SUSPICIOUS ARREST OF RAMIZ ALIA
Ultimately, the press campaign for the arrest of Ramiz Alia materialized on Saturday, but with a not insignificant flaw.
Ramiz Alia was not taken to a cell. He was placed under house arrest. Once again, it was proved that the demands and predictions of the press have no small influence on the decisions of government and those in power. In any case, the decision to arrest the former president—which, in all honesty, must be called a political act—also roused the predictors to enthusiasm, with their three-part predictions. It also disappointed those who had been informed about the day of the execution, the manner of execution, and the wording of the indictment.
Yesterday, in the early hours of September, two journalists from the Albanian Telegraphic Agency and an AFP correspondent, having been informed, as they said, of the arrest, waited until late evening beneath the former president’s balcony. The same thing was done the following day by two Associated Press correspondents, but, unfortunately for all of them, the decision was carried out on Saturday. What was decided between Thursday and Saturday, and what was understood over those extra days by Ramiz Alia or by those who had his arrest in their hands, is evident and as clear as daylight. A very internal, even mysterious mechanism was what imposed the delay and ultimately, after two tense days, determined the manner of execution, which constitutes the second element of the procedure. Thus, what must have been considered the most convenient formula for satisfying all interested parties, including Ramiz Alia himself, was devised: house arrest.
The third unforeseen element was the official justification given for the arrest. According to Albanian television, which broadcast the indictment, Ramiz Alia was placed under house arrest for embezzlement and abuse of office—a very imprecise and wholly unexpected accusation even to the current leaders of the PD, who had systematically called for the former president to be punished for genocide during local election rallies. Nevertheless, the authors of this accusation have proved to be as amorphous as they are opportunistic about the future, since the phrase “abuse of office” could tomorrow, depending on pressure from below, from the top, and from the right, very easily be converted into a bona fide political accusation.
While the aforementioned mechanism was at work, Ramiz Alia wrote and published, on the very day of his arrest, an article entitled “Why Is My Arrest Being Sought?” The fact that its publication coincided with the day of the arrest was not accidental and demonstrates not so much his intuition as something he must have known thanks to that mechanism. In the article cited, the former president appears deeply threatened and cynical. He himself dismisses and is not very afraid of the charge of economic embezzlement, to which he has devoted less than a quarter of the article. He refers pointedly to the party in power, its clans and its divisions, but at precisely this point he is contradictory and gives away the mechanism of which he himself seems to be a cog. By accusing the two leaders of the PD, specifically the Jogists and Ballists, as well as those expelled from that party, he leaves in the shadows the faction that actually has his arrest in its hands. In other words, he is more afraid of those who want his head than of those who currently have the power to take it. He fears the shouting crowd more than the executioner who kills.
He says verbatim: “One side attacks the other, calling it hostile, and the other, in order to refute this accusation, demands that R. Alia go to trial, while denouncing the other side for allegedly preventing this.” If this statement is not a slip, it is a threat—but certainly not against the Jogists, because, as Alia himself indicates, they are the real ones demanding his arrest. His threat is explicit at the end of the article, when he writes: “I cannot remain silent and not say everything that I consider necessary.”
In fact, the split in the PD, as the former president also writes, brought the decision forward, because the stance toward him undermined or increased the credibility of each side. Ramiz Alia also mentions the Eastern phenomenon, which likewise brought the arrest closer in time and space, because Albanians have found that they have often translated the political solutions of the East as their own. There is, however, another certain reason, linked to some extent with the first but nevertheless more personal, which has seriously contributed to accelerating the decision: recent attempts to run the connection between former Communist president Alia and Democratic president Berisha through a new filter of facts. Another reason—at least the fourth, though not the last among those known so far—is that Ramiz Alia, until now the “blockman” among blockmen, whose means of buying his freedom up to this point are unknown, in fact signed his own arrest order back in December 1991, when he accepted the alternative of imprisoning his former colleagues from the Party of Labor. But just as that compromise boomeranged on Ramiz Alia, so too may—and will—the half-hearted and dubious decision to place him under house arrest boomerang on today’s authorities. Political opponents will prove nimble enough to use it to undermine official policy.
BEN BLUSHI