The Consulate Michigan Asked For

Rama opened his UN week in Troy with an announcement. The people it was addressed to had put it on paper nine days earlier.

By Klea Ukaj, US Bureau · Troy, Michigan

Edi Rama met Albanian-Americans at the Marriott in Troy on Sunday afternoon, the first stop of his trip to the UN General Assembly. Two weeks earlier Sali Berisha had held his meeting in Garfield, New Jersey. The same chant followed both of them from Tirana: “Rama në burg, Berisha në burg.”

Inside, Rama said the government will open a consulate in Michigan. Foreign Minister Ferit Hoxha, who was there, wrote on X afterwards that it will be a Consulate General in Detroit and that it will open “soon”. No date was given.

The request for exactly that had gone to Hoxha’s ministry on 11 September. Beso te Diaspora, an association with an office on Livernois Road in Troy, mailed a 44-page package asking for a full-service consulate in metropolitan Detroit and copied it to President Begaj, to Rama, to Ambassador Ervin Bushati and to the parliamentary foreign affairs committee. It asked for an official answer within 45 days of receipt. The package includes a statement from Albania’s honorary consul in Michigan, statements from religious communities and associations, a list of supporting businesses and a petition. It gives 27,466 as the official number of people of Albanian origin in the state and around 200,000 as the community’s own estimate, and it describes an honorary consul’s office swamped with requests for passports, identity cards and help with funerals, all of which currently mean a trip to New York or Washington. Illyria published the text on 19 September, the day before the meeting.

In a covering note the association said it would attend the meeting to make the request in public, and that otherwise it would have been outside “as Albanian youth have been for a hundred days and more”. It said the days when the diaspora “served as decoration for political parties in Albania” were over, along with the days of political emissaries who “smiled, dined, stayed in hotels, waved from the aeroplane window and went back to declare the diaspora’s support to their bosses”.

Hoxha’s post does not mention the association or the petition. Rama, in TEMA’s transcript, called the ministry’s decision “the right one and the deserved one”. We do not know whether the government decided because it was asked or had decided before the letter arrived. What is on the record is the order of events.

Rama also gave the outline of what he will say in New York: every negotiating chapter with the EU is open and the closing phase has begun, with membership by 2030; a National Diaspora Register is being set up under the Albania 2030 strategy; Tirana’s airport now carries more passengers than Belgrade’s; the NATO summit is coming to Albania. He told the room the diaspora is “a large network of people who keep their eyes on the homeland” and not “a bank account of the homeland”. On the Kosovo Specialist Chambers judgment against Thaçi, Veseli, Krasniqi and Selimi, he said Albania can do nothing more than stand beside Kosovo and that Kosovo’s institutions must decide how to respond. Earlier in the day he visited Universal Transport, Adriatik Sheko’s logistics company.

Outside the hotel, a group of about twenty people demonstrated at a distance with Albanian and American flags; Fox 2 Detroit put the number at “many”. No reported incidents. One placard, seen in a photograph obtained by the Tirana Examiner and taken outside the Marriott on Sunday afternoon, called for violence against the prime minister. Under the words “Edi Rama” it read: “He sold us, robbed us, beats us, blackmails us. Treason gets the bullet [Tradhëtia do plumbin]. Down with the Marxist government.” The organisers of the protest had asked participants beforehand to remain calm and to express themselves “peacefully and democratically”.

There was an argument about the meeting before it happened. Rama had announced it on Facebook as a meeting “with Albanians and for Albanians”, at the community’s invitation, open to anyone who wanted to come. Valentin Lumaj, writing from Michigan on Saturday, said it had not been announced to the public, was not open-entry, and that invitations had gone to people the hosts considered Socialist sympathisers; if the Prime Minister of Albania is coming, he wrote, the hosts cannot pick the guests by their politics. Dritan Demiraj, the former interior minister, claimed the reception was run by businessmen who hold government licences. We could not confirm either account. Nobody, for or against, has named the host organisation. We have asked.

Ten days ago the Democratic Party’s foreign secretary, Enri Çeno, said the Albanians of Michigan could “influence and directly steer” the Senate race here. Nine days after an association in Troy set the Albanian government a deadline, a minister came to Troy and announced what it had asked for. The 45 days run from receipt. We will be asking the ministry when that was.