[ALBSA-Info] Ilir Meta

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Ilir Meta
May 17th 2001
>From The Economist print edition

Albania’s prime minister has to lift his people out of the mire—and keep 
them out of regional violence


HE MIGHT have become a champion weight-lifter. Instead, Ilir Meta chose 
politics—in which, as prime minister of Albania, he needs much the same 
qualities: muscle, persistence and an ability to pick the right moment for 
an all-out effort. His job is to heave his hard-pressed country out of the 
clutches of traffickers in drugs, weapons and illegal migrants; and, now, to 
resist the extremists who are trying to create an ethnic-Albanian fief in 
neighbouring Macedonia.

Mr Meta’s ex-communist Socialist Party is hoping to win a second four-year 
term in the elections in late June. It will remind the voters of the way it 
restored order, more or less, after months of anarchy following the collapse 
in 1997 of a series of fraudulent pyramid savings schemes. Mr Meta himself, 
only 18 months in his post, will point to his personal achievements during 
the Kosovo war, when, as deputy prime minister, working closely with 
international aid organisations, he handled the influx of at least 450,000 
ethnic-Albanian refugees. The solid victory that seems likely would much 
strengthen him against Fatos Nano, a discredited former prime minister who 
has hung on as party chairman and still wields considerable influence.



Starting young
Mr Meta, now 32, is one of Albania’s first professional politicians. As an 
economics student at Tirana University, he helped launch the transition to 
democracy, taking a leading role in the demonstrations in 1991 that 
persuaded President Ramiz Alia to open up Albania’s borders after almost 50 
years of self-isolation and abolish the one-party system. But rather than 
join the newly formed Democratic Party, he shrewdly preferred to help 
reshape the Socialists, and set up their pro-EU youth movement.

Since his promotion to prime minister—his predecessor gave up after failing 
to unseat Mr Nano as party leader—Mr Meta has concentrated on improving 
co-operation with the western countries whose help Albania needs to build up 
its crumbling infrastructure. Aid from Germany has surged since his 
government cracked down on imports of stolen Mercedes cars. Relations have 
also improved with Italy and Greece, Albania’s biggest investors and trading 
partners, and host to many Albanian migrant workers.

The $500m-odd that the migrants send home every year is one reason for the 
boom in trade and construction that should help the economy to grow by 7% or 
more this year, for the third successive year. Foreign investors are 
starting to return. Greek companies have acquired Albania’s fast-growing 
mobile-phone operator and a licence to set up a second cellular network. An 
Italian group has leased the biggest chrome mine, and a Turkish outfit has 
started processing scrap metal at an elderly Chinese-built steel plant. 
Albania still has far to go, however. Its hopes of joining the queue of 
candidates for EU membership were dashed last year, when it failed to meet 
conditions to negotiate a stabilisation and association agreement.

The rule of law is still less than solid. Mr Meta’s critics say the 
government’s control of Albania’s traditionally lawless mountain regions 
ends at dusk. Drug smugglers are estimated to earn as much as the migrants 
send home. And the glitzy apartment blocks going up in the port of Vlore 
indicate that shipping illegal migrants across the Adriatic is still a 
flourishing business. Western diplomats praise Mr Meta’s efforts against 
crime, but say he should do more about civil-service corruption—easier said 
than done, when $650 a month is a junior minister’s wage.



No Greater Albania for him
Other Balkan leaders think well of Mr Meta. Ethnic-Albanian rebels may 
battle in Macedonia, but he dismisses dreams of uniting all ethnic Albanians 
under a single flag. “Greater Albania is a project that doesn’t exist even 
in our minds,” he says. “Our priority is to leave behind our historical 
backwardness and start closing the gap between Albania and the rest of 
Europe.” Visiting Kosovo last December, he carefully avoided talking about 
its Albanians’ dreams of breaking away from Yugoslavia. If Mr Meta betrays a 
trace of resentment towards the neighbours, it is envy of Macedonia’s 
success in signing its EU stabilisation pact in spite of that country’s 
increasing instability.

This good sense may not prove a vote-winner. Some other Albanian politicians 
are less willing to ignore the idea of Greater Albania and worry about roads 
or water supplies; among them Sali Berisha, the mercurial former president 
from the north of the country who now leads the opposition Democratic Party. 
Unlike his predecessors, Mr Meta has avoided being drawn into an open feud 
with Mr Berisha. But as the election campaign heats up, candidates, 
especially in the northern and eastern districts adjoining Kosovo and the 
ethnic-Albanian region of Macedonia, will be tempted to bang the nationalist 
drum.

There are worrying reports too of guerrillas crossing into Macedonia from 
border areas. Extended families live—and guerrillas recruit—on both sides of 
this mountainous frontier. Guns for the rebels in Macedonia pass across it. 
Even where the Albanian government’s writ runs, which is not everywhere, its 
army and police, despite new equipment and training supplied by 
international donors, have trouble controlling the borders.

Yet, given his aims, Mr Meta—willingly enough—has to resist, as best he may, 
the nationalist (or merely criminal) groups and the pressures of those who 
go along with them. West European governments and the United States were 
happy to side with Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians when that meant undermining 
Slobodan Milosevic. With his downfall, they have changed track. They do not 
want Macedonia split along ethnic lines, and would aid no Albanian 
government working towards that. Nor would the resultant chaos encourage the 
EU to admit any south Balkan country, let alone one that had helped to cause 
it.



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