Do You See This?

The Iute Credit branch on Rruga e Durrësit burned on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, a fifteen-minute walk from the EU Delegation. The Delegation found seven sentences for the police and none for the fire. Since May a rumour has said the Union’s missions would behave exactly like this. On Wednesday they did.

Maringlen Cara

This is the Iute Credit branch at the entrance of Rruga e Durrësit, on Wednesday afternoon. On Tuesday the masked men smashed it, carried its furniture into the street and burned it there, and one of them broke the cash machine open and was filmed digging inside it. On Wednesday they came back and set fire to what was left. The photograph is from Shqiptarja. It is two hundred metres from the Ministry of Education. It is a fifteen-minute walk from the Delegation of the European Union.

It is one building. In the same two days the Ministry of Education has been stoned and hit with molotov cocktails on both afternoons, its door forced with railings and an office on its first floor set on fire. The Municipality has been attacked. The stalls of Pazari i Ri have been burned while their owners fought the flames with their hands. Security cameras have been smashed from a pole, street lights torn out, advertising hoardings and bins set alight along the route. Journalists have been stoned. Police officers have been hit with stones, fireworks and petrol. A Democratic Party deputy has been chased off the street with bottles. The flag of the Holy See has been torn from the Apostolic Nunciature and left on the pavement. Sixteen were arrested on Tuesday, forty-nine are under investigation, and the count for Wednesday was still rising at three in the afternoon. The photograph is not the incident. It is the one that happened to be burning when the camera was pointed at it.

So the question is to you, at the Delegation. Do you see this? Any of it?

You saw the police. Your seven sentences on Wednesday took note of allegations against them and expected an investigation as a matter of priority. You saw “all sides”. You saw “dialogue”. The building in the photograph was already gutted when you wrote that, and it was burning again an hour after you posted it on your own account. You did not see it then, you have not seen it since, and you have not seen the flag on the pavement outside the Nunciature either, although it is your own rule, the inviolability of missions, that was broken there.

What is being said in this city you will not have heard from the people who come to your receptions. Since the last week of May, when this protest began, there has been a rumour in Tirana that the Union’s missions want this government gone and are not unhappy to see the street do the work. I did not believe it. I thought it was the kind of thing a country says about foreigners when it cannot face its own politics. I argued against it in company. On Wednesday afternoon you made it very hard to go on arguing.

A rumour becomes a belief when the people it accuses behave, in public, exactly as it predicts. It predicted that when the masked men came, the Union would find words for the police and none for them. You did. It predicted that the Union would call a petrol bomb an escalation and a burning building a matter for dialogue. You did. It predicted that the Union would not say the word “condemn” even when the Albanian state said it first. You did not say it. Every prediction the rumour made about you, you have met.

What you intended is your business. What you have done is ours. Silence while a microcredit branch burns for the second day is not neutrality; it is the thing an accomplice provides, which is the absence of a witness. And a statement that looks straight at a city with fires in it and reports an escalation with no author has twisted what happened, and the people who twist what happened, in the rumour’s vocabulary, are not bystanders. The rumour has a word for them, and the word is mastermind. By your own seven sentences you have put yourselves in the mastermind’s column, and it is for you to climb out of it, not for Tirana to help you.

You can still answer the question. Not to me. To the owner of the branch, to the stallholders of Pazari i Ri, to the Nuncio, to the officers who were hit with stones while you were drafting. Say that you see it. Say who did it. Say the word the Albanian foreign ministry said before nine on Wednesday morning. If you cannot, then the rumour is not a rumour any more, and nobody in Tirana will need to be told who made it true.

Maringlen Cara writes on religion, law and public life in Albania and the region. A Catholic and a constitutional conservative, he holds that a church which serves the state stops being a church.