Name Your Leader

Maringlen Cara

The Prime Minister asked one question in his live address yesterday and nobody has answered it. Dialogue, he said, certainly. With or without cameras, at the faculty, wherever you want. With whom?

Look at who has been speaking for this movement. Not a committee, not a spokesman, not a list of demands with a name under it. For five nights the only thing that has addressed the country on behalf of the protest is a mask. The mask set the court on fire. The mask attacked the central bank. The mask looted the shops on the boulevard and put twenty-one police officers in hospital. When the cameras find the front of the crowd, the mask is what they film, and the mask is what the rest of the march walks behind.

A mask has one function. It separates the act from the person who commits it. That is the whole point of wearing one, and it is why the law on assemblies forbids it. A citizen protests with his face, because a citizen is prepared to answer for what he does in the square. The face is the signature. Take it away and what is left is an act with no author, which is the precise description of a crime.

A movement with no leader, and a movement whose only public voice is a covered face. These are not two facts. They are one. The movement has no leader because the people running it have decided that no one will answer for it. The mask is not a tactic. The mask is the programme. It says: we will do this, and no one will be found.

Every movement that changed this country, or broke it, still had faces. The students of December 1990 gave their names to the nation within a week. Even the revolt of 1997 had committees with chairmen who signed what they demanded. The students of 2018 put eight demands on paper and sent delegates to read them out. You could sit across a table from all of them, because there was a person on the other side. Nobody can sit across a table from a mask. There is nothing there to agree with and nothing to hold to its word the next morning.

So everyone who has spent this week saying that the young deserve a voice, from Washington, from Brussels, from the evening shows, should direct that energy where it belongs. Not at the Prime Minister, who has already said he will come. At the movement. A voice has a face. If this one has a voice, produce the person it belongs to. If it cannot, then stop calling it change. Change has a programme and a name. What has no programme and no name, only a schedule for the next night, has a different word, and the word is chaos. A movement that cannot name a leader is not an agent of change. It is an agent of chaos, and it should be addressed as one.

Something else happens to a movement that leaves its signature line blank. Someone signs it for them. On Friday night, while the Bank of Albania was being attacked and the only face on the boulevard was a mask, Alexander Dugin wrote that the Albanians are awakening. The Kremlin’s house philosopher does not say that about movements with leaders. A leader can be told no. A crowd with no name can be given one from Moscow and cannot hand it back. That is what the mask delivered on Friday: it hid the author of the violence from Albania and left the authorship open to the first foreigner who wanted it. Dugin took it, and not one of them has lifted the mask to contradict him.

Political violence by people who conceal their identity, aimed at courts, banks and the symbols of the state, to force an outcome no one is willing to sign: every country in Europe that has lived through it knows the word for that, and the word is terrorism. The mask is how you recognise it. The absence of a name is how you confirm it.

The test costs nothing. Name your leader. Take off the mask. Pick the place and the time. The Prime Minister has said he will come without cameras; this publication will take him at his word and make sure the invitation reaches him within the hour. If he does not show, we will write that too.

And if the only answer is another night of masks, the country has its answer. Protest has a face. This has none, and the one name attached to it so far is Dugin’s. Name yours.

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.