The Yugoslav ambassador has promised her he will pay her when he returns Since March 1999, she has been throwing bones and bread to the residents of the Yugoslav Embassy page 10

BY FRROK ÇUPI A few days ago, as we were trying to transcribe an interview received by ATSH from Kukës, where an explosive device had just detonated at the city's water-supply system, the phone rang. A journalist from the northern European countries spoke to me so hurriedly that he seemed to be short of breath: - What are you doing over there, my friend? Don't you see that you're losing Kukës! The journalist's urgent call, and especially the loaded words “you're losing Kukës,” shook me; it seemed to me that he, too, had been so heavily influenced by Balkanism. But his alarm was about something else, as he explained a little later. The news about the bombing of Kukës's water supply had spread far and wide from there before it reached the ears of Tirana. Some people, especially those in the running for the “Nobel Peace Prize,” were looking this way towards Kukës in amazement (perhaps not with hope), wondering how nothing bad was happening “in that Albanian city.” And then it happened: the explosion at the water-supply system. According to my colleague, quite a few Nobel candidates were shaken and had exclaimed hopefully, for their own sake: “Look at Kukës; a city that destroys its own life with explosives cannot be a Nobel Peace Prize city.” So that is what happened. After this, the question of the “Nobel Peace Prize” for Kukës is at a frightening crossroads. Someone might say that “those who planted the explosives are just a handful of people, six at most; while Kukës, which welcomed that biblical exodus of Kosovars, is something else, it is the greater whole.” Yes, of course, that is true too; but who can say it isn't also as the Peace Prize hopefuls around the world say?!... What if exactly the same is said about all of Albania immediately after the October elections end? If Peace does not win our elections, then this much is certain: the developed world will say that Albanians are incapable of establishing the civic and state principles of the century in which we live. Behind the election door, no one is waiting with a Nobel Prize; rather, the entire international community is waiting to take us into its fold as neighbours with whom it can coexist, or to leave us on the far side of the stream. (Continued on page 9)

Minister of Public Order, Spartak Poçi, showing the strength of his arms in establishing law and order. photo: P. LLO

“I want to hear his claims about irregularities and manipulation in the electoral process” The Prime Minister issues a public invitation to the opposition leader page 4

He argued with his classmate over the desk seat Police arrive at the scene and arrest the protagonists page 13