TIRANA: Clashes broke out late Monday in Tirana between police and opposition protesters seeking that longtime leftist Prime Minister Edi Rama resigns, leaving 10 officers injured police said.
A few thousand people gathered in the Albanian capital at demonstrations organized by the country’s right-wing opposition, according to an AFP reporter.
Scuffles first broke out in front of the government building when demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon and some of them threw Molotov cocktails.
The crowd then moved toward the headquarters of Rama’s Socialist Party where more Molotov cocktails were thrown, setting on fire the entrance door and a banner with the prime minister’s image, the AFP journalist reported.
The protesters, who want Rama to step down and a caretaker government to take over until next year’s parliamentary elections, also targeted the interior ministry headquarters and the city hall with Molotov cocktails. A bus station and several garbage containers were set on fire.
Police, deployed in large numbers, used teargas in a bid to disperse the crowd moving toward the parliament.
“So far 10 police officers have been injured in the attacks with Molotov cocktails, pyrotechnics and solid objects,” a police statement said.
Meanwhile, according to the AFP reporter at least three demonstrators were mildly injured by Molotov cocktails during the nearly four-hour protest.
Police urged the demonstrators to stop attacking them and state institutions, warning that measures were being taken to identify those involved in the attacks.
“This is the first step toward civil disobedience,” Flamur Noka, an official of the main opposition Democratic Party, told reporters in front of the party’s headquarter.
“We will continue our battle of civil disobedience until Rama resigns and a caretaker government is formed,” he said.
The protest was held a week after opposition lawmakers threw their chairs out of parliament and set them on fire in protest at a prison sentence handed to one of their peers.
Ervin Salianji, an official of the Democratic Party, in September was found guilty of “giving false testimony” in a drug trafficking case that targeted the brother of a lawmaker of the ruling Socialist Party.
The opposition described the MP’s arrest and conviction as a “blind act of revenge and political terror against the Democratic Party,” accusing Rama of being behind it.
Democratic Party leader and former prime minister Sali Berisha said earlier that Monday’s protests would be the “battle of our lives.”
Berisha has been under house arrest since December last year on charges of “passive corruption.”
He has rejected the accusations against him as politically motivated.
Clashes erupt at Albania anti-government protest
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Clashes erupt at Albania anti-government protest
Archbishop of York says he was ‘intimidated’ by Israeli militias during West Bank visit
- “We were … intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the archbishop said
LONDON: The Archbishop of York has revealed that he felt “intimidated” by Israeli militias during a visit to the Holy Land this year.
“We were stopped at various checkpoints and intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the Rev. Stephen Cottrell told his Christmas Day congregation at York Minster.
The archbishop added: “We have become — and really, I can think of no other way of putting it — we have become fearful of each other, and especially fearful of strangers, or just people who aren’t quite like us.
“We don’t seem to be able to see ourselves in them, and therefore we spurn our common humanity.”
He recounted how YMCA charity representatives in Bethlehem, who work with persecuted Palestinian communities in the West Bank, gave him an olive wood Nativity scene carving.
The carving depicted a “large gray wall” blocking the three kings from getting to the stable to see Mary, Joseph and Jesus, he said.
He said it was sobering for him to see the wall in real life during his visit.
He continued: “But this Christmas morning here in York, as well as thinking about the walls that divide and separate the Holy Land, I’m also thinking of all the walls and barriers we erect across the whole of the world and, perhaps most alarming, the ones we build around ourselves, the ones we construct in our hearts and minds, and of how our fearful shielding of ourselves from strangers — the strangers we encounter in the homeless on our streets, refugees seeking asylum, young people starved of opportunity and growing up without hope for the future — means that we are in danger of failing to welcome Christ when he comes.”
