February 20 is an important date in Albania’s history, and Vlora’s citizens were keenly aware. Seven years before in Tirana, crowds had toppled Enver Hoxha’s monument in Skanderbeg Square, marking the symbolic end of the dictatorship. To commemorate the event in 1997, Vlora demonstrators raised three fingers in the air on February 17—two fingers and the thumb—as a sign that Berisha had three days left. The three-fingered salute, an evolution of the Democratic Party’s two-fingered victory sign for freedom and democracy, quickly spread through Albania as a symbol of anti-government rage.
For ethnic Albanians in Kosovo watching the revolt on television, the three fingers were a confusing and offensive shock. Kosovars knew the sign as a Serbian nationalist salute that police waved aggressively in their faces every day. “Is this Albania or Angola?” a stunned friend in Kosovo asked as we watched the Vlora protests on television. “Don’t they know what that means?”
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