MOSCOW, 23 September — Russian President Boris Jelcin went to work at the Kremlin as usual, becoming the target of renewed threats and calls for a strike from members of parliament gathered in the legislative building of parliament. Launching a new offensive, he announced presidential elections for 12 June 1994. When he dissolved parliament on Tuesday, he set parliamentary elections for December. He has also had the support of most of the regions and all levels of government, while the Supreme Soviet, the parliament, has continued its meetings in the Kremlin complex after replacing Jelcin with Vice President Aleksandr Ruckoi. Several hundred demonstrators, made up of hard-line supporters, continued their support early in the morning for the legislators inside. But since the parliamentary complex was isolated from the outside world, the parliamentarians had not seen power. Their calls for strikes, protest meetings and civil support went almost unheard. The strong military support for Jelcin appeared to have silenced the parliament supporters’ warnings, with military personnel supporting Jelcin condemning themselves to death. A Jelcin spokesman dismissed the death threats as a tactic destined to fail. The spokesman, Vjacesllav Kostikov, referred to the parliamentarians as “former members of the former Supreme Soviet” and accused them of inciting political terror by alluding to future reprisals. Given the country’s long communist rule of terror, Russia has no sympathy for people who irresponsibly raise the spectre of mass reprisals, Kostikov was quoted as saying by the TASS agency. (ATSH)

After former communist president R. Alia, the next two PPSH prime ministers, Fatos Nano and Vilson Ahmetaj, were also detained by the justice authorities, accused of corruption. Of the former PPSH leaders from the beginning of 1991, that is, after the birth of political pluralism, only two or three have yet to face justice, while the others were at the forefront of corruption scandals, full of political and financial scandals. The opening of the archives revealed yet another scandal involving the left-wing extremists. Through an illegal procedure, former first secretary of the PPSH Central Committee Ramiz Alia had ordered the transfer of a solidarity fund of 400 thousand dollars to the newspaper “Zëri i popullit”, whose editor was the current PS leader, Namik Dokle. This happened at a time when political pluralism had been established in Albania and the PPSH had been separated from the state by law. The consequences of this scandal were truly enormous: “ZP” used 400 thousand dollars to delay by two years the full arrival of democracy in Albania, to stifle the people with demagoguery, to lie, to slander and insult every political, intellectual and scientific generation that thought differently from the PPSH’s policy. The scandal of F. Nano and A. Alia involving the firms “Iliria Holding” and “Levant Co” and the humanitarian aid allocated by Italy to Albania. The scandal of S. Brokaj involving humanitarian medical aid. The scandal of F. Brokaj and P. Ajazi involving H. Sejdisë’s companies. The scandal of Y. Bufit involving the 40 innocent lives in Fushë-Arrëz and his ominous statement about six days of bread. The scandal of V. Ahmetit involving the granting of thousands of dollars to the unknown Frenchman Arsidi. The PS scandal against the law on human rights. The scandal of K. Islami involving dragging people and smashing skulls at the illegal rally of 30 July. The scandal of G. Ruçit, F. Nanos and R. Alisë in the unprecedented massacre of 2 April in Shkodër. The PS scandal of voting against the Constitution. The scandal of N. Dokles, who voted against Albania’s accession to the Council of Europe. The endless scandals of the PS’s left-wing extremists clearly prove that they left, stole, destroyed and burned down their own house. Those who came and rebuilt this devastated house have the right to bring the abusers to justice. DALAN RAMA

Kujtim Cashku OBJECTIONS TO THE ARTICLE IN “ZËRI I RINISË”, dated 22.09.1993, ENTITLED “KADARE+QOSE+IN ALBANIA=DISCORD” I. THE GIANTS OF ALBANIAN THOUGHT AND LETTERS ATTACKED BY ANONYMITY The dictatorship’s main weapon of oppression was anonymity. Anonymity, that gigantic factory of mediocrity, had as its chief product bile, an anti-intellectual poison. Under the dictatorship it appeared everywhere: in the inquisitorial air, in public spaces, in the dark corners of sleep, like a permanent and vigilant spy on every individual act undertaken by anti-anonymity. Today, in freedom, if one is to make a complex analysis of the picture of anonymity and anti-anonymity, the main reference for the latter would undoubtedly be the intellectual world, the values of the individual as a phenomenon that challenges anonymity. The chief opponents of anonymity are individualities, personalities, identities and diversities. At first glance, anonymity is an amorphous, shapeless mass, without form, expression or almost any features. But, when viewed inside, at its very core, it is strengthened by an energy, a certain charge. A destructive energy and charge, used in the undertaking of criminal acts, but also heroic ones. The ideas or beliefs that anonymity often acquires drive it to two extremes. Submissive anonymity is part of a general criminal picture, typical of totalitarian societies. Meanwhile, anonymity revolting against subjugation is part of the heroic pictures reflected in the overthrow of systems and eras and in great changes and transformations. Thus, it is clear that the energy of anonymity is a driving force: an energy that carries inertia within itself. An inertia ready to turn crime into revenge and heroism into crime. If an individual breaks away from anonymity, they control their reflexes through dominant reason; individuality makes those reflexes prey to dominant passion. The force of collective anonymity reveals the anonymous individual as both brave and frightened, criminal and heroic. More concretely, this individual, installed within the flock of anonymity, feels courageous, while outside it they are afraid. If we were to determine the constant of the energy exerted by anonymity, we would see that its results are anger, collective hysteria, collective pathology, collective hatred and collective bile. Tyrannies and dictatorships were perfect masters at controlling and using anonymity. Through it they carried out oppression and repression, persecution and execution. When they set out to destroy the mind, they rationalized this by submerging and drowning it in the pool of anonymity. So many scientists, philosophers, historians and artists have drowned in this poisonous pool of anonymity. Some were not burned at the stake or confined in the dreadful medieval school prisons, but sent to remote islands of the world, to madhouses, to gulags of exile, poverty and misery. In those dark places where the masses of anonymity gathered, they eroded the mind; in those places where the darkness of ignorance gathered the deafness and blindness of the world. Anonymity is a gigantic grave of the mind, the individual, personality, identity and diversity. Tragically, thousands upon thousands of individuals have been sacrificed in that grave so that mediocrities could live on; Albania is free today. It is a country where the mind has been liberated. As never before in its history, it has placed its national potential on the pedestal it deserves. For the first time in hundreds of years, the free individual has been put at the center. For the first time, it is gathering at the national altar its sons whom a Bartol Buxhaku, Bu(??) Bogdani and Frashëri, Noli, Konica and Fishta, Mjeda, Prennushi, Çamaj, Kadare, Agolli and Podrimja had denied it; all of them together are the most precious treasure of the Albanian nation. I do not have the courage even to try to list the names of this Albanian potential, but I want to stress that the sooner Albania frees itself from the narcotic of anonymity, the sooner it will open its eyes and become aware of the values it carries within itself; the sooner it will feel the sacred worth of freedom, the sooner it will reap the fruit of democracy. The values of a nation’s civilization and freedom are measured by the value that nation places on its sons and daughters. The Albanian Renaissance figures did not give Albania weapons for wars, but gave it consciousness and an appreciation of freedom. Today is the time for a new Albanian renaissance, for a new consciousness which, first of all, has turned its eyes—as I mentioned above—toward what was denied, destroyed, forbidden, divided and torn apart. In other words, it is time to reassess values and their opposite. This is the price of freedom; this is also the price of a genuine civilization. This is the price democratic Albania has chosen today. I do not wish to make either the newspaper “Zëri i Rinisë” or the person who wrote the article the subject of this piece, but, considering it an attack by a transitional phenomenon, I will dwell on it briefly. I want to recall one instance of the dictatorship’s use of anonymity. To intimidate the mind, the dictatorship put non-mind on a pedestal. Instead of mental attributes, it gave priority to physical attributes as part of totalitarian enslavement. Enver would separate an individual from the anonymous crowd whenever he needed to and make that person a hero, philosopher, scientist, politician, demigod, or whatever else he could. This was done for several specific purposes. First, with such an act he would serve the crowd; second, he kept it under control through the non-body; third, he guaranteed an alliance with anonymity; and fourth, he could easily screen the individual who emerged from that anonymity. As can be seen, it was a completely closed and fixed circle. Today, in a democracy, it is not the individual in power who seeks an alliance with anonymity. But we must recognize clearly that in post-totalitarian Albania, the inertia of anonymity still exists and seeks at all costs to restore the severed alliance between the individual in power and anonymity in power. Thus, this retrograde phenomenon is developing on lost ground. The inertia of anonymity, as an inertia of the reflex of passion, is also the inertia of the euphoria that freedom brings. As the opposite of dictatorship, freedom directs its struggle against collective anonymity, which stands in opposition to the individual who has broken away from it. The basic starting point of freedom is the free individual, but it should not be forgotten—and this is understandable—that at this starting point the first attack will undoubtedly fall on the individual who is trying to break away from anonymity. From this perspective, there are individuals who think they can make this separation in an instant, and as such they fall victim to the enemies they inherit from the anonymity to which they belong. In their hands and minds appear, as relics, the archaisms of the inherited written tradition: bile, hatred, contempt, denial and degradation. There is another category of individuals who imagine that by attacking the heights, even if they hurl only stones of mediocrity, they can touch, reach and possess those heights. There is also another category, dominated entirely by the ethics and history of power, ready to declare itself a scientist, philosopher, minister or president in a single day. This is also the beauty of freedom: it is an infinite space of possibilities and hopes, and at the same time of their realization. Th (Continued on page 6)

FATOS’S PETITIONS ARE PETITIONS BY ENVER’S VOLUNTEERS PS’S DECEPTION CAMPAIGN CONTINUES DEFENDING CORRUPTION — A GREAT ACT OF SHAME

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Kujtim Cashku