Albania opposition supporters clash over leadership

TIRANA: Albanian police used teargas and water canons on Saturday to disperse hundreds of opposition supporters who broke into their party headquarters as part of an internal struggle over the leadership, an AFP photographer said.

Around a dozen people were arrested after the violence in which one officer and one protester were slightly injured, a police statement said.

A veteran Albanian statesman and former head of the main opposition Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, had gathered supporters in a bid to oust the party’s leader Lulzim Basha.

Supporters of Berisha, who ruled Albania for eight years until 2013, used iron bars to break into the headquarters in the capital Tirana and threw stones, smashing windows.

They took over the ground floor of the building in which Basha and other opposition lawmakers were present, but police dispersed them using teargas.

Police denied they used teargas but said they used water canons. Police intervened “after calls from a group of MPs who were inside the Democratic Party headquarters” as protesters were trying to force themselves into the building, a statement said. One officer and one protester were slightly injured, a police official said. Meanwhile, Berisha,77, vowed the “battle will continue”. “This is just the beginning of our resistance,” he told reporters. Basha excluded Berisha from the party’s parliamentary group in September which sparked wrangling within the party.

The move came after the US State Department in May banned the former prime minister from travelling to the United States because of his links to “significant corruption”.

Washington accused Berisha of “misappropriating public funds and interfering with public processes” to the financial benefit of his family and allies.

Basha says Berisha, once his key aide, is trying to turn the Democratic Party into an “anti-American bunker to protect himself from corruption affairs”.

But, Berisha rejects the accusations as “purely political” and claims there is no evidence against him.

Berisha lost power in 2013 when the Balkan country’s left-wing coalition claimed an electoral victory.

Meanwhile, the delegation of the European Union, that Albania aspires to join, condemned the violence. It called all “actors involved to exercise calm and restraint”.

Watchdogs regularly rank Albania as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, and it is also one of the continent’s poorest.