[ALBSA-Info] Mbi Gjakmarrjen/On Feuds

[Xhuliana Agolli]

New York Times Magazine
December 26, 1999, Sunday
The Curse Of Blood and Vengeance
By Scott Anderson

By conservative estimate, at least 200 people witnessed the murder of 
Shtjefen Lamthi in Shkoder, the northernmost city of Albania, early on the 
afternoon of Aug. 3, 1998. The 43-year-old farmer was walking south along 
Zyhdi Lahi Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the Rus marketplace in 
downtown Shkoder, his hands weighted down with plastic bags filled with his 
day's purchases. Just in front of a small tobacco kiosk at the northwest 
corner of Rus Square, a burly man who looked to be in his mid-30's suddenly 
stepped into Lamthi's path, brought up a Kalashnikov assault rifle, shot him 
21 times and walked away. None of the witnesses came forward to identify the 
killer. Instead, a wall of silence immediately descended. Today, 16 months 
later, Lamthi's murder remains officially unsolved, despite the fact that 
almost everyone knows exactly who killed him. A strange event, but not in 
Albania.

Albania was largely forgotten during the war in Bosnia, and only talked of 
indirectly during the war in Kosovo, as those driven out of the province by 
the Serbs were of Albanian descent. But the tiny nation of 3.5 million, 
tucked between the former Yugoslavia and Greece on the Adriatic coast, was 
high among the concerns for the Balkans at the beginning of this decade. 
Intent on transforming the poorest land in Europe into a free-market 
economy, on building a democracy atop the ashes of one of the world's most 
repressive Communist dictatorships, Western nations poured untold millions 
in aid into Albania in the early 1990's. For a time, all seemed to go well 
-- and then it all blew apart. Today, Albania is an economic ruin, its 
government is largely theoretical and the frequency of murders like that of 
Shtjefen Lamthi makes it one of the deadliest ''at peace'' nations on earth.

What is it about the Balkans that so defeats all efforts to calm them? In 
searching for an answer, observers have naturally focused their greatest 
attention on the succession of conflicts that have torn apart the former 
Yugoslavia. And in so doing, they have tended to conclude that the Balkans 
are singularly riven by centuries-old ethnic and religious hatreds -- that 
these are people, or better, groups of people, who simply can't live 
together.

''Ethnic cleansing'' and concentration camps are strong evidence of this 
assessment. And yet from my own travels through the Balkans over the past 
two decades, I've never found that explanation wholly convincing. How, for 
example, to reconcile the ''centuries of hate'' with the historical 
cosmopolitanism of places like Sarajevo and Belgrade? How to account for the 
high degree of intermarriage in cities between ''enemy'' groups like the 
Muslims and Orthodox Christians? What to make of a man like Radovan 
Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader whose genocidal pogroms against Muslims 
have earned him an indictment for war crimes, but who once routinely treated 
Muslim patients in his psychiatric practice and, by all accounts, got along 
with them very well? And how does this theory explain Albania, a corner of 
the Balkans that, despite its mix of Christians and Muslims, is relatively 
free of ethnic or religious tensions, but where people still die violently 
in appalling numbers?

I have come to believe that a key ingredient of the Balkan poison -- perhaps 
the key ingredient -- is a different kind of schism, one that largely 
disappeared from the rest of Europe a half-century ago: that between urban 
and rural, between village and city. In contrast to all but the most 
isolated pockets elsewhere in Europe, the gulf of experience between the 
city and the village in the Balkans represents an awful chasm. The cities of 
Sarajevo and Belgrade are -- or were, until only yesterday -- emblems of 
European sophistication and cultural fusion. The typical Balkan village, on 
the other hand, has always been a hard and pitiless place, one where ancient 
feuds are nursed and passed on for generations, where change and outside 
influence is deeply mistrusted. What's more, so ingrained is the Balkan 
village's medieval code of honor and loyalty -- and this is true for Muslim 
and Christian villages alike -- that even many of those who have escaped its 
grip and become city dwellers seem to return to its thrall in moments of 
crisis.

This was true, I think, of Radovan Karadzic, a university-educated 
psychiatrist -- a Modern Man -- who grew up in a tiny mountain hamlet so 
grim and remote that it essentially consisted of his own extended family. 
Only slightly larger was the home village of Karadzic's military commander 
-- and fellow indicted war criminal -- Gen. Ratko Mladic. Indeed, when 
looking at the backgrounds of those most responsible for the Balkan 
slaughters of this decade, including both Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and 
Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, who died earlier this month, you can't help 
noticing that all of them came from villages or small towns. When crisis 
came -- and the economic stagnation and political fracturing that befell 
Yugoslavia in the 1980's was surely a crisis -- it was to the primitive laws 
and passions of the village that these men reverted.

This past autumn, I set out to explore the nature of the Balkan village -- 
its codes and violent means of enforcing them. I chose to avoid the 
recognized battlefields of Bosnia and Kosovo and to journey instead to a 
corner of the Balkans that is officially at peace, but where the ancient 
ethos of the village has now resurfaced to deadly effect: northern Albania. 
The story of how Shtjefen Lamthi came to die in the streets of Shkoder, of 
who killed him and why, affords a glimpse into a world where old offenses 
are never forgotten, where no easy mechanism exists to break a murderous 
cycle of vengeance.

In a different part of Europe, Shkoder would be a tourist resort. A city of 
some 80,000 in northernmost Albania, it spreads gracefully over the plains 
beside Lake Shkoder, surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains. On its 
southern edge, a great medieval castle overlooks the confluence of the Kiri 
and Drin Rivers, the country beyond giving over to wheat fields and forest. 
Rather than a tourist resort, though, Shkoder today is pretty much a ruin, 
its lake thoroughly polluted, most of its old factories crumbled to dust, 
the rows of drab high-rise apartments on its outskirts seemingly ready to 
follow suit. Most of all, Shkoder suffers under the reputation of being one 
of the most dangerous places in a very dangerous country.

Testament to the level of violence in Shkoder is that the junior prosecutor 
assigned to solving Shtjefen Lamthi's murder has trouble recalling much 
about the crime. At the moment, he is juggling some two dozen criminal 
cases, almost all of them murders, and the killing of Lamthi in the summer 
of 1998 is basically ancient history to him, the details growing indistinct.

''It did have one unusual aspect,'' he finally offered, when I sat and 
talked with him in a quiet cafe about 100 yards from where the killing took 
place. ''To do it in public like that, with so many witnesses, that is not 
normal. It means the killer wanted to send a message.'' As for what that 
message might be, the prosecutor was unwilling to even hazard a guess.

On at least two points, there is no dispute: the end of Shtjefen Lamthi came 
very quickly and was very ugly. Before Lamthi had time to react, he was 
felled by several shots to the chest; his attacker then stood over him on 
the sidewalk and emptied the 30-bullet Kalashnikov clip into his body. When 
the firing finally stopped, the killer calmly slipped the assault rifle into 
a plastic bag and went on his way.

Brazen even by the standards of Shkoder, the murder in Rus Square seemed to 
underscore just how deeply a climate of mayhem had taken hold in Albania, 
and how little Shtjefen's killer had to worry about consequences. When the 
police arrived at the murder scene, they simply loaded his body for the trip 
to the morgue, not even bothering to question any potential eyewitnesses to 
the attack. A young girl who had been wounded in the fusillade of bullets 
was taken home rather than to a hospital, her parents apparently wanting no 
association with the event. Even Shtjefen's brothers, who had accompanied 
him into Shkoder that day, were tight-lipped. When they came to the morgue 
to collect his body, they professed to have absolutely no idea who might 
want their brother dead.

''That's how it works in Albania,'' the junior prosecutor said that 
afternoon in the cafe. ''No one talks.''

Albania has never registered very high in the average American's 
consciousness -- and for good reason. For 40 years following the end of the 
Second World War, the small mountainous country was hermetically sealed from 
the outside world by its Communist strongman, Enver Hoxha, its inhabitants 
existing in an isolation rivaled by only that of North Korea. What news did 
filter out tended to fit neatly into the ''News of the Weird'' column: the 
hundreds of thousands of tiny concrete bunkers -- Hoxha's mushrooms'' -- 
being built to repel some phantom foreign invasion; the fact that in the 
entire country there were only 700 television sets and 400 cars, all in the 
hands of the state. With the end of Communism, the world saw fleeting 
images, but they still tended to be odd and decidedly un-European: 
impoverished Albanians crammed shoulder to shoulder on rusting freighters 
pulling up on Italian beaches in the early 1990's, gunmen and looters taking 
to the streets in 1997 after vast pyramid schemes had bankrupted the 
economy.

For such a small country -- roughly the size of Maryland -- Albania has very 
large problems. Along with being the poorest nation in Europe, it suffers 
the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy. With 
virtually all its Communist-era factories in ruins, it has an unemployment 
rate well over 30 percent. It is also an environmental disaster zone, 
without a single waste-treatment plant in operation, and with huge tracts of 
the countryside now little more than toxic waste sites as a result of 
Hoxha's reliance on heavy industry.

Two years ago, both the national economy and the government collapsed, and 
looting was rampant. A special target of the looters was the police and army 
arsenals conveniently located outside nearly every town, so that Albania was 
suddenly awash in high-powered weaponry. Ever since, the central government 
in the capital, Tirana, has struggled to re-establish its legitimacy and 
some semblance of order.

While that campaign has had some success in Tirana, it has had little in the 
countryside. With whole towns controlled by heavily-armed smuggling mafias 
or mini-warlords, and ambushes frequent, travelers race to be off the roads 
before nightfall. In the northern district of Tropoje, several relief 
workers have been murdered by bandits, and the humanitarian organization, 
Doctors Without Borders, has had so many of its vehicles stolen that it has 
won the local nickname Doctors Without Cars.

The rise of organized and semiorganized crime is not the whole story, 
however. In fact, it has served to mask a deeper, darker truth about 
Albania. Communism never actually modernized Albania, but merely put the old 
ways, the village ways, in a kind of deep freeze -- much as Tito did in 
Yugoslavia following World War II. The collapse of the state and the 
national economy has led many Albanians to once again openly embrace the 
traditional laws and loyalties of the village. These are spelled out in the 
kanun (pronounced ka-NOON), a book of rules and oaths. By the dictates of 
the kanun -- there are actually several versions, most of which came into 
being centuries ago -- one's primary allegiance is to clan and community, 
not to the state. In accordance with this allegiance, taking revenge in 
order to defend the honor of one's family is not only permissible but also a 
sacred duty. Of course, unlike medieval times, now that duty can be carried 
out with modern weaponry like assault rifles.

The most enduring of the kanuns, and also the most severe, was that 
formulated by a 15th-century nobleman named Leke Dukagjini. For centuries, 
the horrifically bloody vendettas sparked by his kanun in the northern 
mountains of Albania was the stuff of Balkan legend, until the practice was 
largely stamped out during the country's Communist era. Now, with the flood 
of weapons into the streets following the 1997 crisis, his edicts have been 
resurrected to deadly effect, claiming lives all across Albania.

Dukagjini's base of power was a narrow rugged valley in northern Albania 
that now bears his name; not coincidentally, the Dukagjin Valley was also 
the original home of Shtjefen Lamthi and of the man who killed him. That 
man's name is Leka Rrushkadoli, and on Aug. 3, 1998, he stalked Shtjefen 
through the Rus marketplace to take revenge for an incident that had 
occurred 13 years earlier in their home village, Thethi, 50 miles northeast 
of Shkoder. That incident began with an overturned dinner table. But in 
murdering Shtjefen Lamthi, Leka Rrushkadoli had set into motion one of the 
trickier tenets of the Dukagjini kanun. By atoning one blood debt he had 
given birth to a new one. Now it was his family's turn to be hunted, the 
Lamthi family's turn to take vengeance.

Nestled in the uppermost reaches of the Dukagjin region, the vale of Thethi 
is imbued with a mournful kind of beauty, its spectacular setting tinged 
with a claustrophobic, end-of-the earth feel. Closed on all sides by sheer 
limestone cliffs of several thousand feet and cut through by a glacial blue 
river, its 500 or 600 inhabitants -mostly subsistence farmers and shepherds 
-- receive only a few hours of sunlight a day, and for centuries their only 
way out was the narrow river gorge cutting south into the rest of the 
Dukagjin Valley. Today, a rugged and rarely used dirt track leads over the 
mountains to connect Thethi with Shkoder, three hours away.

So isolated and poor was the Dukagjin that the Islamic Ottomans who ruled 
Albania for 400 years barely bothered with it. As a result its inhabitants, 
mostly Catholic, lived out an existence little changed from medieval times. 
And rather than submit to any concepts of Ottoman or Western law, they 
continued to govern themselves according to the Dukagjini kanun.

At the south end of the Thethi vale is a reminder of the kanun's power, a 
three-story stone tower known as a kula. In old times, the males of a family 
involved in a blood feud would gather in a kula to await a peace settlement 
or to learn the terms of the vendetta, a wait that could last months or even 
years. Testament to the frequency of such feuds is that at one time nearly 
every Dukagjini family had a kula. While today most of the kulas are gone, 
the mentality that they represent is not.

At the northern end of the valley, a narrow path leads over open fields to 
three stone houses. One belongs to Leka Rrushkadoli, the killer of Shtjefen 
Lamthi. Since the murder, his house has sat empty. Just up the slope from 
Leka's house is that of his 35-year-old cousin, Martin. Martin and I sat on 
his stone terrace one afternoon, eating olives and sipping raki, the 
homemade Albanian version of grappa, as his half-naked children scrambled 
about in the warm sunshine. But every few moments Martin turned to glance 
down the path. Caught in the act, he gave an embarrassed smile.

''Even sitting here,'' he explained, ''sometimes it makes me nervous.'' He 
grabbed the arm of his youngest child, a 3-year-old boy. ''Even this one, he 
has to worry, because after all this time we still don't know the terms of 
the blood.''

Since the murder in Rus Square, Martin and all the other males of the 
extended Rrushkadoli family -- some 50 just in the Thethi environs -- have 
been ''locked,'' confined to their houses as they wait for the Lamthi's to 
take their revenge. In that time, Martin has barely left his tiny patch of 
land; when he does, he always carries his Kalashnikov assault rifle with 
him. ''We are all afraid, just waiting for the peace to be done or. . . . '' 
He glanced down the path again. ''Well, if they come for me and I kill them 
first, then I am free. By the kanun, they can't come for me a second time.''

Taking in the limited view from the terrace -- a few fields and then the 
enclosing wall of cliffs -- I tried to imagine what it would be like to 
stare at that, and little else, for more than a year. When I brought this up 
with Martin, he seemed puzzled. ''It's dull,'' he finally managed, ''but I 
am luckier than most. My relatives in Shkoder, they can't even go outside 
their houses.'' Despite a life that amounts to a form of captivity, one in 
which death may be just around the corner, he has no anger toward Leka. 
''Leka had to do it to restore the family honor,'' he said. ''He had no 
choice.''

More than a mere set of laws, the kanun of Leke Dukagjini is a meticulous 
blueprint governing all aspects of communal life, with rules set in place 
for everything from how to bury the dead and conduct a proper wedding to 
what happens when one person's bee swarm ventures onto another's property. 
Even in the settlement of simple disputes, the logic can, at times, be 
elusive. If, for example, a neighbor's pig is marauding your property, it 
can be killed so long as it is not wearing a verze, or restraining collar; 
if it is wearing a verze -- which presumably should have kept it from 
wandering off in the first place -- and you kill it, the pig's owner has to 
be compensated.

But it is in the area of criminal law where matters become the most exacting 
-- and the most exotic. At its core, the kanun is all about defending one's 
honor, since ''a man who is dishonored is considered dead.'' While lesser 
offenses to one's honor can be settled through apologies or gift-giving, 
higher offenses mandate the taking of blood.

By the dictates of the kanun, a murder is the ultimate affront to a family's 
honor, the family existing in a limbo state of disgrace, essentially 
''owned'' by the killer, until they ''take their blood back'' -- and the 
most respectable way to do that is to kill the killer. Of course, once this 
is done, it means the other family is in disgrace and needs to take its 
blood back.

If it sounds like a recipe for slaughter, it gets worse. Since the kanun of 
Leke Dukagjini was not written down until the beginning of this century, its 
precepts were passed down orally -- which meant they mutated. In the 
original edicts, for example, only the actual murderer was targeted in a 
''blood,'' or a kanun-sanctioned vendetta, but those parameters gradually 
expanded over time to include all his male relatives. In some villages, 
certain crimes were judged so heinous that they mandated a 2-for-1 or even 
3-for-1 payback. A result was bloods that ranged over entire regions and for 
generations -- the longest reportedly lasted 240 years -- and left scores 
dead. They also had a devastating economic impact. Since a home could never 
be invaded in order to carry out a blood, the males of an entire extended 
family on the wrong side of a feud could spend years ''locked'' inside their 
houses or kulas.

It was not until the rise of Enver Hoxha and his particularly vicious brand 
of Communism in 1945 that the cycle of vendetta in northern Albania began to 
be broken. In his fanatical pursuit of transforming the nation into a Red 
beacon, Hoxha immediately set about crushing anyone or anything he deemed 
counterrevolutionary -- and he took special aim at the kanun. In the 
Dukagjin, the kulas were razed and the authority of village elders subsumed 
by party commissars. For those caught in possession of a book of kanun, the 
sentence could be years of hard labor in the prison camps and the banishment 
of their families to the opposite end of the country. An especially ghoulish 
end was said to await those found guilty of committing a blood killing; 
according to folklore, Hoxha ordered the killers to be buried alive in the 
coffins of their victims.

Not surprisingly, overt adherence to the kanun all but disappeared in the 
Dukagjin during the long Communist era. But the kanun was not eradicated. It 
survived quietly, beneath the Communist state, and it was a collision of 
these two forces -- the laws of the village and those of the state -- that 
ultimately set the Lamthis and Rrushkadolis of Thethi at war with each 
other.

Six miles north of Shkoder is a grim patch of wind-swept farmland, 
remarkable only for the rounded tops of a half-dozen old bunkers of the 
Hoxha era rising out of the earth. Just beyond is a decrepit, three-room 
farmhouse held together with wood scraps and plastic sheeting. For eight 
years, this has been home to Shtjefen Lamthi's older brother, Preka Lamthi, 
his wife, and their three daughters and two sons.

Preka Lamthi, 52, has the unmistakable air of a mean drunk, the sort who can 
slide from macho joviality to offended rage in a flash -- and on the day I 
visited, Preka had been drinking a lot. As we sat in his dingy living room, 
he brought out a bottle of homemade raki and filled the shot glasses he had 
set before us.

He began with a rambling, 15-minute disquisition on the evils of Communism, 
the horrors inflicted on Albania during Hoxha's rule. Then he suddenly 
stopped, raised his raki glass and waited until I raised mine. ''When the 
Communists came to Thethi,'' he said slowly, in broken English, ''I was the 
first person they asked to join the party. I didn't have to join. It was not 
required.'' He broke into a mirthless grin. ''I joined.''

In the next instant, the grin was gone, replaced by anger. ''And what do I 
have for my years of service?'' he sneered. ''This place. One cow, seven 
sheep, two pigs. That is all. I swear to you, that is all. That is what 
serving Hoxha gave me.''

In the collective memory of his people, Enver Hoxha lives on as a malignant 
ghost. From the end of World War II until his death, in 1985, he ruled 
Albania with all the capricious cruelty of a Stalin, combined with the 
paranoid xenophobia of North Korea's Kim Il Sung. For the slightest sign of 
disobedience to the Great Leader, an Albanian could be denounced as an enemy 
of the state and sent to one of the country's myriad prison camps; given the 
all pervasive security apparatus and the handing out of medals to 
schoolchildren who detected subversive tendencies in their parents, Hoxha 
was assured a steady supply of victims.

Maintaining this ''workers' paradise'' required constant vigilance against 
all taint from the outside. The few Albanians allowed to possess radios or 
televisions, mostly the party elite, were constantly watched by the secret 
police; those found to have rigged homemade aerials to pick up transmissions 
from nearby Italy were sent to the gulags. In the 1970's, even as the 
horse-drawn cart remained the chief source of transportation in his 
impoverished nation, the Great Leader embarked on a fantastically expensive 
project to ring Albania with his reinforced concrete bunkers, not stopping 
until some half-million of his ''mushrooms'' dotted the landscape. Perhaps 
most crucially of all, his rigid control of internal migration ensured that 
Albania remained a largely village society.

But of course, there is really no such thing as one-man rule; like despots 
everywhere, Hoxha sat atop a great pyramid of capos, each level of the 
pyramid lording its power over those below and at the mercy of those above. 
In the village of Thethi, Hoxha's man was Preka Lamthi.

First recruited into the party as a teenager in the 1960's, Preka steadily 
rose through the ranks until he was named the secretary general for the 
Thethi region in the late 1970's. As such, he was one of the most powerful 
men in the Dukagjin, with virtual life-and-death control over everyone else. 
To the Rrushkadoli family, a clear sign of Preka's omnipotence was what 
occurred inside his house on the night of Jan. 13, 1985.

Both the Lamthi and Rrushkadoli clans had been in the Thethi area for 
centuries -- in fact, given the degree of intermarriage over the years, it 
was difficult to determine where one family ended and the other began -- and 
one of Preka's closest friends since childhood was a neighbor named Noue 
Rrushkadoli. As men, and as fellow members of the Communist Party, the two 
frequently got together in the evenings to socialize, which usually meant 
playing cards over glasses of raki. So was the plan on the night of Jan. 13, 
1985, when Noue dropped by the Lamthi house in Thethi; already gathered in 
the living room was Preka, his younger brother, Shtjefen, and two or three 
other men. While accounts differ on specifics, all agree that a lot of 
drinking ensued.

''For a time,'' Preka recalled, ''everything was fine, all having a good 
time. But then Noue lost his temper over something -- and he had a bad 
temper when drinking.''

According to Preka, the argument culminated in Noue's overturning the 
dining-room table, one of the gravest insults that can be committed in an 
Albanian home. When Preka ordered him from the house, Noue instead went for 
his knife, stabbing Shtjefen six times before being overpowered. Then, 
either there in the living room or in the corridor leading to the front 
door, someone stabbed Noue once in the chest. The blow hit his heart and he 
fell dead.

''It was all a stupid, tragic thing,'' Preka says, ''because Noue was a good 
friend of mine. But you have to say he brought his end on himself by taking 
up the knife.''

The authorities agreed. At an official inquest into the incident, a tribunal 
ruled that whoever struck the death blow -- it was never determined which of 
the men in the room stabbed Noue -- had acted in self-defense, and the case 
was dropped.

Dropped but not forgotten. To Noue Rrushkadoli's two teenage sons, Leka and 
Angelo, then 19 and 16 respectively, Preka Lamthi had escaped justice 
because of his high position in the Communist Party. Even more to the point, 
he had violated one of the most solemn covenants of the kanun.

''The house of the Albanian belongs to God and the guest'' reads the kanun 
of Dukagjini, and so sacred is this notion of hospitality that a homeowner 
is expected to lay down his life for it. For the woman of the house, says 
the kanun, churlish behavior toward a guest deserves the same punishment as 
adultery: a cut locket of hair for a first offense, a bullet in the back for 
a second. There have even been cases of killers finding protection in the 
homes of their victims, for, as the kanun states, ''If a guest enters your 
house, even though he may be in blood with you, you must say to him, 
'Welcome!' ''

While Preka Lamthi had clearly failed to maintain these high standards, to 
Noue Rrushkadoli's two sons that wasn't the half of it. By officiating over 
the death of their father inside the Lamthi house, Preka had committed a 
crime explicitly listed in Chapter 157 of the kanun as mandating the 
''fire-torch and ax'' punishments: ''If someone commits these crimes, he is 
executed by the village, his family is fined, his house is burned, his trees 
are cut down, his garden and vineyards are destroyed, and his survivors are 
expelled from the country with their belongings.''

If the Rrushkadoli brothers couldn't restore their family's honor so long as 
Preka was the Communist Party boss in Thethi, they were willing to wait.

In 1988, with Hoxha dead three years and the Communist apparatus in Albania 
disintegrating, Leka made his first strike. Ambushing Preka in a Thethi 
lane, he managed to stab him several times before being pulled away. 
According to Preka, it was his first indication that the Rrushkadoli boys 
considered themselves ''in blood'' with him.

''And that is not the way of the kanun,'' he told me. ''You must inform the 
other side immediately that a blood exists. I had gone to their father's 
funeral, I had shaken their hands, so to attack me years later, this was a 
violation of the kanun.''

Not seriously injured in the attack, Preka declined to press charges against 
Leka. For the next several years the two families maintained a wary vigil -- 
even as the society around them came apart at the seams.

When Communism finally collapsed in 1991, it was as if Albania had awakened 
from a 46-year slumber. For the first time, Albanians saw both the cruel 
hoax they had lived in Hoxha's ''paradise,'' and the comparatively fantastic 
wealth of their capitalist neighbors. Almost overnight, the face of the 
country changed. Tens of thousands of young men streamed for the borders, 
becoming the new ''guest labor'' of the continent, while mountain villagers 
who had been barred from moving in Hoxha's day poured down into Tirana and 
the coastal towns. With land ownership and free enterprise having been 
banned for nearly a half-century, everywhere a mad scramble was on to stake 
a claim or start a business.

Amid the tumult, backwaters like Thethi quickly emptied out -- and among the 
first to leave that isolated village was the Lamthi family. By late 1992, 
nearly all the extended clan, including Preka and his five brothers, had 
gone over the mountains to resettle on the wind-swept plains north of 
Shkoder.

If no longer enjoying the relative privilege they had known with Preka as 
party boss in Thethi, the six Lamthi brothers were at least able to get by 
on their Shkoder farmsteads. Gradually, with the Albanian economy coming to 
life under a succession of nominally democratic governments, they could even 
afford a few simple pleasures: radios, televisions, a battered old Mercedes 
for running errands into town. As for the old blood feud with the 
Rrushkadolis, most of the brothers barely gave it a thought.

''We would watch if someone approached the house,'' Preka said, ''maybe look 
around a bit when we went into town, but nothing more than that. It was a 
new time, so those things were over.''

Life slowly improved for the Rrushkadoli boys, too. In 1996, they also 
abandoned Thethi, moving together into a small apartment on a back street of 
Shkoder. If the living quarters were cramped -- both Leka and Angelo were 
now married -- they were earning enough from short-term jobs to keep things 
together and at least imagine a better future. The feud with the Lamthis, 
now living six miles away, seemed all but forgotten to Leka and Angelo as 
well.

For all, the brighter future ended very abruptly in early 1997, when Albania 
was felled by one of the most outlandish financial swindles the world has 
ever seen.

By the mid-1990's, so-called investment banks had begun popping up in 
Albania and promising remarkable returns on client's deposits, often 200 
percent to 300 percent annually. With little understanding of how capitalism 
actually worked, and with the Albanian government doing little to monitor 
the banks, Albanians began selling everything they had to cash in on the 
gold rush. As the deposits grew, so did the competition among the ''banks''; 
by late 1996, several were advertising returns of 40 percent per month.

In truth, the investment opportunities were nothing more than pyramid 
schemes, and when they started to collapse in February 1997, Albania 
exploded into violence. The riots seemed to release a collective rage that 
had been held back since Hoxha's time, and the mobs turned their wrath on 
any symbol of authority they could find: police barracks, town halls, even 
the old state-run factories. They also turned their attention to the weapons 
arsenals that Hoxha had built outside almost every town. By the time the 
government was brought down and more than 6,000 mostly Italian peacekeeping 
troops arrived in April of that year, Albania had been transformed into

a very scary place; there were now an estimated 650,000 modern weapons, 
mostly Kalashnikov assault rifles, in the hands of people largely 
ungoverned, destitute and steeped in the notions of blood and vengeance.

One person that the collapse deeply affected was Leka Rrushkadoli. Now 35 
and unemployed with a young son to care for, he seemed to remember suddenly 
his old blood feud from the Dukagjin. Buying a Kalashnikov assault rifle in 
the Shkoder market, he set out to find one of the Lamthi brothers. The first 
one to cross his path, on the early afternoon of Aug. 3, 1998, was Shtjefen.

Of course, the 1997 crash had also profoundly altered the Lamthi family's 
lot in life, leaving them little incentive to ignore the ''in blood'' 
demands placed on them by the kanun for the murder of one of their own.

Llesh Prela clearly subscribes to the best-defense-is-a-good-offense theory. 
A ''cousin'' of Leka Rrushkadoli, in the elastic way that term is used in 
the Dukagjin, the 71-year-old shepherd has made a number of preparations 
around his little stone house in the back reaches of Thethi should one of 
the Lamthis come calling. When asked what those preparations consist of, the 
elfin old man smiled mischievously.

''Well,'' he said through an interpreter, ''all of us who are related to 
Leka have guns in our houses, of course, but maybe we also have them buried 
in the fields for when we are working. Maybe some of us have grenades, even 
rocket launchers. The situation in Thethi today requires it.''

For seven months after the killing of Shtjefen Lamthi, Llesh Prela never 
left his property. He now feels emboldened enough to venture a little 
farther afield, usually to visit with other Rrushkadoli relatives in Thethi 
who are similarly ''locked.'' With evident amusement he told of a cousin who 
lived in Canada for 10 years, but who returned to Albania the previous 
summer.

''Bad luck,'' he laughed, ''because now he is locked, too.''

The Lamthi-Rrushkadoli blood feud is, in fact, just one of two currently 
taking place in Thethi. The other is so bizarre that Mark Shyti, a wizened 
man who fixed his age at ''about 80,'' can barely bring himself to speak of 
it. ''It is within one family,'' he whispered with incredulity, ''one set of 
cousins against another. This is something I've never heard of before, 
against everything in the kanun.''

This blood is such a disgrace and blot on Thethi's reputation that the old 
man became fretful at the mere suggestion of my meeting the family. ''But 
these people are very low,'' he said, ''not worthy of being spoken to. It 
could cause problems for you.'' The implication was that my own status as a 
privileged guest in the valley would suffer should I pursue the matter.

As a lifelong resident of the Dukagjin, Shyti has tremendous experience with 
bloods; he estimated that, in this region of some 13,000 inhabitants, there 
have been at least 200 blood killings in his lifetime. ''Very many when I 
was young,'' he said, ''then very few during the dictatorship. Now it has 
come back again, and new ones are starting all the time.''

As one of the elders of Thethi, Shyti is occasionally called upon to mediate 
in local disputes and, with luck, forge a peaceful resolution. He also 
represents a vital bridge over the Hoxha interregnum, drawing on his 
knowledge of earlier bloods to set precedents -- and limits -- for those 
occurring now. Late into one night, we sat with half a dozen other men in 
the living room of his son's home as he described noteworthy bloods of the 
past and their legalistic peculiarities. The conversation eventually turned 
to a very recent incident, one that revealed both the complexity of the 
kanun and the slipperiness with which it can be applied.

Six days earlier, a married couple from the Dukagjin had been stopped on the 
road to Shkoder by four bandits. The woman had a pistol hidden in her purse 
and, when the bandits' attention was diverted, used it to shoot two of them 
dead; the other two bandits then returned fire, killing her and wounding her 
husband before fleeing.

For the next half-hour, Shyti was silent as the other men in the room 
offered theories as to where the blood lies in this case. Most eventually 
decided that the dead woman's family -- that is, her father and brothers -- 
should now take revenge against the families of the two surviving bandits, 
until Shyti raised a dissenting finger.

''By the kanun,'' he intoned, ''banditry is permissible if it is to feed 
one's hungry children. If that can be proved in this case, then it is the 
families of the dead bandits who have a blood with the woman's family, 
because it was she who started the shooting.''

The others in the room nodded solemnly at this pronouncement, but I couldn't 
recall ever having come across the ''hungry children'' clause in the kanun. 
When I politely pointed this out, the old man shrugged and said, ''It is a 
local interpretation.''

Before setting out for Shkoder, Albanian journalists in Tirana had warned me 
of a city under virtual siege, its streets cleared by early afternoon, the 
nights given over to shootouts between local mafias and the mountain 
clansmen who have come down in recent years and brought their blood feuds 
with them. The reality was not nearly so dire. Shkoder residents this past 
autumn didn't begin to head indoors until 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and an 
elite, well-armed police battalion trained by the Italians was manning 
roadblocks on the edge of town, conducting spot checks of travelers from 
behind black ski masks. The heavy police presence was clearly having an 
effect; as the United Nations noted about Shkoder in one of its weekly 
security reports: ''The situation is calm, with only two reported murders on 
the 19 Oct.''

One of those responsible for Shkoder's incremental return to civility is a 
dapper 41-year-old man named Emin Spahia. A former hospital barber, Spahia 
is now the general secretary of the All-Nation Reconciliation Mission, a 
grass-roots organization dedicated to ending the blood feuds in Albania 
through mediation. This is no simple task, since arranging a peace can take 
years of negotiations with the warring families and then, if a peace is 
achieved, a mass gathering of all the extended relatives must be organized 
for a ceremony.

''You must get them all to gather for the ceremony,'' Emin Spahia told me. 
''Otherwise, someone can decide they are not bound by the peace, and the 
blood will start again.''

Spahia came to his current vocation after his own family was involved in a 
blood. In 1987, his uncle was killed in a dispute with a neighboring family, 
and five years later his cousin took revenge. While the feud was eventually 
settled, Spahia spent eight months ''locked,'' long enough to persuade him 
never to be involved in another blood and to work toward ending others.

By his account his work has been remarkably successful. With virtually no 
outside funds (the Soros Foundation did donate a computer and two-way radio 
system this year), he and his mediators -- usually elderly men respected in 
their communities -- have met with more than 2,000 Albanian families ''in 
conflict'' in the past two years. In the process, they have managed to head 
off some 350 disputes before they reached the killing stage -- even divorces 
and car accidents can spark bloods -- and brought an end to more than 600 
active feuds. As Spahia proudly pointed out, that translates into more than 
10,000 people being freed of their ''locked'' status, including more than 
1,000 children now able to return to school. At the same time, with an 
estimated 2,700 feuds still active in Albania and more starting up every 
day, Spahia suspects he won't be out of a job any time soon.

''Most of these go back to the land ownership disputes of '91,'' he said, 
referring to the national scramble for property after the collapse of 
Communism, ''but then when all the guns came out in the '97 crisis, that's 
when the killing really started. The big problem now is a lack of 
government, so it keeps spreading. Before, the Dukagjini kanun was only in 
the north, but since '97 you are seeing it in Tirana, in the south, even in 
other countries.''

According to Emin Spahia and others, there have been several cases of 
Albanian emigres in the United States and Western Europe being killed as a 
result of homeland feuds; there have also been cases of emigres returning to 
Albania in order to take revenge.

By coincidence, the headquarters of the All-Nation Reconciliation Mission -- 
a windowless second-floor cubicle donated by a local merchant -- is a mere 
40 feet from the spot where Leka Rrushkadoli gunned down Shtjefen Lamthi. 
That blood feud is one that Spahia and his mediators have been trying to 
end. Over the past year, the general secretary has paid a number of visits 
to the Lamthis on their farmsteads north of town, as well as to many of the 
Rrushkadolis who are ''locked'' in Shkoder.

''I'm optimistic about ending this one,'' Emin Spahia said, ''because the 
Lamthis seem ready to negotiate. The big obstacle, though, is Leka. His 
relatives are still too nervous to arrange a meeting with him, and until we 
speak, it's very difficult to negotiate a peace.''

When I mentioned that I'd heard Leka was living as a fugitive in the hills 
above Thethi, Spahia smiled. ''Yes,'' he said, ''that is what families like 
to say in these situations, but it is possible that he is still here in 
Shkoder.''

That night an intermediary with extensive contacts in the ''locked'' 
community of Shkoder led a rambling tour through the town's deserted back 
streets. It turned out that Shkoder's ''locked'' inhabitants, estimated to 
number about 1,500, maintain an informal network among themselves; after 
knocking on the doors of half a dozen homes, and staring down the barrels of 
several guns, we were directed to an address near downtown. After a brief 
discussion with a woman at the building's entrance, we were told to come 
back in the morning, that someone who might know Leka's whereabouts would 
meet with us.

The metal door opened a few inches, and a heavily-built man quickly looked 
me up and down. I noticed he had worried eyes and was very pale. After a 
moment, he pushed the door open and ushered me inside, into a tiny living 
room adorned with old family photographs and Catholic icons. As we sat, the 
man continued to study me, seeming both timid and wary. ''I am Leka,'' he 
said finally.

A few minutes later, we were joined by Angelo, Leka's younger brother. He, 
too, was very pale, but he had used his 14 months of house imprisonment to 
learn rudimentary English from a textbook.

For the next hour, Leka matter-of-factly explained why he killed Shtjefen 
Lamthi, starting with how his father came to die in Preka's house 13 years 
before. Interestingly, his account of that first death differed very little 
from Preka's, and he readily acknowledged that his father had escalated the 
argument by going for his knife. When I suggested that this act made his 
father more culpable in the tragedy, and the Lamthis less so, Leka simply 
shrugged.

''That doesn't matter in the kanun,'' he replied. ''By the kanun, the very 
worst crime is to kill someone inside your house, no matter the 
circumstances or how it started.''

''That's right,'' Angelo chimed in. ''For this, the Lamthis should have left 
Thethi. By the kanun, Preka should have been executed, his house destroyed 
and all his family made to leave the valley and never show their faces 
again.''

Leka nodded. ''But we didn't ask for that. All we wanted was for Preka to 
come to us and ask for our forgiveness. But he was the big party boss for 
the district, he knew he couldn't be touched, so he treated it like nothing. 
For 13 years we waited for him to come to us, and finally I could not wait 
any longer.''

Throughout the brothers' tale ran a deep current of animosity for Preka. For 
Shtjefen, on the other hand, there seemed no rancor and even a measure of 
sympathy; after all, both Leka and Angelo recognized that he was the first 
victim in the whole case, stabbed by their drunken, knife-wielding father. 
It prompted me to ask an obvious question.

''Rather than kill Shtjefen, why didn't you wait for the chance to kill 
Preka?''

Leka pondered. ''But it made no difference'' he said eventually. ''By the 
kanun, any of the Lamthis were equal, just so long as one of them paid. I 
saw Shtjefen first, so he paid.''

What the Rrushkadoli brothers wanted now was a peace settlement with the 
Lamthis so that they could venture out their apartment door and return to 
the world. The score has been evened at one death apiece and, as Emin Spahia 
had earlier pointed out to me, it is always easier to broker peace when the 
score is tied. Except this blood feud doesn't quite have a tie score, as 
Angelo reminded his brother: ''There is still the time you stabbed Preka in 
Thethi.''

''That's right,'' Leka conceded. ''That will have to be negotiated.''

Later, when I told Emin Spahia of my meeting with Leka, he was pleased. 
''This means he is trusting now,'' Spahia said, ''maybe even a bit desperate 
for it all to end. I'm very confident that we will have a peace here very 
soon.''

He may be right, but I can't say I share his confidence. I remember sitting 
across from Preka Lamthi, his look of feigned amazement when I asked about 
the ongoing blood feud between him and the Rrushkadolis.

''Blood? But we have no blood with them. That is all in the past now.''

At that, his two grown sons had exchanged sly glances and smirked.

I also remember what the Rrushkadoli brothers said as I left them. Perhaps 
emboldened by the presence of a visitor, they had stepped across their 
apartment threshold to stand on the landing and gaze out at the sunlit 
street.

''The Lamthis should give us peace now,'' Angelo said, ''because technically 
they still owe us. We are not asking for anything more but, by the terms of 
the kanun, for killing our father inside their house, they owe us three 
deaths.''

''That's right,'' Leka had nodded, blinking furiously against the sunlight 
he had barely glimpsed in 14 months. ''Three of theirs.''



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