[ALBSA-Info] Kosova and Albania's politicians

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Why Albania Politicians Are Not Welcome to Kosovo

TIRANA - The chief editor of a leading Prishtina daily said in a television 
interview two weeks ago that both opposition leader Sali Berisha and the 
leader of the ruling Socialist Party, Fatos Nano, were not welcome in 
Kosovo.
“It would be good for Kosovo if Berisha and Nano would not come to Kosovo,” 
said Baton Haxhiu, the editor of Koha Ditore said in an interview to private 
TV channel Klan.
For decades, Haxhiu said, Albania’s political class had manipulated Kosovo 
Albanian politicians and inflamed the already volatile political situation 
there.
Albania’s politicians have mingled and often fueled the animosity between 
the politicians in Kosovo, often not to the benefit of Kosovo’s Albanians 
themselves, analysts in Tirana said.
Nano decided not to take the step to Kosovo last month, where he was urged 
by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, the Hashim Thaci party, not to visit. The 
Socialists had supported during the war the former Marxist guerrillas, both 
with weapons and by allowing Albania’s territory to be used by the KLA.
The Socialists also turned a deaf ear when the leader of a guerrilla group 
that was against Thaci, was killed in Tirana. No murderer of Ahmet Krasniqi, 
the Defense Minister of Bujar Bukoshi’s LDK government, had been arrested by 
their government.
Berisha, as a former President of Albania, surely did not have a clean 
record in his dealings with the diaspora and the Albanians in the Balkans.
The DP leader is still considered a provocative and inflammatory politician, 
who exerts an authoritarian personality and survives out of conflicts he 
aggravates.
His mingling with the Albanian political classes in Kosovo and Macedonia 
have also proven to be conflictive.
Berisha was credited with using Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Albanian 
leader, for political benefit when he obliged Rugova to rally behind him in 
the hot Albania political issue of a draft constitution he wanted to pass. 
Voters turned that draft down, and saw Rugova’s interference as 
inappropriate.
He then strained the relations with Rugova, by urging Kosovars in 1996 to 
take the roads and abandon Rugova’s civil disobedience method. He supported 
at the time Adem Demaci, an adversary of Rugova.
Rugova himself did not forget about this. In Berisha’s worst moments, during 
1997, the Kosovar leader urged him to resign. “It is no big misfortune if a 
president resigns,” Rugova had commented in March that year, when Berisha 
was resisting popular demands to leave the office.
Rugova remains aloof to Berisha now, and he refused to hand him an official 
invitation of the LDK, the Democratic League of Kosovo, diplomatically 
saying that “Berisha is being invited by the people of Kosovo.”
Equally problematic were Berisha’s mingling with the affairs of the Albanian 
politicians in Macedonia. In 1994, he played down Nevzat Haliti and lobbied 
Albanians to vote for Arben Xhaferri, whom he had considered as loyal at the 
time. Xhaferri has long abandoned Berisha.
The biggest mistake Berisha made was during the Rambouillet talks of Kosovar 
Albanians with Serbs, where he urged them not to sign the agreement. The 
agreement was being pressured by the international community.
“This scrapped him of the right to visit Kosovo,” said speaker Skender 
Gjinushi on Wednesday.
But his record of creating turbulence in Albania, much to the fashion of a 
post-communist authoritarian and tricky ruler, had also been an example that 
the model Albania gives does not serve much to Kosovo.
In the end, both Socialists and Democrats, in their share to power, had 
trained their own Kosovo guerrilla groups, which would frequently turned 
against each other during the war last year. (By ARTUR LAZEBEU and ALTIN 
RRAXHIMI)

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