“The New Republic”: Berisha, authoritarian

While those comments seized the country’s attention, “The New Republic” (TNR) comments what it considers the strange remarks of the US Republican candidate and that largely escaped notice: “These guys in the U.S.—the Karl Rove equivalents—they do races all over the world, in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel,” he said.

“They do these races, and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I’d tell them to you,” Romney joked, “but I’d have to shoot you.”

According to TNR, The well-travelled consultants Romney praised was almost certainly his chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, who helped lift at least two foreign strongmen into power, guiding them to victory in elections rife with irregularities and violence.

TNR’s article says that brings to memory an article published last month in “Politico” that portrayed Stevens as the target of vicious sniping within the campaign mentioned in passing that he worked in Albania and the Congo. But it didn’t name the leaders whose campaigns he ran: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and Congolese President Joseph Kabila, authoritarian figures who have alarmed human rights groups and, at times, the U.S. State Department.

According to TNR, the depth of Stevens’ involvement in the campaigns of Berisha and Kabila is evident from the LinkedIn profile of Joel Frushone, a former deputy at Stevens’ consulting firm, the Stevens & Schriefer Group.

TNR states that his resume says the firm managed almost every aspect of their election bids, from “high level multimedia campaigns” to “fundraising,” “policy development,” “in-depth opposition research,” and “political strategy, media plans and tactics”—virtually the same services Stevens provides Romney.

TNR quotes an insider from the 2005 Albanian campaign, who says that Stevens was recommended to Berisha by a Bosnian middleman, Damir Fazlic, whom the U.S. State Department has described as “shady.”

Stevens was joined in Albania by a consort from Washington’s BGR Group, and the Americans had their work cut out for them: Berisha’s image needed serious rehab. His previous reign over Albania had ended in a surreal, almost apocalyptic catastrophe, while Stevens framed Berisha as an agent of grand, visionary change, according to the TNR.

The article adds that in a presentation at Albania’s Sheraton Hotel that was reported by a local newspaper, he insisted that Berisha embodied American values just like George W. Bush did. Berisha himself stepped forward to say something nice about Stevens. Stevens, said the candidate, was his campaign’s “magician,” and he and Stevens worked together like “Siamese twins.”

TNR also mentions a phone interview with Erion Veliaj, who declares that Stevens made a dirty play during the entire campaign. Shortly before the election, Veliaj told reporters that he received a threatening phone call from one of Berisha’s consultants. At the time, he did not identify the caller. Today, he says it was Stevens.

Veliaj says Stevens “went berserk,” demanding he withhold the results of a poll commissioned with help from the British and Dutch embassies and conducted by Gallup International (which is unrelated to America’s Gallup organization). The poll showed an uncomfortably close race for Berisha.

According to Veliaj, Stevens said he would use his influence in Washington to cut off future U.S. visas for Veliaj if he didn’t scrap the poll.

Berisha won the election in July 2005 by a five-percent margin, the TNR article continues, but monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe called the election a “disappointment,” saying it failed to comply with international standards because of “serious irregularities,” intimidation, vote-buying and “violence committed by extremists on both sides.”

The article then mentions that in 2008, on a secretly recorded phone call, an American arms dealer complained that his scheme to sell illegal ammo from Albanian junkyards to the U.S. Army had become entangled in an Albanian “mafia” involving Berisha and his son.

TNR also mentioned the opposition protesters who were shot dead outside Albania’s parliament last year, and that Berisha claimed they were trying to launch a coup with guns disguised as umbrellas and pens and called the independent prosecutor investigating their deaths a “boulevard whore.”

The article also quotes the 2010 cable of the former US Ambassador, John Withers, who since leaving his post in Albania has become one of Berisha’s most vocal critics, accusing him of driving Albanian democracy into the ground since his return to power in 2005. His leadership has run “exactly contrary to democracy-building,” Withers said in an interview with Albanian media in March. His government “has routinely bullied the courts … striven to curtail media freedoms through restrictive and undemocratic laws,” manipulated the electoral process, and “shown an active, even obsessive interest in only one objective: the pursuit of power by any means at its disposal.”

TNR also adds that after his triumph electing Berisha, Stevens went to work on a 2006 election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By then, Kabila had been in power for four years, after assuming the presidency upon his father’s assassination. Though he ruled by diktat, he also held promise as a reformer, helping negotiate a partial end to an immense regional war and passing a liberal constitution.

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