Edi Rama, You Are a Joke

Serbia buries Mladić with honours and keeps every chair. Tirana burns and gets seven sentences for the police. The Europe Edi Rama invested twelve years in no longer exists, and the one that does will do to him what it did to Thaçi. A note to the Prime Minister from someone who defended his bet.

Albatros Rexhaj

On Tuesday afternoon Albania closed Chapter 20 in Luxembourg. On Tuesday evening the Ministry of Education was on fire.

On Wednesday it burned twice more. The Ministry of Finance had its door blown open, its furniture thrown into the street, its cameras smashed and its offices set alight. The Ministry of Justice was stoned, then burned. Molotovs hit the Prime Minister’s office. The Assembly presidency’s door went down, fireworks went in, the building burned from inside. The Constitutional Court was stoned. The Bank of Albania’s guard post was smashed with torn-out railings. The Archives lost their windows. Police Station no. 2 was stormed and a police car burned out in its courtyard. Four banks were set on fire. Cafés at the Pyramid were looted, the drinks handed round, and then burned. The Twin Towers, Toptani and Syri i Tiranës were wrecked. Cars burned. Kiosks were emptied. Journalists were stoned before noon. Masks and gloves came out of bags. A politician’s son explained molotovs on camera. By eleven at night 51 police officers were in hospital, one with his jaw and nose broken and an eye that may not recover.

At two in the afternoon, between the first fire and the second, the European Union’s mission in Tirana issued seven sentences. All seven were for the police. None was for the men with the petrol.

Edi Rama read them and went on believing.

That is the joke. Not the man. The belief.

I have defended him for twelve years on this. He never treated Europe as a reward. He treated it as Albania’s investment in Europe’s own security: a NATO member on the southern flank doing its part so the Adriatic stays quiet while the continent worries about the east. He opened chapters faster than anyone in the region. He put the courts, the services and the budget into it. He meant it, and I said so, in print, many times.

It is never going to happen. Not because Albania will not do its tasks. Albania is doing them, chapter by chapter, with the city on fire. It is not going to happen because the Europe he is investing in no longer exists. The one that exists runs on stereotypes about Albanians it has held since the Congress of Berlin, and it is breached, in its institutions and in several of its governments, by Russia and the people Russia pays.

Look at what it tolerates. In September Ratko Mladić was buried in Belgrade with a military escort, a Gendarmerie salute and a minister reading the eulogy. Brussels found no word. Two days later the Serbian president was embraced on the steps of the Élysée. Serbia is back in the fascism of the 1990s, in uniform, with a state funeral for a genocide convict and the man Vučić keeps for such messages repeating Putin’s line that the nation was “divided by force” and the second half is coming. It is arming faster than any state in the region, rocket artillery, drones, Chinese air defence, for the war it keeps announcing. Brussels has no problem with any of it. Serbia sits in five chairs at once and is rewarded for each. It aligns with nothing, not one sanctions decision, not one declaration, and is paid in millions. It shows Brussels the middle finger on camera, enjoys Moscow’s blessing and Beijing’s factories and air defence, and keeps every chair.

What Brussels has a problem with is Albania. Albania talking to Kosovo about defending itself against that programme. Albania comparing notes with Croatia about what Belgrade is buying. A counterweight to a militarised Serbia with an open appetite for conflict is the one thing in the region the unelected officials who run the Balkans desks cannot abide. Making Serbia happy is their business. Albania making itself safe is a provocation.

And now, Prime Minister, look at your Europeans in Tirana. On Wednesday it became clear whose service the head of the EU mission is in. While the Ministry of Education burned for the second time, she sat for an hour with Jorida Tabaku, and Tabaku published the photograph and the readout. The same Tabaku who called the country to the street at 12:52, seven minutes before the first molotov. Who posted four times in nine hours, every time about the police, never once about the petrol, and closed the day by writing that a threatened youth “chooses this form to be heard”. That is the justification of the burning of Tirana. Its author is the opposition’s chief interlocutor with the embassies, and the EU ambassador chose that afternoon to be photographed at her side. By association, it is now the ambassador’s position too. These are your Europeans, Edi. Watch them with worry.

And know what they do to their friends. They did it to Hashim Thaçi and to Kosovo. The man who signed everything Brussels put in front of him, who handed the Union its own court on Kosovo’s mandate, sat in a cell in The Hague while Mladić was buried with honours. Kosovo did every task it was given and was rewarded with its wartime leadership in the dock and its state told to be patient. That was not an accident. These same Europeans will humiliate you, and Albania with you, in exactly the same way. Because you trusted them.

This is a hybrid war. Sophisticated, patient, aimed at chaos. Its instrument is a few hundred masked men and the politicians who call them lions. Its cover is the European path. Its enablers are unelected officials in Brussels and elements of governments that Russia has already turned, who cannot condemn arson in Tirana because condemning it would mean standing with the Albanian state. The aim is regime change, by force, with the Union’s missions standing by, and the method is 1997: enough fire that the institutions stop working and the foreigners arrive to supervise what is left. Tirana is burning. It will keep burning. These people will not stop until Albania is dragged back to 1997, and they have no reason to stop, because nobody in Brussels has told them to.

Your sincere investment is now the cover. Every time you say “the European path” while a ministry burns, you tell the arsonists that the path matters more to you than the ministry, and you tell Brussels it can keep issuing seven sentences because you will never answer them. The utopia is being used to disarm you. And if you keep believing in it while the city burns, then when 1997 comes you will share the responsibility with the people who lit it.

I am not writing this to insult you. I am writing it because you are the only man in this country with the authority to stop it, and you are spending that authority on a promise nobody on the other side ever made. See it. Name the mission that could not find the word. Name the politician who called the crowd and never called it off. Say, once, on the record, that Albania’s membership is not a licence for anyone to supervise the burning of its institutions.

Be the leader of Albania. Not the last believer in a Europe that stopped believing in you.