bill for crimes against humanity. The bells ring to warn that the rule of justice-deprived, seven-times-[unclear] rulers must end, rulers one dares not approach because they put their hands in your pockets. They ring so that we remember to honor the many, and stop calling thieves and traffickers all sorts of things for the sake of “some,” “someone,” or “somebody.” The bells ring to remind us all to see and honor the trampled dignity of the state, so that the citizen [and] the state’s [unclear], so that in general the STATE gives [unclear] (a word not written entirely in capital letters), a fault from which nobody can escape. The bells ring to shake us up: the next century must be approached differently, because for everyone it will be called the DIFFERENT Century: without hatred, without resentment, without filthy and deceitful politicians. The bells ring for a new tradition, in a “DIFFERENT” Albania. That is why the BELLS ring!

p. 2

p. 4

. The laws of the Albanian jungle p. 6. Politicians’ intimacies. Berisha’s “daily routine” p. 20

POETRY by Borges and Vyshka; SHORT STORIES by Sakja, Zeqiri and Bogdani; GRAPHICS by Medi Belortaja