BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The parliament of Italy voted April 9 to send 2,500 troops to lead a 6,000-strong force to occupy Albania. The imperialist military intervention comes in response to the two-month-old revolt against the pro-capitalist regime of President Sali Berisha. Italian premier Romano Prodi said the force, blessed by the vote of the United Nations Security Council, will begin landing April 14. After the Italian legislature gave its stamp of approval, the government of Spain deployed two ships carrying 325 soldiers from its southern coast. French troops were already on their way to Albania.

Paris, which initiated the proposal for the military occupation of this Balkan workers state, is slated to send 1,000 soldiers. The government of Greece is readying its contingent of 700 men. Other capitalist regimes participating in the intervention include those of Austria, Denmark, and Turkey. The government of Romanian premier Victor Ciorbea, the one regime in Eastern Europe with strong ties to France, is also sending 400 soldiers. The governments of Hungary and Slovenia, which were slated last week to send 100 troops each, backed out.

The vote in the Italian Chamber of Deputies was 503-85 in favor of intervention. The Senate had approved the proposal a day earlier. Communist Refoundation, the successor of the former Communist Party, opposed the deployment, causing a crisis in Prodi's social democratic coalition. The government doesn't "have a majority to lead the country, let alone an international mission," stated former premier Silvio Berlusconi of the rightist opposition coalition.

As a condition for approving Prodi's motion for troop deployment, Berlusconi forced the government to place its future in the hands of Italian president Oscar Luis Scalfaro. At a meeting immediately after the parliamentary ballot, the president asked Prodi to seek a confidence vote from parliament. The premier announced he would do so on April 10.

Rome's performance "worries all the allies in the multinational force," stated Spain's secretary of state for foreign affairs. This is the first time since World War II that Rome will lead an imperialist expedition. The last time was in 1939, when Benito Mussolini's fascist armies invaded Albania with 100,000 troops and 400 planes.

Opposition to intervention inside Italy solidified among sizable layers of working people after thousands poured into the streets of Vlore, the hotbed of the Albanian revolt, a week earlier. Angry crowds of up to 7,000 people in Vlore repeatedly denounced the sinking of an Albanian boat by the Italian navy in international waters near the Italian port of Brindisi, as well as the planned intervention. Eighty- seven refugees reportedly drowned in the March 28 assault, though only four bodies have been recovered so far. On April 6, youth opposed to intervention hurled eggs at an Italian navy cruiser docked in Brindisi.

After an initiative by rebels in Vlore who got the grudging agreement of the Socialist Party and other opposition groups to sign a declaration demanding in writing the resignation of Berisha, the government crisis in Tirana deepened. Berisha's Democratic Party threatened to quit the "national reconciliation" government of premier Bashkim Fino, an SP leader.

On April 5, hooded armed thugs organized by pro-Berisha forces attacked Fino's convoy with grenades outside Shkoder, the largest city in northern Albania, where Berisha has a strong base of support. No one was injured in the assault. The police in that city pled ignorance and has made no moves to arrest the culprits. The prime minister was forced to return to Tirana. The SP leadership then demanded the dismissal of officials of the Interior Ministry, run by the Democratic Party.

Both of these parties, however, which represent competing layers of the bureaucratic caste that has ruled for decades in Albania, are strong advocates of imperialist intervention, hoping to quell the working-class revolt.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home