Keep Your Condemnation

Editorial Board

“Yesterday they backed the protest, today the EU Delegation asks the students for restraint: We strongly condemn the escalation of violence and the destruction of property” (“Dje mbështetën protestën, sot Delegacioni i BE kërkon vetëpërmbajtje nga studentët: Dënojmë me forcë përshkallëzimin e dhunës dhe shkatërrimin e pronës”). That is Newsbomb’s headline this morning. Newsbomb is mainstream Albanian media and it is known for its position against this government. It has no reason to defend Edi Rama and every reason to defend the protest. It put the Delegation’s two statements next to each other and still could not write it any other way.

Yesterday they backed the protest. Today they ask for restraint.

Between the two came a night. Masked men with metal batons walked through the centre of Tirana as if they owned it. Private shops were broken open and emptied. A credit office set on fire on Tuesday was set on fire again on Wednesday. None of them moved like people who feared being caught. They moved like people who had been told something. What they had been told was Wednesday’s statement from the Delegation, which addressed the police and said nothing to them, and the photograph the head of mission published the same day of her hour with the Democratic Party’s chief interlocutor. Then the city burned, and on Thursday morning the Delegation found the word condemn.

We are expected to welcome it. We decline.

You gave licence. Not in those words, which is how licence is always given. You looked at a stormed ministry and a Nunciature flag on the ground and found seven sentences for the state and none for the mob, and every man with a baton understood you.

Albania did not need a sentence about democracies. It needed the European Union to say, to Jorida Tabaku and to every spin doctor working the street this week, that the EU supports no regime change outside the ballot box. That it is not standing quietly behind the unrest. That anyone telling the crowd the Germans are with us, the Dutch are with us, Brussels is with us, is lying. That statement would have cost the Delegation two lines, on Tuesday night, and it would have been the only thing the men with the batons feared. It needed, too, a head of mission who thinks about who gets the photograph on the day the capital is burning. The photograph went to the opposition. The condemnation came the next morning. Everyone in Tirana can read that order, and Newsbomb read it for them.

The Delegation knows how to write the statement it did not write. In June 2019 it put the safety of a demonstration on the protest leaders by name of office and called the use of explosives or any other items designed to cause injury completely unacceptable. In May 2019 the EU called on all political leaders in Albania to publicly condemn the violence and help identify the perpetrators. Those sentences are on the Delegation’s own website. Not one of them is in Thursday’s text either. Protestors are asked for restraint. Protest leaders are not named. No one is asked to condemn, to distance, to help the police identify a single face. “Genuine grievances” survive from Wednesday to Thursday, so the burning keeps its cause even as it loses its welcome.

Too little. And after Wednesday night, too late.

The Thursday text does not mention the Wednesday text. It does not withdraw it. It reads as if Wednesday never happened. It was written for the capitals that read Wednesday’s text and did not like it, and for a file in which the Delegation can later show that it did, in the end, condemn.

It did. In the end. After the fire, after the second fire, after the protest letter, after an anti-government newspaper said it out loud. Tirana will put out its own fires. The Delegation may keep its condemnation.