The Photograph

On the afternoon Tirana burned, the EU ambassador received the opposition’s interlocutor in the Union’s own office and published nothing. The opposition published the photograph and the readout. Either Brussels chose that, or Brussels has lost control of its mission. There is no third answer.

Ardit Rada

The European Union’s ambassador in Tirana held one political meeting on Wednesday that the public knows about, and the public knows about it because the other side published it. Jorida Tabaku posted the photograph: the ambassador’s office, the two flags on the coffee table, an hour’s conversation. The Delegation has not mentioned the meeting. Its account of Wednesday consists of its seven sentences and nothing else.

Delegations publish readouts of political meetings for a reason that every officer of the External Action Service learns in the first year: the readout is the message. The meeting is a private event; the readout is the public one, and whoever writes it decides what the meeting meant. The Union’s delegations in Belgrade, Skopje and Sarajevo put one out after every political call, every week, because that is how the Union keeps hold of its own words. On Wednesday in Tirana the ambassador met, during street violence, the interlocutor of a party that had spent the morning with the detained, and the Union’s words went out under that party’s name. Tabaku’s post says who ordered the police must be found, that integration is measured by how power treats those who oppose it, that her committee will hear the Interior Minister on Monday, and that the ambassador supports an assessment of “how the authorities acted” and wants “further protests” peaceful. That is now the Union’s readout, because the Union did not write one.

So the question is not for the Delegation. It is for Brussels, and it has two answers.

The first is that the External Action Service knew. The meeting was cleared, the silence was cleared, and the decision to let the opposition carry the Union’s message on the afternoon the Iute Credit branch burned for the second time was a decision taken at headquarters. In that case the photograph is the Union’s position. Kallas owns it, with the molotovs in the frame, and the seven sentences were not a lapse in Tirana but a line from Brussels, which is what some in this city have said since May.

The second is that the External Action Service did not know. In that case its head of mission in a candidate country, six weeks in post, conducted a political meeting with one side of a violent confrontation, in the Union’s office, without instructions, and surrendered the readout to her guest. In any foreign service in Europe that is a matter for the inspectorate. The Service would be expected to say so, to publish its own account of what its ambassador said in that room, and to tell Tirana whether the word “condemn” was among her words, since the guest’s version does not contain it.

There is no third answer. Either Brussels chose this, or Brussels has lost control of its mission in Tirana for a day on which control mattered more than on any day since the Service opened the office.

And the consequence is already fixed, whichever it is. Monday’s hearing will be the first institutional act after the fires. Its subject is the police. It will sit with the Union’s ambassador on the record, through the party that convened it, as supporting an assessment of how the authorities acted, before the authorities have been assessed. Whatever she says on Monday or any day after, the government’s police will be examined with the Union’s name already on the examiner’s side of the table. She did not have to put it there. She could have postponed the meeting until the building stopped burning, or held it and written the Union’s own account. She did neither, and the Delegation is now where she has left it.

The Tirana Examiner’s letter to the Commissioner and the High Representative asked who cleared the Delegation’s statement. The photograph adds a second question, and it is the sharper one: who cleared the meeting, and who decided that the Union would not say what was said in it. Brussels can answer with its own readout, today, in full. Or it can let the photograph stand. In Tirana the photograph is already standing, and nobody in this city needs the External Action Service to explain what it shows.