The File SPAK Has Not Opened

Albania’s prosecutors are right to examine property issues at Zvërnec. But the antisemitic incitement carried into the protest raises a separate question of public security, one SPAK cannot pretend it did not see.

by Renada Bici (Tirana Examiner Legal Desk)

Two investigations could have been opened in Tirana this week. One has been. The Special Structure against Corruption and Organised Crime is examining the land deals behind the Zvërnec resort, as it is it’s right to do so. The second file, the one that belongs beside it, has not been opened at all. It concerns what was carried into the protest over that resort: an organised current of antisemitic incitement that ended in a placard placing the Prime Minister of Albania inside a sniper’s crosshairs and calling, in writing, for his death. On that, the Special Prosecution has said nothing. The silence is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is the wrong one.

Begin with competence, because that is where the excuse will be made. It will be said that hatred shouted at a march belongs to the ordinary prosecutor in Tirana and not to SPAK. That was true once. It stopped being true in 2021, when a constitutional amendment handed the Special Structure sole jurisdiction over terrorism offences. Among them is Article 232/a of the Criminal Code, which punishes incitement, public calls and propaganda for acts of a terrorist character with four to ten years of imprisonment. Incitement to terrorism in Albania is no longer a district matter. It belongs to SPAK alone. The question is therefore not whether the Special Prosecution may look at what happened this week, but whether the facts before it are serious enough to require a preliminary examination. They are.

Look at what sits in front of it. A demonstrator was dragged across the ground at Zvërnec, a genuine grievance filled the capital, and into that crowd a separate thing was introduced. Chants of “Down with Israel” before a government whose contested project contains no Israeli party of any kind. A placard rendering the head of government as an Orthodox Jew, his face caught inside a gunsight, beneath a sentence proposing that the rifle be handed over so that he could be shot. By any reading this runs past the rough edge of a demonstration. It is an image of a named official marked for killing, the marking performed by redrawing him as a Jew. Stripped of the costume, the placard depicts a planned assassination carrying an ideological motive, which is conduct that at the very least raises a question under the terrorism provisions, not one a prosecutor may file away as protest temper. The law on public assembly was careful to keep its own ground separate, and rightly: Albanian terrorism law expressly excludes strikes and gatherings from its reach. But that exclusion protects the crowd. It does not absolve what individuals carry into the crowd. The march is shielded. The incitement is not.

Nothing in this argument touches the protest itself. The grievance over the coastline is legitimate, the anger is earned, and the thousands who marched are owed an answer about the resort, not suspicion about their motives. It is precisely because the cause is just that the incitement smuggled into it has to be named and lifted out, before it is allowed to define a movement it never belonged to. To defend the protest is to refuse to let a sniper’s crosshairs become its emblem.

The incitement did not assemble itself, and here the concern moves from a single sheet of paper to a structure a prosecutor is built to map. One of the figures who supplied the protest its antisemitic vocabulary, under his own name and to an audience in the tens of thousands, is Olsi Jazexhi. He had defined the demonstration before it began as the third stage of a “Zionist takeover” of Albania. Across the days of the march he posted that Israel has controlled the country since 2016, that the Prime Minister is selling it to the Jews, and that Albanians should pray for the death of an American family, a message he returned to and edited so the word Zionist would sit inside it. His record reaches well past provocation. He has defended Hamas by name on Albanian television, a body proscribed as a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States. He has for years carried the line of the Islamic Republic of Iran and publicly dismissed as fabrication the very plots Albanian police foiled on Albanian soil, the same regime Albania broke relations with in 2022 over what the Prime Minister called state aggression, and that the Albanian Parliament has since formally declared a state sponsor of terrorism.

That combination is why a serious prosecutor does not look away. What this calls for is not the policing of opinion but a prosecutorial question: whether incitement to the murder of the head of government, broadcast by a figure aligned with a proscribed group and with a state Albania has branded a sponsor of terror, then amplified into a mass gathering of the young, is the product of orchestration by domestic and foreign elements connected to networks that support terror. There is genuine concern that it is. The concern is not proof, and the work of either establishing it or laying it to rest is exactly what Article 232/a and the institutions that enforce it exist to perform. A democratic state does not get to wave that question away as paranoid while refusing to ask it.

There is also the matter of who is being recruited. Albania’s own threat assessments, and those of its allies, have for years identified the radicalisation of Albanian youth as the country’s living terrorism risk. What unfolded this week is a textbook performance of it. A generation’s legitimate fury over a coastline was taken up by adults with a platform and turned toward a hatred and a target the marchers did not bring with them. A young man held a sign demanding an assassination he did not design. The people standing upstream of that young man answer to a heavier description than “activist,” and whether it is the description written in Article 232/a is for SPAK to establish. That it has not begun to is the failure this desk records.

The Special Structure has already shown, in the resort file, that it can move on Zvërnec when the offence is a suspected criminal wrongdoing within SPAK’s mandate. It has shown, in its own convictions secured in 2023, that it prosecutes incitement to terrorism committed online and wins. The competence is settled. The precedent is its own. What is absent is the will to turn both upon an incitement whose only camouflage is that it was raised inside a protest the public rightly supports. The alleged theft of a coastline is a serious thing. The marking of a prime minister for death, by hands the state may have every reason to fear, is a graver one. One file is open. The other is the one this country will remember was left closed.

Renada Bici is a Tirana-based lawyer practicing in civil, criminal, and administrative law. She holds a law degree from the University of Tirana and has experience in both private legal practice and public administration.  She writes in her private capacity.