Investments that will add another 33 thousand telephone numbers to Tirana

DUKAGJIN HATA PSSH — the Party of Labour with a new name It is a unique case in the history of political pluralism in the post-communist countries of the East for a political party such as PSSH to function with virtually the same structure and mentality, continuing the strategy, personnel, practices and principles of its 54-year path. Apart from the façade—which, even though repainted and colored, cannot conceal the old ruins of the proverbial constellation of Albanian neocommunism—the Albanian Socialists are thus experiencing the deepest multifaceted crisis, inherited and carried forward through these years of great ambivalence, which presents them one way in appearance and declarations and another in substance. This crisis is, first and foremost, political and concerns moral legitimacy in politics; it is the driving force behind the success or failure of a political force’s alternative. Moral legitimacy in politics, before being a category of philosophical abstraction, is a starting point from which a political force sets out to reach the field where it implements its electoral program. The Socialist Party entered the political starting line of Albanian pluralism under a false name, just as the names of secret agents are false when they strain at all costs to conceal their identity. Everything from the old party, from the top of the pyramid to its base, sacrificed some parts of the ship in order to install in that same ship parts of its own, which it had kept as emergency reserves, thereby ensuring its continuity. The years 1990–91 entered the history of the old political class as years of great discredit, as the years when Alia, seeing the ground slipping from under his feet, used not only the arsenal of violence and genocide against the “rebels” to prolong the life of the Dictatorship, but also backroom maneuvering to secure guarantees that the old structures of PSSH would not be touched. In those years, alongside the black smoke of destruction, those responsible at the border, and so on, PSSH changed its name to PS and put into action its personnel and its compromised figures from the past, from the remnants of the State Security to the zealous communist agitprop operatives, who occupied key positions and the most important posts at the headquarters of the pseudo-socialists of Albania. In this way, the political crisis of PS is conveyed first and foremost by its crisis figures, who bear not only a discreditable past, laden with violations of the law and crimes, but also a destructive present, filled with shadows and shadow governments, illegal meetings and illegal celebrations, and irresponsible calls for violence and skull-cracking. It is a unique case in the history of the post-communist Socialist alternative for a political party, as in the case of PS, to be led by a former Minister of the Interior, who was sent by the grassroots as a strongman to bathe the still-developing democracy in blood, and... the scriptwriters, directors and implementers of the institutions of genocide, which are increasingly being exposed to public opinion as the most macabre institutional apparatus ever to operate in the history of Albania. The publication of the death lists is a bloodcurdling testament to communist blindness, which, through the machinery of violence and bloodshed, persecuted, imprisoned and killed thousands who thought differently from the disciples of crime. The perpetrators of these massacres, both those carried out and those contemplated, are at the head of PS and, thanks to the excesses of freedom, do not hesitate to bare their teeth at this reality, which has taken powerful shape during these three years and a few months of democratic governance. Ruçi claims he burned the lists of terror to erase a criminal practice, but he forgets that, first and foremost, he should have denounced these lists—the very least that can be demanded of an officeholder who not only knew about them, but had in fact been called in as a strongman precisely to restore and adapt these lists and this criminal practice to the new developments. Ruçi, Nano, Pellumbi & Co. and the rest of the Hoxhist clan in PS are weighed down by Mali me Gropa and the February Massacre, 2 April in Shkodër and the killings and destruction of 1990–91—the tragic hostages that a dark era, with criminals as its protagonists, demanded of a new era that was being born despite...

These are all remnants of the legacy of the past, which are now more active than ever in the PS leadership, at the extreme of the anti-reform movement. These are the protagonists who envisage shadow governments and shadow institutions, who have opposed around two-thirds of the laws submitted to Parliament, who have risen against the Charter of Fundamental Freedoms and Human Rights, who have concocted Omari-style draft constitutions, who have anathematized the decree on Privatization Vouchers that would make all Albanians owners, who have fabricated alarming opinion polls, who have made Albania’s admission to the Council of Europe conditional on the Albanian dimension being fulfilled and on the so-called “Nano Issue,” who call for scenarios like 2 April to return, and so on and so on. They are the ones who most recently opposed the law on the sale and purchase of land and compensation for former properties; they are nostalgics for total collectivization. PSSH—the party of a crisis of alternatives, the only alterna-

Statement by the Spokesperson of the President of the Republic In recent days, the far-left press, in a series of articles driven by arguments based on fabrications and vocabulary worthy only of their authors, has attributed entirely false statements and remarks to the President of the Republic. These fabrications culminate today (13 August 1995—shi.nied) in an editorial in the newspaper ZP, in which that paper’s editorial office writes that, at the recent DP Conference for Tirana, the President of the Republic said: “A future victory by the Socialists would be national treason.” This is a fabrication from beginning to end, and its authors will be held legally accountable for their immoral act. In his analysis at the DP Conference for Tirana, the President of the Republic demonstrated that PS is experiencing the deepest political and moral crisis of identity and alternatives. The causes of this incurable crisis should not be sought in the President of the Republic, but in the former head of the Albanian secret police, in the authors of the lists of terror, and in the arsonists of churches and mosques, who have usurped the leadership of PS and its entire leadership pyramid, as in no other Socialist party in Eastern Europe. This demonstrates, in fact, that PS is the only communist party in the Eastern world that was not dissolved, but merely changed its name, thus remaining directly PPSH under a new name. Its anti-reform inheritance and stance explain the deep isolation and great international loneliness that PS is experiencing, which pushes it toward empty relations and meetings. You governed the Meksi Government and failed, because you did not vote against the dictatorship of the proletariat, hyper-collectivism, the country’s isolation and national division. In his speech, the President called on everyone to hold firmly to the motto “opponents but brothers”; meanwhile, you shout that he called us enemies, thereby showing that the intolerance arising from your Marxist ideals still keeps the cult of the enemy alive in your minds. But I remind you that fabrications and labels. Tirana, 13.08.1995 Spokesperson of the President of the Republic in secret. In his analysis at the Tirana DP Conference, the President of the Republic not only failed to predict a victory for the SP, but also analyzed, among the facts, the inevitable failures of the SP. And the Socialists should not blame the President for this. If you have arguments, I invite you to prove that it was not you who declared that Albania would not be accepted into the Council of Europe without a constitution—and failed, because the EC Commission declared that Albania had no legislative vacuum. I invite you to prove that you did not create the unconstitutional Omari commission to deceive public opinion—and failed; that you did not declare that you would hold your congress in June—and failed. the Shadow Government and end in failure; that you did not activate the cartridges (as you yourselves put it) to overthrow the Meksi Government—and failed; that you did not vote against the Penal Code and against the entry into force of the Code of Criminal Procedure, even though this was a request of the EC—and failed. I invite you to prove that you were not the ones who made every effort to make membership conditional and failed; that you were not the ones who, with Byzantine secrecy, liquidated the moderate wing of the Youth Forum and usurped its leadership. I invite you to prove that you did not vote with only seven people for the law on the purchase and sale of land; that you were not the ones who called for a no-confidence motion against the Minister of Defence on the day of the Minister of Defence’s visit to Kosovo; and that, although Minister Zhulali himself asked you to withdraw it, you not only did not withdraw it, but demanded a secret ballot on it and, through your words, condemned Albania’s cooperation with NATO. In his speech, the President of the Republic declared that the Socialist alternative, based on the principles of Marxism, is irreconcilably opposed to the ideals of freedom and democracy, and to individual liberties and rights. You are outraged by this statement. Then prove that this alternative is not the alternative of violence and terror, class warfare and the dictatorship of the proletariat, hyper-collectivism and the isolation of the country, as well as national division. In his speech, the President calls on us to hold firmly to the motto “opponents, but brothers,” while you shout that he has called us enemies, thereby demonstrating that the intolerance which springs from the ideals

The SP is currently experiencing a political crisis, indeed one deeper than the crisis experienced by the PP in 1990, the year that prepared the great collapse, when Ramiz Alia, in an effort to prolong Noah’s Ark, which was sinking in the proclaimed majority of socialism, [Text begins cropped at the top edge of the image.] have reached the finish line, and the realization of its own names of secret agents are false, as they strive at all costs to hide their identities. Everything about the old party, from its pyramid down to its base, has been conceived as a continuation, without disturbing the proverbial forms of the previous organization, even to the issuing of illegal circulars calling for unitarism with Marxism and Enverism. It is precisely this split between name and being, between form and content, between Albanian democratic society and the alternative of total stagnation offered by the Socialists, that characterizes the PS’s political crisis—which is above all a crisis of identity. In their demonic determination to appear different, the Socialist leadership expends all its energy; it neither creates the opportunity nor has the desire or ability to put forward progressive ideas and alternatives. In this dogmatic collapse, which destroys every chance for the old political class to reform itself, they have become a continuation of its most destructive elements: a sordid political game that places this class not among the opposition, but among the political opponents of the great values that freedom has created over these three or four years. Changing the name from PP to PS cannot restore the tarnished image of a bad political class which, for 54 years, has become a gravedigger of opportunities for Albanians. It has worked like a vast factory for producing internal and external “enemies,” turning the country of the greatest tolerance into a laboratory for the macabre experiments of the Hoxhist clan, which still continues to direct the leadership of the Albanian Socialists. The PSH, usurped by former secret-police officials, common thieves and figures of crisis The PS is currently experiencing a political crisis, indeed one deeper than the crisis experienced by the PP in 1990, the year that prepared the great collapse, when Ramiz Alia, in an effort to prolong Noah’s Ark—which was sinking in the quagmire of the proclaimed majority of socialism—[?] ideological [?] socialism, in the case of the PS, has at its helm a former Minister of the Interior, sent from the grassroots as a strong hand to bloodily crush democracy, which was still in its infancy. Ruçi embodies the PS’s crisis figure, expressing above all its inability to break with the past, in whose longevity the former head of political crime and senior Secret Police official Ruçi made no small contribution. It is a fact that Albania’s largest opposition party, the PS, cannot break away from the protagonists and apologists of crime and genocide, because such monsters of evil are also living archives, preserving every thread of their fellow conspirators’ complicity; they hold all the cards on one another. These cards reveal the most perverse corners of the world of crime and black money, archaic psychological manipulations amplified by the thief-baron oligarchs, myth-scandals, and every deviation from democratic laws and the rule of law that we Albanians are building with great effort and hardship after a fatal half-century. It is also a unique example in the world that a party, as in the case of the PSSH, should keep as its leader a common criminal who was imprisoned, implicated in corruption involving Italian aid while he was prime minister, and should try to condition Albania’s integration into Europe on the so-called “Nano Affair.” The PSSH has as its ideologue and first among four deputy chairmen a withered monster of the Enverist school, the former Marxism lecturer at the Party School, the demagogue Servet Pellumbi, who, with terrifying fanaticism, is turning his party into a tabula rasa, erasing every sign of emancipation and every idea except those of the 50-year legacy, which has now entered Albanian memory as the legacy of the most unprecedented crime and genocide in modern history. At the head of the PSSH, the perpetrators of Albania’s most recent genocide Today the PS leadership, from the top of the pyramid to its base, is run by people unaccountable for violence and skull-crushing. post-communist Socialist alternative that a political party, as in the case of the PS, should have the so-called “Nano Affair.” At the head of the PS are those who closed churches and mosques The PS’s political identity crisis reaches its zenith when one considers that the tribunals of its failed charisma are denatured specimens of internecine struggle who, decades ago, closed churches and mosques and proclaimed the Albanian Pol Pot an omnipotent god. They are precisely the people who, now that they are free, fan the demons of regional and religious division—something that has never existed in Albania. Those who closed churches and mosques, hanged churches and mosques, who closed churches and mosques, those who closed churches and mosques, those who closed churches and mosques, and their transformation into Prosecutors cannot serve the PS except as mannequins of anti-clericalism, anti-reform and anti-hope. PSSH—a party of crisis in its alternative; its sole alternative is Marxism From this moral and political crisis of crisis-ridden figures also comes the crisis of the PS’s alternative, which has remained frozen in 1990 and has still not moved beyond Ramiz Alia’s directives on the self-management of enterprises and institutions, in the furrows of revising socialist centralism. A party whose politics are guided by an immoral core, and which tries to pass its rampant crisis on to Albanians, can offer only an alternative of crisis. The dominance of Marxism in the PS electoral program, and its transformation into a bone of contention between the strongest clan, that of Pellumbi, and the weaker one, led by Majko, shows that the political collapse is all-encompassing and the prospects for change are at zero. In the name of Marxism, the Socialist leader cut off Majko’s head, while he called Lesjani a traitor and an agent, using the language of his spiritual father, Enver. Unitarism around Marxism and Enverism expresses the crisis of the alternative, which the PS leaders themselves have sometimes been forced to acknowledge. The political arena of the PK (P)SH is overflowing with destructive manoeuvres and unrestrained nihilism, with shadows, stagnation, illegal cold tribunals, score-settling among clans and groups, and the revival of political ghosts directing the old machine from behind the scenes. Thus the PSSH heads towards ’96 with a grave political and moral crisis that it seeks to pass on to the Albanian electorate, which certainly cannot be deceived by the empty propaganda of the crisis figures of the old class. In its all-consuming fever for power, that class has nothing to offer Albanians, despite its deafening vacuum and the sterility of its ideas and alternatives.

Press conference by the Minister of Agriculture and Food, Hasan Halili The Ministry of Agriculture and Food has worked to implement the government’s programme approved by the Albanian Parliament, said yesterday the Minister of Agriculture and Food, Hasan Halili, at a press conference. The major transformations in Albanian agriculture began in July 1991, when, at the insistence of the DP parliamentary group, the proposal to grant land into private ownership was approved. Since then, while consistently pursuing the Government’s agricultural policy, the MBU has worked to achieve several objectives. First, it had to carry out administrative reform, which it did in several areas: the structure of specialists, the reorganization of district agricultural directorates, and studies for reorganizing institutions in accordance with Western market-economy concepts. The ministry was fully computerized, as were some of the agricultural directorates. The transition from a centralized economy to a market economy made it necessary to improve the existing legislation, continued (Continued on page 2)

At the invitation of the Minister of Justice of the Republic of Albania, Mr. Hektor Frasheri, the Minister of Justice of the Republic of Greece, Mr. Anastasios Peponis, arrives in Tirana today for a three-day official visit. During his visit to Tirana, Mr. Peponis will meet with the country’s highest-ranking officials. At their meeting, Mr. Frasheri and Mr. Peponis are expected to discuss a number of issues, such as implementing the obligations arising from the Convention on Mutual Assistance between Albania and Greece, particularly the mutual enforcement of judicial decisions in criminal cases; drafting a programme of academic exchanges in the field of law, particularly European Union law; and the possibility of providing academic assistance in the field of judicial assistance, particularly with regard to the Code of Civil Procedure, administrative law, etc. These could be carried out through exchanges of groups of experts. The visit to Tirana by the Greek Minister of Justice, Mr. Peponis, which will be followed by a visit from the President of the Republic of Greece, Mr. Stefanopullos, is believed by diplomatic circles in both countries to give new impetus to Albanian-Greek relations.