Three Sentences, General

An open letter to the Ambassador of the United States

Editorial Board

Your embassy spoke on Friday night at eleven o’clock. Three sentences. Violence is not civic engagement. Protest peacefully. Restraint and calm on all sides.

By then the High Court had taken molotovs. So had the Bank of Albania. A private bank was burning. Shops along the boulevard had been looted by men in masks with metal bars. Twenty-one police officers were in hospital, one with his jaw broken by a steel ball. Two days earlier, the Prime Minister says, a drone carrying explosives was stopped on its way to the courtyard of his office.

How come the government of the United States is tolerating a criminal eruption of Antifa violence in the streets of a NATO ally, General?

Your own government wrote the answer before it happened. Last year the President named Antifa a terrorist organisation and signed a national security memorandum on far-left political violence. In November your State Department designated four European Antifa groups as foreign terrorist organisations and cabled every post in the world, this one included, to report how host governments were responding. In July Secretary Rubio and Stephen Miller sat sixty-seven delegations down in Washington and told them far-left terror is a mortal threat to civilisation. The same day your Department announced visa bans on any foreigner who incites or enables it.

Then it happened here, in the form your Department described. Black bloc at the front, faces covered, minors pushed forward as shields. Banks and cash machines attacked, not robbed, attacked, because they are the symbols. A court set on fire. Private businesses looted. And a government that broke with Tehran for Washington put under siege while a fabricated story about Israelis landing to beat Albanian children ran through the crowd. Private property under attack, capitalism under attack, Albania’s alignment against Iran under attack, and the embassy of the United States, holding the memorandum and the cable, found three sentences for the demonstrators and put the state in the same breath as the mob.

How does that fall in line with your Department’s policy, General? Is Albania the one country where the cable did not arrive?

On Friday evening, while the Bank of Albania was being attacked, three men read Tirana the same way within two hours of each other. Representative Joe Wilson wrote that the Albanian government must refrain from all violence against protesters and that the young deserve a voice. Representative Keith Self, who held the hearing on Albania last month, wrote that the protests are the culmination of the people’s distrust of corrupt politicians and that Albania’s leaders must heed the calls for change. Alexander Dugin wrote that the Albanians are awakening. Nobody had to copy anybody. A corrupt regime, a people rising, a government that must yield: two Republican members of Congress and the Kremlin’s house philosopher arrived at the same page on the same night, and the page was Dugin’s. How come two Republicans are buying Dugin’s lines about a NATO ally, General, and how come your embassy left them nothing better to buy?

Washington’s doubts about some European governments are understandable. There are capitals that dislike this White House and its policies and would not mind seeing its friends in the region fail. Albania is not one of them. It cut relations with Iran in 2022 after Tehran’s cyberattack and still hosts the people Tehran wants dead. It raised defence spending before NATO asked. It stands in every coalition this administration has built, against terror, against Iran’s agenda, against the networks that run through the Balkans. It went to the wall for an American investment on its southern coast that the same street is now burning banks over. It is aligned with Washington in everything, and it is the one being burned.

And what did you think was going to happen? For two years your embassy allowed a story to be installed in this city: that SPAK, the special prosecution the United States funded, trained and praised, exists to decapitate this government; that the embassy stands behind the project; that the cases against ministers and mayors are the instrument. Nobody at your address said it. Nobody at your address denied it. It ran on every evening show, and the mission that could have killed it with one paragraph let it grow until the masked men on the boulevard believed they had an American licence. They say so. They believe you are behind them.

Whether those cases will stand in court, nobody knows, and that includes you. Some may. Some have already shown the seams. Since when does President Trump’s administration enable prosecutors to pursue political agendas with sketchy cases? In Washington that prosecutor is called a political prosecutor, and the President calls him worse. Rumour is not proof. General belief is not proof. If they were, Donald Trump would be a Russian puppet, because the entire American left has repeated it for ten years. You know that argument is worthless aimed at your President. It is equally worthless aimed at this government, and your embassy has let it stand for two years.

You have been in Tirana for three weeks. You came from a service that knows a destabilisation operation from the inside: a real grievance, a mob that is not the grievance, a foreign hand that claims the result, and a local legend that the great power approves. All four are on your street this week.

Your embassy had three sentences for it.

Find the fourth, General. Say that the United States supports no change of government in Albania by force. Say that those who claim your embassy stands behind the street are lying. Say what your own Department said about Antifa in Washington in July, here, where it is happening. One paragraph. Wake up.