The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Guerrilla Politics
Tirana | 29 January 2010 | By Besar Likmeta
The Council of Europe voted through a resolution on Thursday that aims to provide a platform for the government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha and opposition Socialist leader Edi Rama, to find common ground and resolve their latest political squabble.
The resolution follows months of accusations, during which Rama has accused Berisha of electoral fraud and corruption in the June 28th parliamentary elections. The Socialist party boss and Tirana mayor claims that his party didn't lose the election, but that it was stolen by the government.
His party and supporters have held a series of rallies across the country seeking a partial recount. Tens of thousands of Socialist Party supporters rallied in Tirana on November 20th.
Berisha's has dismissed any possibility of a recount, arguing that he cannot circumvent the courts that have ruled against it, and responded to the opposition rally with an even larger get-together of his supporters and public employees in Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square.
Since the new parliament sat in September, Rama’s 64 elected deputies have boycotted its sessions, halting the passage of any legislation that requires more than a simple majority.
The boycott has poisoned the political climate in Albania and both European and American diplomats have called for a political solution in order not to hamper the country's reform process, vital for its EU integration.
However, both Berisha and Rama have refused to budge from their entrenched positions, keeping parliamentary life in suspended animation, and launching a stream of personal jibes against each other.
The two opponents have over the past months hurled increasingly harsh insults at each other, accusing the other of homosexuality, domestic violence, insanity and fascism.
Meanwhile the two parties have devoted their main energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – both have frequently succeeded.
The Socialist and the Democrats, the two main political powerhouses in Albania since the end of the Stalinist regime of former dictator Enver Hoxha in 1991, have a long history of political animosity, usually following disputed electoral processes.
With interlocutor’s from the Council of Europe due to descend on Tirana, as they have done many times in what now seems to be the country’s endless transition to democracy, the model of guerrilla politics that has characterised it, seems to reaffirm itself.
The scheme is simple - constitutional power is challenged in Albania after every poll, with the loser inflaming a pseudo messianic battle for democracy that somehow will lead to the end of the history of presumed frauds,- but which in the end does not fulfill its promise.
If Rama is leading the charge this time around, his arch rival Berisha has led it many times before when the Democratic Party was in opposition. Tirana is one of those places where history is always doomed to be repeated.
Actor Larry Hagman used to joke that politicians are a bit like diapers, they need to be changed regularly and for the same reason. Unfortunately, Albania has been wearing the same old rags for the last two decades and seems in no hurry to go shopping.
