Albania President Can’t Halt Unrest Violence Grows As Police Unleashed

In moves that heightened anxiety in Europe about a flow of refugees out of Albania, the hard-line president had himself reappointed for a five-year term Monday and enforced a state of emergency which gives police the power to shoot stone-throwers on sight.

The main opposition newspaper was set afire, apparently by secret police, less than 12 hours after the introduction of Draconian press censorship laws.

Despite weeks of protests demanding that the government be sacked - protests that the government is trying to quash with the tough new orders - Parliament easily re-elected President Sali Berisha to a five-year term.

“Today is the day of open dictatorship in Albania,” said Neritan Ceka, head of the opposition Democratic Alliance. “Only a dictator could be elected under such conditions with martial law.”

While Europeans are concerned about refugees, Washington has expressed fears that greater unrest in Albania could spill over to a troubled Balkan region or beyond. The center of the unrest, the southern port of Vlore, is an easy boat ride from the Italian coast, where a tide of Albanian refugees arrived in 1991.

Under the state-of-emergency regulations read over state television early Monday, people will not be permitted to walk in groups of more than four, newspapers must submit their material to the government’s Defense Council before publication and police may shoot at anyone who throws objects at them.

Foreigners were given until 2 p.m. Monday to leave the southern part of the country. After that, police were authorized to shoot without warning in case of unrest.

A curfew will be enforced from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Anyone not carrying identification will be accompanied to a police station; in case of resistance, police will fire a warning shot, then shoot to kill.

The state of emergency was declared Sunday in an attempt to extinguish protests and violence growing out of public rage over the collapse of popular but high-risk investment schemes in which nearly every Albanian family lost money.

However, government authority appears to have dissolved across much of southern Albania, where civilians have seized arms.

At least three people were killed in clashes Sunday and Monday in the southern towns of Fieri, Saranda and Gjirokastra, state radio reported.

In Fieri, trucks and cars from Vlore surrounded the headquarters of an army division and the motorists opened fire. The crowd seized all the weapons stored in the barracks before police arrived.

In Saranda, what the radio characterized as “terrorist gangs” were shooting in the air and seized 2,000 rifles and an army boat from a naval base on Monday.

All sports and cultural activities were canceled.

The government also shut down the only satellite link in the capital used by Western journalists, in effect cutting off any foreign television reports inside or outside the country.

Greece and Italy cut ferry service to Albania on Monday and Greece increased patrols along its northern frontiers.

Italy dreads a repeat of a 1991 refugee flotilla, in which tens of thousands of Albanians fled across the Adriatic Sea on overcrowded ferries and homemade rafts.