The US calls on political forces The United States Government calls for an expansion of political dialogue between the ruling party and the opposition in Albania as the first step toward holding free and fair local elections, adopting a new constitution, and holding new parliamentary elections at the earliest opportunity. at the earliest opportunity. The United States believes that the ruling Democratic Party should do more to reach out to the opposition parties, offering them a genuinely essential role in preparing the local elections, on the election commission, and in preparing and adopting a new constitution. We recommend an inclusive formula for participation in the forthcoming round-table discussions. We call on the opposition parties to participate fully in this electoral process and in efforts to strengthen Albania’s democratic institutions. USIS Tirana, 24 August 1996

Message from the President of the Republic, Sali Berisha, addressed to the Congress of the Socialist Party The second phase of your Congress gives me the opportunity to greet all Albanian socialists with social-democratic aspirations and ideals, and to sincerely wish you progress and success in your important efforts to free yourselves from the deeply bitter past legacy that weighs upon the very being of your party. Only a few months ago, in a message I sent to the first phase of your Congress, I expressed the hope that you would courageously break with Marx and the Marxists, Enver and the Enverists, Ramiz and the Ramizists; condemn the monstrous crime of the dictatorship; and rehabilitate all its left-wing victims. I am convinced that, had these suggestions been taken into account, your leadership would not have dared, on May 26, to trample on the respect, gratitude, trust, hope, patriotism, loyalty and democratic ideals of the PS electorate, and that you would not be gathered here today so abandoned at home and in such profound and unparalleled international isolation. Today, while welcoming your decision to remove Marxism from the program and to condemn Enver’s and Ramiz’s dictatorship, as well as statism in the economy, I must regretfully stress that this is not reform, but merely a farce of reform. The decade-long legacy and the developments of the last five years clearly and definitively demonstrate that the PS cannot be reformed. Therefore, I invite you, through a truly historic decision for the Albanian left, to announce today the dissolution of the PPSH, which five years ago was rebaptized as the PS, and to found—removing all the incriminated groups and individuals—the party of genuine social-democratic ideals in Albania. I am convinced that my proposal will hurt today not a few of those whose legacy lies at the foundation of your party. Another part of the party, including its leadership groups, which today largely dominate it, is inseparably and entirely bound up with that legacy. Thus, today, in Albania and abroad, no one will believe that you sincerely condemn Marx, Enver and Ramiz when you keep in your ranks and at the head of your party the followers of Marx and collaborators of Enver, or those who, in the Black Year, together with Ramiz, organized the coup at the United School and the Shkodër massacre—events in which dozens of young Albanians lost their lives and hundreds more were wounded—those who in 1991 looted the humanitarian aid meant for a hungry people and who continually opposed, by every means, reform and democracy in Albania. There can be no talk of reform while keeping at the head of the party those who issued the call to dismantle the values that had been built and, held hostage by their political past, ordered the boycott of the vote count, turned the PS into a party outside parliament and, most recently, by boycotting dialogue and local elections, decided, for clan and personal interests, to turn it into a non-electoral party—practically an association of Enver—and soon confine it to the exhibits of bitter memories in the history museum. And so your act today of condemning Marx, Enver and Ramiz while keeping Marxists, Enverists and Ramizists at the helm merely brings to mind the act of an infatuated and insincere person who, forced by new circumstances, tears up a photograph of a friend but keeps its negative in order to reproduce it in hundreds and thousands of copies later. The dissolution of the PPSH under a new name and the founding of a democratic left would be a remarkable event, welcomed by the whole country; an act of gratitude toward Gjinushi, Malëshova, Kokalari and the hundreds and hundreds of Albanians who sacrificed their lives for their democratic left-wing ideals, becoming immortal at the altar of Albanian democracy. It would be a genuine, real hope for all those hundreds and thousands of Albanian socialists who have no connection with the bitter legacy of the PPSH, and for Albanian eurosocialists who, together with democratic forces, want a European left in Albania. The latest events clearly and conclusively demonstrate that the SP cannot be reformed. Therefore, I invite you to take a truly historic decision for the Albanian left by declaring today the dissolution of the PPSH, which was baptized as the SP just a short while ago, and founding—removing all the groups and individuals implicated in crimes—the party of true will hurt quite a few of you today. But on the other hand, I must remind you that at the foundations of your party, or of the PPSH under its new name, lie violence, terror, genocide, the most savage barbarity Europe has known since the Second World War; the sacrifice and martyrdom of 400,000 Albanians; Albania’s deepest isolation and greatest hyper-collectivization throughout its history; the massacres of Tivar, Fushë Aliaj, Lushnjë and Shkodër, and the coup in United Shkodër. A very large part of your membership has no connection whatsoever with this.

Socialists far from creating a social-democratic party Most of the delegates had been pre-conditioned in advance to support or oppose the re-election of their imprisoned chairman, rather than to be builders or implementers of any platform for renewing and reforming the party. Documentary photo: The divided platform...

SECOND CONGRESS S SH 24–25 AUGUST 1996 Documentary photo: The divided platform...

“I would begin precisely with when I first met Nano,” Brokaj said at the start of his address yesterday at the Congress, adding that when people talk about Ramizism, they first talk about Fatos Nano. “Probably in early February ’91, I was summoned by former Prime Minister Çarçani. Fatos Nano was also in the office. They proposed that I become a minister. I objected to Çarçani, and naturally he was surprised that I didn’t say I was grateful to the party. As I went outside, Fatos Nano, whom I was seeing for the first time, latched on to me. Until then, Nano had known me better than I knew him. He took me into his office and asked why I wouldn’t accept. I told him this was a shameful game of yours. “Two months earlier, I had called for your resignation—that is, the resignation of the Çarçani Government—and for the Political Bureau to be removed from power. You want to shut us up. He said, ‘We want to bring about a radical change; we intend to do it by evolutionary means. To do it by evolutionary means, we need people who are professionally good and politically quite different from the current standards. You,’ he said, ‘were denounced in the petition you wrote against the Party of Labour. You are a dean, which means you are presumed to be professionally good, and we caught you with a hook.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘how many will you do this with—two?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘we’ll gradually find others.’” This is how Brokaj ends his account of how he was recruited by Fatos Nano.

The rival factions that clashed fiercely yesterday in the hall of the Socialist Party Congress found a boycott of the local elections to be the only point on which they managed to reach some kind of consensus. This is further major proof of the political irresponsibility that is a shared virus among all socialist leaders, regardless of the shades of red that distinguish them from one another. While the Socialist Party’s boycott of the local elections occupied a very important place in Nano’s speech, read by Sabit Brokaj, the other opponents of the motion were no less adamant. The only voice against boycotting the local elections at the Socialist Party congress was that of the Socialist International’s envoy, Kui[o?], who called on the socialists to work together to restore political normality to the country. But this makes the sin that the irresponsible leaders of the Socialist Party want to repeat even graver, because they are ignoring the recommendations of important international institutions, as well as the invitation from the European left. This is yet another major demonstration of the inability of the factions running Albania’s largest opposition party today to renew themselves. They are united when they should be different, and different when they should be united. They differ greatly from one another when it comes to the struggle to ascend to the congress’s new throne, caught up in a fierce factional battle. But they are completely alike whenever they have had to be alike, whenever they have had to demonstrate reform and political responsibility. T.P.

He asked the deputy chairmen and colleagues Servet Pëllumbi, Namik Dokle, Ilir Meta and Luan Hajdaraga to act with principle and in a spirit of self-criticism, and to assume personal responsibility for the mistakes and shortcomings in the party’s leadership by submitting their respective resignations to the congress, Fatos Nano insisted in his request.

It seems to me that everything said about the Tirana conference in Comrade Fatos’s speech was written here at the SP headquarters, he told the delegates, because everything said there is what my comrades and I heard the very day after the conference from those who equate their careerism with reforming the SP.

Only one foreign delegate at the SP’s second congress The Socialist International’s representative Roberto Kui[o?] implied yesterday, in his address to the Second Congress of the socialists, that Europe is not calling for new parliamentary elections in Albania, while the country should focus on holding local elections properly, once again urging the socialists to abandon a possible boycott. Meanwhile, the International’s envoy reminded the socialists that reform is a condition for establishing relations with this important organization of the world’s left. Kui[o?] did not hesitate on this occasion to remind the delegates in the hall that he had passed through Fassin[o?]’s image before coming to Albania. In November 1995, Fassino declared in Tirana that the Socialist Party had still not been reformed, while now Kui[o?] is suggesting the Euro-socialists’ approach as a way to bring about effective reform among Albania’s socialists. On this occasion, the socialists in the hall learned just how far behind the socialist leaders were in their contacts with the Socialist International. Roberto Kui[o?] also said that the first contacts between the International and the SP were established in 1995, while the relationship between this party and the International so far has gone no further than the presentation of biographies of Albanian socialists who might be included in some honorary delegation at an SI event. Roberto Kui[o?] was the only foreign delegate at this congress, thus marking the lowest number of delegates to have attended any of this party’s congresses throughout its roughly fifty-year history.

Dokle makes Nano’s secret letters public But the chairman, too, should not think of the SP as China, with some sort of rule by a few frogs in the Bënça stream. I would have to remind him that one in three candidates he proposed to the leadership immediately joined another party after we rejected Chairman Nano’s proposal. Or that one of his three candidates was his wife, which prompted the noble poet Agolli to write: “My Sadija would have been better.” By way of illustration, I will take the two latest extreme cases: Pandeli Majko’s quarrelsome, empty inertia, when even he himself does not know what he is asking for in his repetitive, identity-less interviews, like the latest one in “Dita Informacion.” And, on the other hand, Bashkim Zeneli’s latest—and repeated—vileness, with subversive articles in “KJ,” not to mention Mago Lakrori’s anti-communist speeches around the districts, along the lines of “beans, beans, but just one bean.” The letter of June 18, ’95 describes as definitively subversive and harmful—so long as they are not corrected—the deliberate actions of the elected officials Lakrori, Zeneli, Majko and Legisi, in the form of working in parallel with the officeholders and functional duties of other comrades, political defiance of the deputy chairmen, and attempts to launch initiatives by denigrating others or secretly feeding the press with false tensions about the SP, but real ones concerning their own heads.

On Monday, 26.08.1996, at 12:00, an expanded meeting of the National Council of the PD will be held at the Palace of Congresses to discuss preparations for the local election campaign. Members of Parliament, prefects, mayors and chairpersons of District Councils who represent the PD are invited, as well as all members of the working groups assigned to work with the districts.

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