Both Sides Claim Victories as Troubled Albania Votes

TIRANA, Albania — Supporters of embattled President Sali Berisha and his Socialist rivals both claimed victories late Sunday in crucial elections marred by missing ballot boxes, gunfire and threats against poll workers.

Socialist Party leader Fatos Nano declared an outright win, saying his leftist coalition had taken two-thirds of the seats in parliament--enough, he said, to oust Berisha.

And the head of Berisha’s Democratic Party, at whose headquarters the mood of an expectant crowd was turning surly late Sunday, acknowledged doing worse than expected. Gens Pollo, the party’s secretary-general, told The Times that voters had forced numerous runoffs here in the capital and elsewhere but that Nano’s victory claim was premature.

The competing claims heightened tensions as Albanians and hundreds of international observers nervously waited to see whether politicians would respect results of the election, widely seen as a last-gasp attempt to rescue this impoverished country from chaos.

Albania has been reeling since the collapse of shady pyramid schemes earlier this year escalated into nationwide armed revolt, sent thousands of refugees into flight and eventually dragged another international peacekeeping force--7,000 Italian-led European troops--into the troubled Balkans.

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Even as ballots were being counted, automatic gunfire echoed steadily throughout the night around the capital and tracer fire streaked the dark sky. Numerous men were heavily armed at the downtown Tirana headquarters of both the Socialist and Democratic parties, located just a few blocks apart. Police in tanks and dark blue vans circulated through the city streets.

Independent monitors, party leaders and officials of the national Central Election Commission reported dozens of complaints. But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), charged with monitoring the elections and eager to certify them as acceptable, said irregularities were only sporadic.

Armed gangs reportedly stuffed ballot boxes in the city of Lezhe, about 30 miles north of the capital. Hundreds of people were omitted from voting lists, the majority of them from opposition parties, monitors said. And at least one election official, a member of Berisha’s party, was shot to death.

Despite the difficulties, turnout was high in the early hours Sunday, when there was markedly less overt intimidation by police than in previous elections. Many voters also were hoping to avoid the violence they thought inevitably would occur after dark. By afternoon in some cities, the streets and cafes were deserted.

Some monitors expressed surprise that the vote went as relatively smoothly as it did, given the remarkably haphazard conditions. In fact, in the rebellious south, including the city of Vlore, few incidents were reported.

For many Albanians, expectations were high yet basic.

“I am voting so that maybe the country can have peace again, and we won’t be afraid to go outside anymore,” Hasime Cuficaj, a middle-aged nurse and mother of two, said after casting her ballot in the city of Kruje, about 10 miles north of Tirana.

Voting was peaceful in the 200-year-old farming village of Peza. Inside the main polling station--a library that hasn’t had books on its shelves since 1991--official election observers remembered the balloting of May 1996, a contest that the opposition and OSCE observers judged highly fraudulent and that gave Berisha absolute control of the parliament.

When the polls closed in the 1996 vote, armed police arrived and simply switched the ballot boxes. Peza, to its surprise, discovered in the tally that it had voted for Berisha’s party.

But that will not happen this time, said Gani Peza, 61, an election official from the Socialist Party.

“Last year, the police were in charge,” said the white-haired retired government worker. “This year, we have guns too. They don’t dare come. My gun is in my house, and I can have it here in three minutes.”

In the southern city of Lushnje, armed gangs were terrorizing a number of polling stations, according to members of the election commission. By Sunday evening, international monitors were being evacuated after receiving threats, said Christina Danielleson, a senior OSCE monitor.

OSCE-supplied ballot boxes never arrived at 16 polling stations in Tirana. Names were missing from voter-registration lists in numerous districts, preventing those people from voting. Many were from opposition parties, election officials said.

Election results were not expected until today. The victory claims being made late Sunday were based on minuscule hard data. Still, Nano said he expected a sufficiently decisive win to take absolute control of parliament, which elects the president.

“This problem”--Berisha--”is already resolved,” he told reporters Sunday night.

At Democratic Party headquarters, where earlier in the evening officials had periodically announced victories from a balcony to cheering supporters, things grew subdued by about midnight. “It looks like the communists are winning,” said one dejected man in the crowd.