Our Man in Tirana

Gezim Alpion, whose work I have mentioned before , recently produced a book on Mother Teresa, entitled Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? There is a good review of the book on the Spiked website. This is the blurb from the publisher's website : Mother Teresa was one of the most written about and publicised women in modern times. Apart from Pope John Paul II, she was arguably the most advertised religious celebrity in the last quarter of the twentieth century. During her lifetime as well as posthumously, Mother Teresa continues to generate a huge level of interest and heated debate. Gëzim Alpion explores the significance of Mother Teresa to the mass media, to celebrity culture, to the Church and to various political groups. A section explores the ways different vested interests have sought to appropriate her after her death, and also examines Mother Teresa's own attitude to her childhood and to the Balkan conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. This book sheds a new and fascinating l...

Did I say no more election postings? Well, perhaps one more. One week on from the elections we are still waiting for the final results. The process of counting has been incredibly slow - in many cases this seems to have been a deliberate ploy. It was only when counting got underway that the most serious incidents to date took place. In Ndroq, in the Tirana region, I watched Lajme 24 broadcast pictures of members of the counting commission throwing chairs, tables and what appeared to be a hat-stand at each other. Two were hospitalised, four were arrested and one was sentenced to fifteen days in prison. In Bushat, in the Shkodra region, there were also disputes, though without the violence. The opposition are demanding that the election be rerun. In Himara, there was large and disruptive crowd outside the counting centre where accusations were flying. Himara is the major city of a region which has a sizeable Greek community. The Greek party, PBDNJ, was accusing the PD and PS of working t...

Watershed Media Centre is in Bristol in the south west of England. The Centre recently announced a short Albanian Film Season from 16th - 18th March. Among the films on view will be the two best known Albanian films of recent years, Slogans and Tirana Year Zero . I have the latter on a very dodgy looking DVD but have not watched it yet. Explaining why they were running this season, Mark Cosgrove, the Head of Programme at the Centre said this: Albanian cinema has been largely under-represented in the West, but over the past five years the stories, directing and cinematography coming out of this country has become stronger and stronger and should be seen by a wider audience. Tirana suffers from a shortage of good venues for showing films. The local Millenium (this is how they spell it) cinema shows the usual range of western - mostly American - movies. The Black Box Theatre at the Academy of Arts shows more interesting films but obviously Albanian films in Albania don't need subtit...

For those who want a lengthy detailed report into the election there will, undoubtedly, be a range of them to chose from. In the meantime, here are my brief reflections on the last few weeks. At the heart of the problems around this election is the unwarranted influence of political parties on all aspects of the electoral process. Every institution responsible for organising and facilitating the election is under the control of political parties. The Electoral Code itself was heavily revised only days before the original date for the elections and only weeks before the actual date (Law 9676 13 January 2007). It was these revisions, specifically Article 181/2, that created the overly complicated identification requirements that caused so much confusion, and undoubtedly disenfranchised some voters. Let's be clear though: these revisions were not designed to protect the interests of the electorate. They were drafted primarily because the political parties do not trust each other. The ...

Kamëz is a poor area, lacking in infrastructure. Normally, this would lead you to expect parties of the left to have a strong presence. Yet in Kamëz it is the ostensibly right wing Democratic Party that is dominant. The local government elections of 2003 resulted in DP control of the municipality and a DP mayor, Agim Canaj. Canaj is not running in this election since he has had some difficulties in the past few years. He was dismissed from his post in 2005 following allegations of involvement in issuing false birth certificates and failing to clear duplicate entries from the voters' list. The Constitutional Court later reinstated him. The DP candidate this time round is Xhelal Mziu. Unfortunately for the DP his nomination resulted in a split in the party and the nomination of a disgruntled DP member, Remzi Tota, as an independent candidate. Tota's registration was initially turned down by the Local Government Election Commission and by the Central Election Commission. These de...

For any of you interested in following the results of these elections there is a lot of information on the website of the Komisioni Qendror i Zgjedhjeve - Central Election Commission in both Albanian and English .