The man in question, an Albanian American called Zef Mirakaj with a reputation for denigrating Mr Berisha in public, had been sitting down with a beer when a group of the president’s guards, a little the worse for drink, sauntered over from the next table and shouted: “You’re the pus ball who caused all that trouble in Vlora aren’t you?” Before he had a chance to answer, they had dragged him out into the street.”You must have got me muddled up with someone else,” he protested. “Berisha’s men came in here yesterday and dragged a friend of mine out at gunpoint,” she said. “He hasn’t been seen since.”That information might have unnerved me for days if I hadn’t heard the full story a few hours later. When I met a political contact for a drink in a bar in Tirana, she announced that we had to leave, immediately. The next morning, paranoia led me to check out again as I began wondering about tapped phones and spies among the hotel staff.

After a few days you really do start wondering about spies working for President Sali Berisha, for the United States government, for the Greeks, for the Turks, and god knows who else. The temptation to assume you are the centre of everyone’s attention, riding on the very brink of danger at every turn, is almost irresistible.When I arrived in Tirana, paranoia led me to check into the biggest international hotel in town because it is monitored 24 hours a day by armed guards. “It’s an old communist tactic.”As it turned out, we never saw the jeep again. But it is so easy to be paranoid in Albania it is almost part of the landscape. This is a country where nothing is knowable for sure, where violence seems to erupt out of nowhere, where conspiracy theories take on an air of credibility with unnerving ease.Friends and enemies alike seem to know what you are doing before you really know it yourself. The jeep drove straight past without so much as a glance in our direction.

“Well that seems to be that,” I said.”Unless they’ve decided to follow us by driving on ahead,” retorted my friend. “What makes you think that?” I asked.
“They’ve been on our tail since we got out of town and it’s pretty surprising a thing that powerful hasn’t overtaken us.”A familiar feeling began to grab me in the guts: Albanian paranoia. I didn’t relish having government goons on my tail, and I didn’t like to think what they might do if they cornered us. I’ve had enough friends threatened, beaten up and hounded out of the country to know I don’t want it to happen to me.We drove on in silence until we couldn’t stand it any more and stopped for coffee by the side of the road. “I hate to tell you this,” said my driver friend, “but I think we are being followed.” We were driving north on the road out of Tirana and, as I saw for myself, a large white jeep was trailing not far behind with two large swarthy men inside.

If Italy cannot at least introduce effective voting reform before the next election, that weakness seems doomed to persist into the next millennium.. Since the negotiations cannot go forward on that basis, they are effectively dead.The episode is the latest sorry twist in a tale that dates to the foundation of the republic, when fear of strong government following the defeat of Fascism led to endemic weaknesses in every aspect of political life including a strictly proportional electoral system to keep parties small and numerous.One prime opportunity to change all that, during the corruption scandals that destroyed the political status quo in the early 1990s, was squandered as a new electoral law was introduced only to compound the problem by returning more, not less, parties to parliament.The present centre-left government, led by Romano Prodi, is every bit as weak as its predecessors and may well fall in the next few months. The truth is that changing the role of the president would involve such a major constitutional overhaul that it is to all intents and purposes impossible. Mr Berlusconi and his allies suddenly began trumpeting the virtues of semi-presidential rule and insisted that all negotiations had to start from scratch. Members of some pro-government parties talked about cancelling last week’s vote and pretending Mr Bossi had never stuck his nose in the process at all.The result has been a tragicomic opera of constitutional babble: more proportional representation being championed here, less federalism there, unfeasible compromises on the whole package everywhere.