The Soundtrack Was the Caption

Iran’s foreign ministry answered Tirana with a produced video and a festival song from 1980. Read closely, the reply is not diplomacy. It is the operation already documented on Albanian networks, surfacing into an official channel, and this time it carries a signature.

Drizan Shala

Start with the video, because this time the artifact carries music, and the music gives up more than the text.

On 9 June the spokesman of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmaeil Baqaei, posted a reply to the Albanian prime minister on X. Attached to it was drone footage of the Tirana protests, filmed on an earlier day of the demonstrations, and laid over the footage was a song: “Rrjedh në këngë e ligjërime,” Vaçe Zela’s recording from the 19th Festivali i Këngës of December 1980, music by Feim Ibrahimi, words by Gjok Beci.

Sit with that selection for a moment, because it is not available to outsiders. This is not the national anthem, which any foreign desk finds in ten minutes. It is deep catalogue, the patriotic repertoire of the late Hoxha decade, carried across two political orders by the one voice Albanians never argued about. Vaçe Zela won the first Festivali i Këngës in 1962 and eleven more after it; she was named Artist i Popullit in 1977; when she died in 2014 the country mourned her as it mourns no politician. Choosing this song requires knowing, in advance and precisely, what it does inside an Albanian chest. The chants quoted in the post showed Albanian orthography. The soundtrack shows Albanian emotional fluency. The production displays a level of cultural familiarity that does not emerge accidentally, and the capability behind it is already on the public record: on 11 March, Meta disclosed the takedown of an Iran-linked network of roughly three hundred accounts and pages built on fake personas with constructed biographies, among them a satirical cartoonist presenting as Albanian, in an operation the company traced back to 2024. The capability predates the protest it now serves. The song is the sound of it in use.

And the selection is more precise than “patriotic,” because the repertoire offered a hundred gentler love songs to the homeland and the editors did not take them. They took the martial branch. The verses of “Rrjedh në këngë e ligjërime” run through the Nagant revolver of the Albanian blazing fire, the partisans called to mind, the Albanian’s gunshot flowing brez më brez, generation to generation, heads high with the flag. Laid over aerial images of a crowd facing its own government, the song does not say beautiful country. It says the nation rises, as it always has, in arms. The refrain supplies the protest’s meaning; the protest supplies the pictures.

This publication documented the method a week ago, at the anonymous layer of the operation. A real fire, moved in time, with a fabricated sentence attached; real footage of real crowds, re-labelled from outside; the lie never in the frame, always in the caption, where no fact-checker can reach it. The video on the spokesman’s account is the same construction, executed at the official layer. The footage is authentic and displaced, taken from an earlier day and re-purposed. The framing is imported and attached. Last week the caption was the operation. This week the soundtrack is the caption.

The text deserves the same reading, line by line, because every sentence in it was chosen the way the song was chosen.

“Calm down, Mr. prime minister.” The opening assigns the roles before any argument is made: Iran the composed adult, Albania’s elected head of government the hysteric. It is also bait. The sentence is engineered to draw exactly the furious reply it drew, after which the distribution of temperament, accused state serene, accusing state enraged, becomes the visual record of the exchange. The first deliverable of the post is Rama’s reaction to it.

“It was YOU, sir, who started this.” Here the timeline is amputated. “This” begins on 5 June, with the prime minister’s accusation in Tivat. It does not begin in 2022, when cyberattacks attributed to Iranian state actors hit Albanian public infrastructure and Tirana severed diplomatic relations. It does not begin on 11 March, with the dismantled network and its Albanian persona. One sentence deletes four years of documented record, and “hackneyed baseless accusations,” later in the post, performs the same deletion with a single adjective, reclassifying forensic attribution as a stale talking point.

“The intelligence and judgment of your own people, as a nation of rich culture and proud history.” The flattery is addressed over the head of the government to the public, splitting the praised nation from the condemned executive. Notice how generic it is. Rich culture and proud history pastes onto any target country without modification; the template shows through the paint. And the sentence that follows, that Albanians are perceptive enough to distinguish truth from falsehood, is inoculation in advance: any future attribution, however evidenced, now arrives pre-framed as an insult to the public’s intelligence. Tehran ran the same inoculation on a second track in the same news cycle, in the register of ridicule, with the remark that one day the flamingos of Narta would be named Iranian agents. Concern and mockery are not two reactions. They are the two voices of one operation, one to court the audience, one to make the evidence laughable before it exists.

“If you choose to sell your national sovereignty, that is your decision.” This is the most engineered sentence in the post. The protest’s most radical frame, Albania for sale, enters as the presupposition of a hypothetical. It is not asserted, so it cannot be rebutted. It is assumed, so it stays. And “sell your sovereignty” is the load-bearing vocabulary of the narrative catalogued at the anonymous layer last week, minus the one word a foreign ministry cannot afford to publish. The captions named the buyer. The spokesman does not. The official layer keeps its hands clean of the payload while echoing, word for word, the frame the payload travels in. Division of labour, visible inside a single sentence.

Then the chants, and the chants are the centre of the post. Three quotations, in correct Albanian: against corruption, for justice, Rama ik. Two facts about them are diagnostic. The first is the selection. The Zvërnec demonstrations have produced weeks of environmental slogans, about the lagoon, the pelicans, the fenced coast. The ministry quoted none of them. It quoted only the three that convert an environmental protest into a regime-change protest, which is the precise re-labelling the anonymous captions performed on the footage. The protest is real; the selection was made in Tehran. The second is the format. Baqaei does not write that the prime minister of a NATO member state should fall. He reports that people chant it. Quotation is the diplomatic technology of deniable endorsement, and here it allows a foreign ministry to publish a call for the removal of a European government while asserting nothing at all. Last week the lie lived in the caption. This week the call lives in the quote.

Step back from the lines to the object. A spokesman’s riposte, dashed off in irritation, does not arrive carrying a video package: archival drone footage selected, a 1980 festival recording cleared from someone’s library, audio synchronised to image. Editing takes hours and a brief. The reply was not written. It was produced. Spontaneity does not arrive with post-production, and the production is the genre claim of this entire text: the post is not diplomatic correspondence, it is a media deliverable wearing the format of one. Its addressee is not Edi Rama, who functions as the pretext. Its addressees are the Albanian street, for whom the chants and the song are designed to be cut, screenshotted, and recirculated in domestic feeds, and the amplification stack documented last week, which received the official frame within hours and carried it.

Be precise about what the artifact proves, because precision is the entire difference between analysis and the thing analysed. The post does not prove that Iran authored the protests. The grievance at Zvërnec is Albanian, the fence is real, the anger at it is authentic, and nothing on a spokesman’s account changes that. What the post proves is participation: a state with no embassy in Tirana, no consular interest, no bilateral channel, performing selection and amplification inside an Albanian domestic dispute, in Albanian, with Albanian cultural material, through its official organ. Last week the participation had to be established through convergence and pattern. This week it is signed.

And the signature reveals the second half of the method. The anonymous layer, as documented, imported a hatred Albanians do not hold: the antisemitic payload, materialising fully formed inside a week, with no domestic baseline to grow from. The official layer does the inverse. It appropriates a love Albanians genuinely do hold, the deepest one available, and re-aims it at their own state. Imported hatred below, appropriated love above, one operation. Vaçe Zela’s voice was recorded under a dictatorship and outlived it, because Albanians kept the love and discarded the regime that claimed to own it. The Islamic Republic is now the second regime to attempt the claim.

It will fail for the same reason, and one fact is sufficient to show why the patriotism in that video is costume. In the country whose foreign ministry pressed play on her, Vaçe Zela could not have sung. Since the 1979 revolution, women have been prohibited from performing solo before mixed public audiences inside Iran. The instrument of the operation is a crime in the state operating it. Everything else in the post is technique. That is the truth it could not edit out.

Drizan Shala writes on security, institutions, and political violence for Kosovo Dispatch and Tirana Examiner. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sarajevo.