Thank You for 1997

Paris lost control of its streets and heard nothing from Vienna. Tirana kept order and heard from it three times in six days. A mission built for 1997 should not be renewed for a country that no longer exists, and in December Albania should say so.

Editorial Board, Tirana Examiner

On Saturday 17 October, 550,000 people marched in France by the Interior Ministry’s count. By Monday the ministry had 2,300 arrests and nearly 1,000 injured police officers and gendarmes. The town hall of Limoges, 143 years old, burned until its bell tower fell in. Protesters forced their way into Marseille’s city hall. The Interior Minister told BFMTV that his police had lost control, and the President ordered him to account for the planning and intelligence failures that let it happen. In Milan the cabinet sent 500 soldiers into the city. In Brussels the police used tear gas on the boulevard.

In Tirana the same week, by the Health Ministry’s count, 272 people were injured over six days, 169 of them police. No building burned to the ground. No minister said the police had lost control. No one has demanded an inquiry into the chain of command, because the chain of command held.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, of which France, Italy and Belgium are founding participating States, said nothing about Paris, Limoges, Marseille, Milan or Brussels. Its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, whose mandate covers all 57 participating States equally, said nothing. Its Parliamentary Assembly said nothing.

About Tirana it spoke three times in six days. On 15 October the OSCE Presence in Albania offered to facilitate dialogue. On 20 October ODIHR asked all sides for restraint and for any unlawful use of force to be investigated. On 21 October the Parliamentary Assembly’s Special Representative for South East Europe, a member of the Luxembourg parliament, declared himself deeply concerned and asked the government, the opposition, civil society, students and citizens to engage in constructive dialogue. Luxembourg’s neighbour had tear gas on its streets the same weekend. There is no Special Representative for Western Europe, and there never has been.

Officials in Vienna, Warsaw and Copenhagen read the same wires everyone else read that weekend. They saw a thousand injured police in France and a burned town hall, and they saw a Tirana that, by every measure of violence, had the better week. They wrote to Tirana. The violence was not the standard. The country was, and the country the OSCE wants is the one it found in 1997: a state that cannot police a protest, count its own ballots or seat its own parliament without a mission to hold its hand. Three statements in six days to the capital that kept order, and none to the capital that lost it, is not concern. It is a preference, and it has been stated.

The file was opened in March 1997, by Permanent Council decision, in the weeks after the pyramid schemes collapsed, when the army had dissolved, the depots had been emptied and a million weapons were loose in the country. The Presence began work in Tirana on 3 April 1997. That was a state that needed a mission, and the mission did its work. The mandate was rewritten in 2003 and has been extended every December since, one year at a time. The current extension expires on 31 December 2026.

Albania does not ask to be spared the organisation’s attention. It asks for the attention France gets: criticism under the same mandates, election observation under the same rules, the same standard applied to the same facts. The answer cannot be that Albania’s police are imperfect, or its elections contested, or its politics loud. France’s are. Equal standing among the participating States was never conditioned on reaching a standard the older members have not reached themselves. Albania’s NATO membership, its 33 open and four closed negotiating chapters, its 2020 chairmanship of this very organisation, are not credentials submitted for Vienna’s approval. They measure how far Vienna’s file has fallen behind the country.

Read the 15 October statement again. The Presence “stands ready to assist in the facilitation of any such dialogue, if so requested”. A mission whose reason to exist is that Albanians cannot talk to each other without a foreigner in the room needs Albanians who cannot talk to each other without a foreigner in the room. An Albania that handles its own protests, its own police and its own opposition is an Albania with no mandate to extend in December. An Albania of 1997 is a mandate for life. Every year since 2003 the Permanent Council has voted that Albania is still, in the respects that matter to Vienna, the country of 1997, and every year the Albanian state has signed the sentence. The organisation that could not find a word for Paris found three for Tirana because Tirana is where it needs the trouble to be.

The Government of Albania should inform the Chairmanship, before the Permanent Council meets in December, that it withdraws its consent to a further extension of the Presence. A field mission exists on the consent of the host state. The precedent is Albanian: in 2008 Tirana asked the Presence to confine itself to electoral and judicial assistance, and the Finnish Chairmanship replied that whether the organisation stayed was Albania’s to decide. It was then. It is now.

The Presence will say, truthfully, that it still runs useful projects: parliamentary support, legal assistance, human-rights work. Useful cooperation does not require a resident mission reporting on its host. Albania can host or co-fund any of it as France does, through Vienna, project by project.

What follows is the relationship France, Italy and Belgium have. ODIHR may observe Albanian elections as it observes French ones. The Parliamentary Assembly may say what it likes; it will say it to a state that hosts no mission. If the organisation keeps a Special Representative for South East Europe, Albania will treat his statements as Belgium would treat a Special Representative for the Benelux.

The courtesy owed to the people who have served in the Presence since 1997 is real, and it is the courtesy one owes at the end of a posting. The decision that the posting has ended belongs to Albania.

Albania thanks the OSCE for 1997. It will not be governed by it.