: Fatos Lubonja
: The False Apocalypse
: Istros Books
: 9781908236623
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Regional- und Ländergeschichte
: English
: 253
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
This unique and disturbing work concerns the events of 1997, a tragic year in the history of post-communist Albania. After the world's most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and opened to capitalism, many people fell prey to fraudsters who invited them to invest in so-called'pyramid schemes'. At the start of 1997, these pyramids crumbled one after another causing wide-spread demonstrations and protests. The conflict became increasingly violent, leading to the collapse of the state and of the country's institutions. Prisons were opened, crowds stormed arms depots, and the country was abandoned to anarchy and gang rule. Lubonja has chosen to tell this incredible story through a narrative technique that operates on two levels: a third-person narrator, who describes the large-scale events that made international headlines, and the narrative of Fatos Qorri, the author's alter ego, who describes his own dramatic experiences in a personal diary. The book begins with the synopsis of a novel entitled 'The Sugar Boat' that Fatos Qorri intends to write about the spread of a small pyramid scheme luring people to invest supposedly in a sugar business. However, as the major pyramids collapse, real events overtake anything he has imagined and Fatos Qorri finds himself in the midst of a real-life tragedy.

Fatos Lubonja is a writer and editor of the quarterly journal Përpjekja [Endeavor], a representative of the Forum for Democracy, and a leading figure in Albania's political life. At twenty three, Lubonja was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for 'agitation and propaganda' after police found his diaries, which contained criticisms of Enver Hoxha. He was later re- sentenced without trail and spent a total of 17 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He was released in 1991. Lubonja's first book in English, Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag, was published to great acclaim by I. B. Tauris (2006) followed by False Apocalypse (Istros, 2015). Among his many literary prizes, he received the Alberto Moravia Prize for International Literature in 2002 and the Herder Prize for Literature in 2004 and the Prince Claus Award, 2015.

FOREWORD

By Andrew Gumbel

For a while, in the mid-1990s, Albania was as fascinating and tragic a place as anywhere on the planet. Imagine a jail break, only on an unimaginably large scale. Three million people had broken free from decades of repression, poverty and near-total isolation under the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha and his successor, Ramiz Alia, and they were in a frenzy to make up for lost time. Certainly, they yearned for an open society, a market economy, democratic institutions – everything that could propel them closer to the living standards of their European neighbours. But they were also impatient for more immediate satisfactions, to bring in a “boatload of money” as one Albanian friend of mine liked to say, and live like kings for a change.

The pent-up creative energy was palpable. Many Albanians were street-smart and worldly. Some had acquired first-class educations, supplementing the politically tainted rigours of their formal schooling with smuggled books, tapes, contraband television signals – whatever could help them break through the artificial walls erected around them. Poverty felt like a needless aberration they could overcome now with just their wits and sheer force of will. After the nightmare of Stalinist totalitarianism, of labor camps, prison cells and an omnipresent fear, what new challenge could possibly stump them? They had natural resources, a temperate climate, a beautiful coastline and a population hungry for self-improvement. Decades of enforced collectivism made the lure of individual action irresistible. If they had to lie, cheat, steal, betray and trample over each other to get what they wanted, then so be it. Wasn’t that the way of the world? The Albania that emerged from the communist era thus became a teeming laboratory of illusions fostered and dashed, of optimism and abiding suspicion, of staggering ingenuity and monstrous corruption. When I first visited, as an eager and wide-eyed young reporter in the spring of 1995, I found it all exhilarating and oddly endearing. Tirana, the capital, was a maze of crumbling buildings and rutted streets filled with garbage and broken concrete where wild dogs prowled at night. Yet it was also covered in satellite dishes and “kiosks”, makeshift structures erected on street corners and in public parks in imitation of Italian terrace cafes, where you could order peach schnapps at eight in the morning, conduct business, meet friends and, if you so chose, linger late at night, at a piano bar without a functioning piano, and dance to Bulgarian bootlegs ofCareless Whisper and other western hits.

There were the disjointed signs of progress: a spanking new Coca- Cola bottling plant, a luxury hilltop restaurant financed by Kuwaitis, a picket-fence neighbourhood near the U.S. Embassy with perfect lawns and red-flagged mailboxes. And then there was the giant hole in the centre of town, the legacy of a Kosovo Albanian investor who had promised a luxury high-rise hotel, driven around in a white Rolls Royce raising millions of dollars and absconded with the lot.

Tirana at that time was a city where everyone was living beyond their means. Everyone had an angle, a scam to pull, a bribe they were willing to pay, a corner they were happy to cut. There were fewer than ten miles of smoothly paved road in the entire country, yet the streets were choking with Mercedes and BMWs, many of them stolen in Italy or Greece with the connivance of organized criminals and sold for a few hundred dollars on the beach outside Durres, a short drive from Tirana. The country’s biggest brickworks produced exactly twenty perfect bricks a year – the twenty it was obliged to submit for official certification – and sold the rest to gullible foreign investors who invariably had to throw them away and start again. Government contractors paid such large kick-backs to maintain the dangerously low-slung telephone wires, or to repair the street drains, that they could no longer afford their own work materials. A few days or weeks later, they’d be bidding on the same job all over again when their jerry-rigged solution broke down at the first hurdle.

To the outside world, curiously, this looked like an acceptably slapdash path to progress, in line with other former