The presentation of the book “Modern Albania” by Fred Abrahams generated a dynamic debate about the key issues of the 25-year long transition in Albania.

Abrahams attended the event entitled “25 years: documents, memories and the Albanian transition” organized in COD, and said that his book provides a completely different perspective through documents and interviews that have never been published before. “In order to write this book I collected approximately 300 documents from the US archives and documents from the State Department for Albania-US relations”, the author said.

In his address, Prime Minister Rama said that “COD is a space available to anyone who has something new to show, something new to exhibit, discuss and even something new to criticize the government about. This space has been created, inter alia, to archive documents, and to become step by step a space not only for dialogue and comment about current events, but also for students, professors, interested people and various experts to do research.”

“Modern Albania” offers a vivid history of 25 years of transition in Albania through the testimony of the main protagonists of political life in the country, foreign diplomats or declassified documents from US archives.

In his work, the author provides an overview of the internal events that marked forever the history of Albania, the student protests of 1991, the revolt of 1997, the war in Kosovo, and so on.

Fred C. Abrahams is a special advisor at Human Rights Watch and a former researcher at “Open Society”. In the last twenty years he has constantly worked in Albania and Kosovo, specializing in Albanian issues.

This is his second book on Albanian issues, after the book about war crimes in Kosovo published in 2002.

Along with Abrahams, part of the panel discussion was the historian and lecturer Arben Puto and journalist Monica Shoshori-Stafa.

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Prime Minister Rama attended this evening the promotion of the book “Per Gjermanine” (On Germany), a diplomatic history and memories by the diplomat Bashkim Zeneli.

The book provides a new perspective and reveals unknown facts about German-Albanian relations.

In addition to Prime Minister Rama, the promotion of the book was attended also by the President of the Assembly, Mr. Ilir Meta, the Mayor of Tirana, Erjon Veliaj, the German Ambassador to Albania Helmut Hofmann, ministers, MPs and other diplomats.