Elbasan police catch him asleep in Tirana and parade him in handcuffs through the streets of Elbasan Police shorten the list of murderers at liberty Everything about the spectacular operation by Elbasan police; Commissioner Edmond Koseni speaks — PAGE 2

Guests at the last congress become delegates

The DP parliamentary group meets in Durrës — PAGE 3 The DP parliamentary group meets in Durrës PAGE 3

Tragedy: the Middle Ages reappear in Shkodër PAGE 2

ABC An excellent operation by Elbasan police in Tirana after midnight yesterday made it possible to capture a well-known figure of crime during the disastrous year ’97, known as Tan Kateshi. Leading the operation was a local police chief whom few people in the capital may know, Edmond Koseni. In Elbasan, this man enjoys great popular respect. How can this be explained? Commissioner Koseni and his team have kept crime under control since he took charge of the police station in this district. Elbasan is, in the fullest sense of the word, an oasis of peace and security, an example for the whole country, while in many other areas we have our hands full with the daily challenges posed by crime. Do we, as a state and as a people, have the strength to defeat crime, or will crime make the law among us? Criminals are few; we are many. But above all, we have many weapons against it that we have not yet put to proper use. We have the weapon of patriotism against it. The criminal does not want an enemy, does not want the law, but does not want the Homeland either. Therefore, the fight against crime should not be the responsibility only of the traffic policeman who, as people often say, has built the shepherd’s mushroom for a city street, but of an entire society—including every politician who trembles with joy on TV screens when saying, “crime is successfully challenging the government,” when seeing an abandoned refugee camp being robbed. Crime is struck down when all branches of power are on the same front—not when the police catch criminals and the justice system sets them free. It is fought with a harsh, indeed very harsh, penal policy, because democracy in itself does not produce crime; crime flourishes when liberalism is understood as anarchy, as the application of the slogan “Anything goes here in Albania.” The paradox we live with is that only the death of criminals is forbidden among us, in the name of the rules of the Council of Europe. But Europe is what it is because of the enforcement of the law, not because of leniency toward crime. Crime is fought when politics is kept out of it, when people do not say, for example, that the late businessman from Shkodër who was killed in Tirana a few days ago was targeted because he was among the sponsors of the anti-government radio station “Kontakt.” By fabricating party martyrs, crime finds shelter in which to grow. It is not fought with the political challenge that says, “This government does not know how to govern, whereas we in the opposition can defeat crime.” Did today’s repeat offenders not fail to defeat crime in 1992–97? The anti-democratic demand “Overthrow this government” is equivalent to wishing for crime to be set free, in the name of certain people’s triumph in power. The fight against crime requires a healthy and entirely new spirit in social relations—not merely counting how many people are feuding, how many conflicts there are in our city, in the block and neighborhood where we live, or, worse still, calculating how many people were killed today and how many will be killed tomorrow. It is no mere slogan to say that the fight against crime is a fight for life, for democracy, for the Homeland.