-SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC, MR SALI BERISHA, AT THE SPORTS PALACE IN KORÇË- First, I would like to express my great pleasure and gratitude for the warm welcome you have given me. I would also like to greet you, the people of Zvezde, and all the farmers of Albania, who through their toil, sweat and honest work have transformed the face of the Albanian agricultural landscape and of Albania. Everyone who comes to Albania—friends and well-wishers of Albania—praises with great respect the work and immense services you have rendered to the land. I have great faith that very soon you will turn Albania into a bride. You have indeed worked your land beautifully; you are rapidly filling your homes with livestock and abundance, but you are the majority of the population, and therefore the improvement in your situation is a great pleasure for us all. The more you have, the more prosperous Albania will become. Through your work and sacrifices you show that you fully deserve this respect and esteem. Within a year you have gained the land you deserve and the freedom to work, because now you work for yourselves and your own homes. This has restored to you responsibility for your work, without which there can be no quality in work. We are very pleased by the rapid changes you have achieved. This is so, first of all, because you have undoubtedly been the poorest and most suffering part of Albanian society. I say that collectivization, the final stage of the process of total nationalization, was undoubtedly one of the most barbaric acts a regime has committed against a people. It also transformed the Albanian village into a kind of semi-military labor camp, where people often worked only for their daily bread. It is true that the practice of that time claimed to give priority to agriculture, but that priority consisted of the genuine enslavement of the farmer, his labor, his time and his sweat. There are countless cases of people being weakened by partial starvation. Your toil, sweat, energy and resources were invested in Enver Hoxha’s luxurious and super-luxurious villas and those of the bloc leaders, or in the insane project of turning Albania into a country of bunkers. Today, by contrast, we have focused all our efforts on agriculture, first of all by making you the true owners of Albanian land. We are completing land reform, and very soon all agriculture will consist of private farmers. We based land reform on a law approved by consensus in the Albanian parliament, which is founded on the principle of “to- (Continued on page 2) President of the Republic, Mr SALI BERISHA, in Zvezde

Yesterday at midday, at the DP headquarters, under the direction of the Chairman of the Democratic Party, Mr Eduard Selami, the national assembly of the DP held its proceedings. Among the problems examined, the assembly’s main focus was on privatization and the need to accelerate its pace. The discussions highlighted and criticized hesitation and slowness in privatizing state enterprises. The assembly emphasized that the only way to overcome the collapse of state enterprises and reduce unemployment and the need for assistance is to accelerate privatization. The effectiveness of this approach is best demonstrated by the experience of other former communist countries, as well as the success of privatization policy in the countryside. The assembly stressed that privatization is one of the fundamental points of the Democratic Party’s program and the most important stage of economic reform. The assembly suggested granting local authorities greater powers to privatize various state-owned facilities. Another issue discussed at the assembly was the fight against corruption. The activists made known the concern and support of Democratic Party members and sympathizers, and of honest people throughout the country, for exposing the thieves and corrupt red mafiosi involved in stealing aid from the Albanian people sent by Italy. The assembly expressed concern about the delay in putting the justice authorities to work on this matter and called on them to act with commitment and seriousness so as to prosecute and punish those responsible for corruption in Albania in a timely manner. Finally, Mr Selami, drawing his conclusions from the assembly, once again emphasized the importance of the privatization process for the progress of economic reform in Albania. “RD” CORRESPONDENT 1

-Statement of the Albanian Government- The Serb communist-chauvinist regime led by Millosheviçi has for years persecuted the Albanian people in Kosovo, using the most inhumane means: police terror, dismissal from work, the closure of schools teaching in Albanian and of information media in their mother tongue. This suffocating atmosphere that has engulfed Kosovo aims to achieve quietly what Millosheviçi and his followers are carrying out through bloodshed and massacres in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This policy, which has continued for three years against Albanians in the Republic of Kosovo, challenges the very foundations of the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki Final Act and other international documents. After closing “Rilindja” and Radio-Television of Kosovo, the Millosheviçi regime dealt the final blow to the information media in the Republic of Kosovo by also closing the only newspaper in the Albanian language and the few periodicals that remained. It completed the destruction of the Albanian-language information system, a system which had helped shape public opinion and bring everyone together around the Kosovo issue and the Albanian issue in general. The closure of the Albanian press aims to leave Albanian public opinion in complete darkness and to create room for democratic forces to act. The hunger strike, this heroic act of the distinguished Albanian intellectual

-If the demands of the boards of the seven newspapers are not accepted, “RD” too will boycott the printing house on 16 June- The governing board of the newspapers “Rilindja Demokratike”, “Republika”, “Alternativa SD”, “Sindikalisti”, “Drita”, “Bashkimi” and “Zëri i Rinisë” announces that it is continuing its boycott of the “Demokracia” printing house. At its meeting of 2 June 1992, the board decided: 1) If the demands put forward by it, already known to the public and to the IMF, are not accepted, on 16 June the newspaper “Rilindja Demokratike” too will boycott the “Demokracia” printing house. 2) Out of respect for readers and in order to fill the information vacuum created in our country since 10 May as a result of the non-publication of the newspapers, the board decided that during this period they should, where possible, be published at other printing houses. President of the board BASHKIM TRETNOVA Editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Rilindja Demokratike” Tirana, 2 June 1993

At the invitation of Deputy Prime Minister Bashkim Kopliku, Austria’s Deputy Chancellor, Erhard Busek, is arriving in our country today for an official visit.