mistake, he said - and continued to make excuses as he was thrown into the back of a car next to the opposition’s leading economist and showered with baton blows en route to his holding cell.
Many Albanians were furious at the international community’s failure to raise a stink about the theft of their fledgling democracy. While the Americans were growing markedly more impatient, the calculus in other western capitals didn’t change: as long as Berisha provided what they wanted, they were prepared to give him more or less free rein. What nobody yet realized was that the stolen election was a prelude to a far more serious crisis.
Hajdin Sejdia, the Kosovo Albanian who had promised a high-rise hotel in central Tirana, didn’t just bilk a bunch of investors. His fund-raising scam was, in effect, Albania’s first pyramid investment scheme – a promise to deliver big, all the better to rake in more cash to steal. Other pyramids soon followed. Some were started by prominent small-town businessmen who had the trust of the local population, others by large companies like VEFA, with political connections and the clout, it was said, to tap into the revenue streams of Greek and Italian gangsters. It was hard to know with any precision what the financial basis of the schemes was, or how they managed to pay out interest rates of 6 percent per month and rising. Folklore and crowd-pleasing stunts took the place of hard information. One scheme in the port city of Vlora sponsored a beauty contest. Another, in Lushnje, lured a former Argentian World Cup star, Mario Kempes, to coach the local football team. Yet another scheme, in Tirana, purported to be the rags-to-riches brainchild of a gypsy shoe factory worker, known just by her first name, Sudja, who bought out her company when it was about to go under by convincing small investors to place their faith in her and hand over their life savings.
Albanians didn’t necessarily believe such colourful stories, but they entrusted their money to the schemes all the same, on the basis that they enjoyed government backing. The rumours about them being money-laundering facilities for organised crime made them, if anything, more attractive. If the mafiosi of Sicily, or Naples or Bari were pouring in their drug money, or if – as one elaborate theory had it – the schemes were financing illicit oil exports to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, why shouldn’t Albanians reap the benefits?
Until the stolen election of 1996, the pyramid schemes were Albania’s dirty little secret, barely discussed in public and certainly not advertised to visiting foreigners. Afterwards, they became Berisha’s biggest political raison d’être. “Vote Berisha and everyone profits!” read a poster widely distributed around Tirana - by VEFA, in its capacity as a billboard publisher - ahead of local elections in October 1996. For a short time, everyone did just that. Imports starting flooding into the country; businesses expanded; the housing market took off; there was a mini construction boom. VEFA ran an advertisement showing a man walking into one of its supermarkets with one bag of money and walking back out with four. Even Hajdin Sejdia made an unexpected return and started paying off the investors he’d cheated years earlier – by investing his own money in other pyramid schemes. Edi Rama, an artist and outspoken opponent of Berisha’s who would later launch his own political career, observed bitterly that the president had fed Albanians the illusion that they could be rich without being free.
The end came swiftly, first with the lifting of UN sanctions on Yugoslavia in October 1996 and then, as that revenue stream dried up, in a few desperate weeks from December 1996 to January 1997. Sudja raised her interest rate to a staggering 100 per cent a month, only to announce from the balcony of her dilapidated apartment building in Tirana shortly afterwards that the game was up. The other schemes quickly followed her into insolvency. Rrapush Xhaferri, the most prominent businessman in Lushnje, a small town 30 miles south of Tirana, was arrested as the last of the millions he’d collected from his friends and neighbours dwindled to nothing. The two policemen charged with the arrest shared a nervous last cigarette before clapping him in handcuffs, because they knew they’d never see their life savings again. Bereft of everything, the town rose up in revolt, and when Berisha’s right hand man, the Democratic Party president Tritan Shehu, arrived to denounce the protesters as members of a “terrorist-Stalinist clan” - his idea of restoring order - he was hit over the head with a tire iron, held hostage for several hours in the Lushnje football stadium and, so the story goes, symbolically silenced with a leek stuffed in his mouth.
Soon, the entire country was in turmoil, and Berisha’s government increasingly resorted to intimidation and force to try to bottle up people’s fury. In Lushnje, revenge for Shehu’s treatment took the form of special policemen in hoods bursting into people’s homes at three in the morning and rounding up suspected trouble-makers. In Berat, 20 miles further south, suspected anti-government subversives were crammed into a single room in the burned-out police station and beaten. In Tirana, Edi Rama was approached by members of SHIK, the secret police, late at night and pummeled with knuckle-dusters. A leading opposition politician, Ndre Legisi, was pulled out of his car and beaten so badly it was feared for a time he’d suffered permanent brain damage.
The fury, however, could not be contained. By early February, Vlora was in flames, and the crisis had claimed its first death. Over the next month, the south of the country slipped from the government’s grip entirely as bands of young men looted police and army weapons depots and chased hapless officials away with Kalashnikovs. In Kucove, rebels seized a fleet of MiG fighters from a military airport. In Saranda, near the Greek border, they seized a warship. Tirana fell under near-martial law, with a strict curfew and a stifling presence of paramilitary police. The death toll rose into the hundreds. From any perspective, this was a living nightmare: the country was being ripped apart, piece by piece, and it seemed nothing could stop the momentum toward total destruction.
This is the terrifying story Fatos Lubonja tells in The False Apocalypse. Lubonja is perhaps the closest thing Albania has to an intellectual conscience: a former political prisoner, publisher, writer and activist who has never been afraid to offer his frank opinions, even in the depths of the Enver Hoxha years, and certainly does not hesitate to denounce Berisha in these pages as a man cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Hoxha – a dictator at heart with only the rhetoric of a democrat.
Lubonja captures the brooding, nervy mood in Tirana that took hold as the crisis deepened in those first few months of 1997 - the hastily convened meetings, the calls to action, the abiding fear of government thugs bursting in at any moment and arresting, maiming or killing people; the frantic attempt to understand what was happening before all was lost entirely. His narrative illuminates the desperation of Europe’s least known country in its hour of greatest need. And it makes clear that Albania is, in all senses, a small place, where everyone knows each other and almost every relationship has a history tainted by mistrust and fear stemming back to the Hoxha era. The civil conflict that erupted in 1997 could not help but have a peculiarly fratricidal edge. The slights and losses were deeply personal, as was the lust for revenge.
And yet Albania did not tumble into the abyss, not entirely. The collapse of the pyramid schemes was a jolting wake-up call, a realization that people could not spend their lives simply buying coffee, whisky and Mercedes, as one Tirana lawyer put it to me at the time. Some Albanians continued to fritter away their days in video bingo parlors, but most of the country redirected its overwhelming bitterness and anger towards the government, and towards Berisha in particular. The rebels’ message was crystal clear. As long as Berisha remained in power, the country would continue to burn.
The western powers understood this with painful slowness. For months after the stolen election of May 1996 and even after the pyramid schemes had collapsed, I had diplomats lecturing me on the virtues of continuity in a time of a crisis. In mid-March, that philosophy came to fruition in the form of a government of national unity, in which Berisha remained as president and a colourless middle-ranking Socialist, Bashkim Fino, took over as prime minister. Having tried and failed to retake the south by force, Berisha appeared to think he could outmaneuver his new rival and use the unity government as a cover to restore his diminished authority. But he was deluding himself, and the rioting only intensified.
By this point, the south was not so much the stronghold of an organized rebellion as an embodiment of complete anarchy. Young men high on raki and marijuana drove around in stolen cars at high speed and unleashed automatic weapon rounds like they were Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris in one of the action movies reliably broadcast