Albania is occupied by the far right Political pluralism in the poorest country in Europe, which broke away from dictatorship only 6 years ago, will be like a water trickle that has been running in Albanian homes for 4 years, this one too on a schedule. Page 3

The latest decision of the Constitutional Court The latest decision of the Constitutional Court A blatant act to justify the violations of the law Page 2

Editorial Albanians have seen the country of Eastern Europe, which in the elections of 26 May marked the final step of the slide toward hell. Berisha has torn off the mask of the voter, as in 1992, without lingering in the terrible anxiety and contortions, but with cynicism and brazen shamelessness, as he has always been capable of. Berisha considers the ordinary voter, so submissive as to carry out orders like a wretched subordinate, and those who have remained with him, in the cities and villages, as a kind of multitude of numbers that verifies surnames in its own personal number. The others are excess, they are shadows of life, who must be driven away with rust; they are absolutely intolerable objects of the mark of these years, that of the scribble with the new man. While the Albanian opposition, with its responsibility and its specific actions in transforming moral and mass protest into civil resistance, denounces the collapse of the state and the dirty signature of Sali Berisha with orders of electoral and political genocide, the offices of the then regime are trying to turn it into a populist and technical discussion, as if in some provincial tribunal. Has there ever been in Albania the killing of thought, punishments for this reason, or violations of basic political rights through brutal violence? Has there not been anxiety, camps and internment, killings at the border and imprisonment until death? Did these happen for the first time, if fascism and Nazism are forgotten, in 1992, and is that the socialist fairy tale invented by some new anti-communists, ignorant people cultivated with manipulated memory, impoverished archives and mad analogies? After 22 March 1992, it seems unnecessary to list the forms of discrimination and denial of rights, a period during which Berisha, after the vapors of the terrible hell of these years and of the Albanian lands, had given the tragicomic sign of parasitism. He, who was never a class in himself, in leaps full of irrationality, now, according to the theory of “resistance,” trumpeted by those who had climbed onto his back, will try to deny, even indirectly, the signs of civic change and to open the gates of this imagined hell. So without going on at length, we can state that all those who have had the misfortune of colliding with situations in which modernization was a social art and solidarity cannot understand the persecution or the mad demonization of a debate without any dangerous structure. To say that in Albania after 26 May a special totalitarianism is being established certainly makes clear the intolerance and the difficult obligation to live with a reality that wipes you out by force. After 26 May, Berisha was no longer just a man governing by order and political police. He was a man who could no longer govern. He became a slave to his own creation: to a “state,” a parliament, and a government born of a criminal vote. Since it was clear that the vote of 26 May did not give him any security of power, he decided to legalize it with his parliament. He knows very well what hopeless power is. He knows very well the consequences of this Albania’s clash of two faces: the free man and the enslaved man. He knows very well the terrible similarities with 1992, where the opposition and the relationship with the electorate are the same as they were then. He knows very well what it means for such a parliament to live in the hall of the Paris Peace Conference.[?] That is why it suits him to take public attention away from the place where he is today, with unresolved accounts and without a real reform, with strange backstage dealings and symbolism, with an opposition that walks on foot and with people resigned to their fate. From it he chose for the parliamentary monster an old and a new scarecrow at the same time; this is the Albanian state that will temporarily hide reality with early elections. He would shout at foreigners that they are “socialists,” “terrorists,” “communists,” “Nazis,” “Greek agents,” “Serbs,” “Satanic,” “mafiosi,” and any other label, in order to secure some kind of justification for raising the last bastion of a regime that is rotting from within. The last bastion of this communism in Albania is Berisha’s own personal power and the perversion he has imposed on state institutions and the law. The last bastion of communism in Albania is President Berisha himself. Memorandum of a group of Albanian intellectuals sent to: the United States; the U.S. Department of State; the European Union; the diplomatic representations of the member states of the Council of Europe

Memorandum of a group of Albanian intellectuals sent to: the United States; the U.S. Department of State; the European Union; the diplomatic representations of the member states of the Council of Europe Memorandum of a group of Albanian intellectuals sent to: The United States; The U.S. Department of State, The United States, The European Union, the diplomatic representations of the member states of the Council of Europe Page 4

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Yeltsin and Zyuganov, face to face Page 7

Newspaper of the Socialist Party of Albania