Order is being restored in Tirana for the world's press at least. But whatever the outcome of the uprising, one thing is certain. The order being restored will not satisfy the Albanian people.
The scale and violence of the March uprising caught everyone by surprise, yet it should not have. A people which was promised freedom from oppression and a chance to enrich itself has been reduced to beggary by a corrupt, authoritarian regime.
Capitalism as a system depends on credit a term derived from the Latin word credere, to believe. Like many before them, the Albanian people believed the promises and then were swindled out of all they had. When the EU poured in $500 million in aid and created a phoney boom, the Albanians believed that at last they had a chance of a better life. They have been portrayed as simple and naive, but it is only a couple of years since western governments and their advisers were portraying the country as a glowing example of capitalist liberalisation.
The Albanians' belief was no different from that of the Americans in the Reagan years, who put billions of dollars into deregulated savings and loans (building society) schemes only to discover they were riddled with fraud. The only real difference between what happened in Albania and the United States lies in the fact that the American state could bail out the savings and loans schemes and avert the bankruptcy of the nation.
The media experts and politicians alike throw up their hands in horror at the 'chaos' of the Albanian uprising. But the uprising was itself a reaction to the chaos wrought in people's lives, the betrayal of hopes, the broken dreams. The people's reasonable response was to protest, to seek compensation, and to demand the removal of the man they saw as principally responsible. When Sali Berisha unleashed the army and the secret police, the people again responded in the most intelligent way. They persuaded the soldiers to join them, raided the barracks, broke open the armouries, took over their towns and villages, seized stocks of food.
This was not chaos, it was, potentially, the birth of a new order. It was an amazingly peaceful process, considering the years of repression. The only real venom was directed at Berisha and his henchmen, and the secret police, the Shik. Yet even they were mainly spared the summary execution they deserved.
The misfortune of the Albanians is that an uprising demands a leadership worthy of the people. In some areas this has happened, above all in the south of the country. Mass meetings have elected town and village committees which have won widespread local support, preventing looting and organising transport, food distribution and medical supplies.
But an uprising is like a vast chemical process: the scum can also rise to the top. There are gangsters on both sides, seeking to take advantage of the situation. Berisha's new militia has been recruited from the underworld, while in Vlorė, for example, the rebellion appeared to include speculators with links to organised crime in Italy. Local drug barons also seem to have been involved.
At the same time, figures from the old Stalinist regime appear everywhere. Berisha is, of course, a former member of the apparatus, who subsequently shed his skin and slithered over to promote an Albanian version of Thatcherism in the Democratic Party (PSDS). The newly appointed prime minister, Fatos Nano, was a reform economist under the old regime of Ramiz Alia and is now leader of the Socialist Party (the PSS) the former Stalinist party under a new name. During the uprising Alia was sprung from jail, where he was serving a nine year sentence for abuse of power, and is now no doubt negotiating for a return to the 'government of national stability' which he led in coalition with the PSDS in 1991-92.
At local level some Socialist Party cadres clearly have popular support: the PSS has a particularly strong base in the countryside. Yet the most striking thing is that throughout most of Albania the appeals of the party leaders had little or no effect on the uprising. The people do not trust the professional politicians, which makes the determination of the EU governments to support them with police 'advisers' even more dangerous than their usual adventures in the Balkans.
But the EU and the US cannot stop interfering in the Balkans, even if some governments are much less enthusiastic than others. Albania is not a backwater like Rwanda, where the slaughter only becomes really embarrassing to the great powers when it reaches the level of genocide. Albania matters.
The instability of the southern Balkans, stretching from Durrės in the west to Istanbul in the east, is the historic fault line of imperialism. It was here that the old Turkish Empire broke up, first with the creation of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania in 1878, and finally with the expansion of the Austrian Empire, the creation of Albania, and the expansion of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria on the eve of the First World War. The aftermath of that war saw huge transfers of population the term 'ethnic cleansing' had not yet polluted the language alongside the creation of Yugoslavia and the consolidation of the Greeks in Macedonia.
The big loser was Turkey. The big winners were Serbia and Greece, acting under the protection of the great powers, France and Britain, whose main preoccupation at the time was to seize control of the Middle East, which they achieved in 1920.
For the Balkans the legacy of this period of butchery and intrigue and the horrors which followed the Italian and German invasions during the Second World War was a patchwork of ethnic groups and national minorities, each suffering discrimination and most mistrusting each other. As a result the region is beset with conflicting territorial claims.
Albania did not exist until 1912. Historically its roots are in Kosovo, 90 percent Albanian but controlled by the Serbs. In neighbouring Macedonia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, 20 percent of the population is Albanian. Macedonia's newly won independence is hardly recognised by Greece and Bulgaria, which both claim parts of the country. To the north, in Bulgaria, there is a large oppressed minority of Macedonians and, alongside them, a Turkish population which has suffered continued religious and political persecution by the authorities. Meanwhile, back in Albania, there is a Greek population which is concentrated in the extreme south of the country right in the heart of the current revolt.
Karl Marx once wrote that the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the southern Balkans. On top of the imperial legacy is the Stalinist one: in particular the repression of Kosovo and the Bulgarian minorities. In both cases the regimes have used the national question and the 'threat' of a breakaway to help divert popular anger away from the authorities. As the different Balkan states grapple with continuing economic crisis and mass unemployment, the potential exists for such diversions on a far wider scale.
For both the EU and the US governments, the nightmare scenario is a conflict which brings in the two Nato members, Greece and Turkey, the historic rivals for control, still at loggerheads over Cyprus. Both Greece and Turkey have been armed to the teeth in recent years, mostly with Nato tanks and planes, as the other Nato powers have scaled down their forces. The interests of the great powers, as ever, lie in a balancing act divide and rule to prevent a strong regional power emerging.
For socialists, the history of the Balkans is both an object lesson in the terrible legacies of imperialism and Stalinism and an important test. The rights of national minorities have to be defended but there are no national solutions. Any attempts by outside powers to 'resolve' the issues will, as in the past, intensify the conflicts. Socialists have always argued that the only way out of the cycle of economic crisis and national conflict in the Balkans lies in social revolution and a federation of independent states.
The Albanian uprising may seem doomed to be diverted into banditry or, worse, some nationalist adventure. Yet beneath the surface there are other forces at work. The symbolic salute of those involved in the uprising was not the two-fingered 'V for Victory' of Berisha's party, nor the raised fist of the old regime. It was three fingers: the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand. That is not an Albanian salute. It is traditionally a Serbian one. It was the salute seen night after night on the television in the closing months of last year the salute of those demonstrating in Belgrade against their hated president, Milosevic.
One gesture does not make a revolution. But it is a symbol of the power of people to generalise, to make connections between their own struggles and those they might in other times consider their enemies. Just as workers in western Europe can link arms in the struggle against Renault, those in the Balkans have shown that internationalism is not an empty slogan.