The Word Brussels Left Out

Ardit Rada (Tirana)

The European Commission has found its voice on Tirana. It took six days. The Ministry of Education was attacked on Tuesday. The High Court took petrol bombs on Friday night, the Bank of Albania the same night, a private bank after them. The American embassy, late and thin as it was, spoke first. Brussels produced four paragraphs on Sunday, as the police were firing rubber bullets for the first time.

The Commission condemns violence, names arson and attacks on State institutions, asks for due process, reminds everyone that assembly is a European value, welcomes the government’s promise to protect the right to protest, and closes with advice: grievances should be handled through constructive dialogue.

Read it twice and count what is missing. There is no date, no building, no name. The High Court is not in it. The Bank of Albania is not in it. The man who stood before the cameras and called for civil disobedience is not in it. The statement condemns violence the way a weather service reports rain, as something that happened to the city without anyone doing it.

Dialogue. With whom? The people who set fire to the High Court were not asking for a meeting. The opposition leader has spent six days explaining that the government cannot be removed by any other means and that the street is the only door left. Brussels answers that proposition by recommending a conversation. That is a reply to a different week.

Daniel Serwer answered the week that actually happened. The Johns Hopkins professor was in Albania in 1997 when the state collapsed, and he opened his Top Channel interview with one sentence: violence is unacceptable in democratic societies like Albania. In a democracy change comes through the vote. Violence does not bring votes. Civil disobedience means you sit down when the police tell you to move and you do not fight them when they arrest you, and he does not know what Sali Berisha understands by the term. He added that both he and Berisha are too old to stand on top of the mountain and that it is time for new leadership.

A retired American diplomat said in five minutes what the European Commission needed six days and four paragraphs not to say. He said Albania is a democracy. The Commission said Albania is a candidate country. He said the remedy is the ballot. The Commission said the remedy is dialogue. He said who is leading the protest and what is wrong with his method. The Commission said “those responsible,” which could be anyone, which is the point of writing it that way.

The word Brussels left out is vote. It appears nowhere in the statement. A government elected in May last year is being told its citizens’ grievances need “constructive dialogue,” as if the country had no parliament, no opposition benches, no election calendar. Albania has all three. That is what makes the petrol bombs a choice and not a necessity, and that is the one thing six days of drafting were for and did not say.

Serwer gave Berisha the sentence he will not enjoy. The Commission gave him nothing to be afraid of, and gave it late. This publication knows which of the two documents the organisers of next week’s protest will read more carefully.