Two Protests That Choked Each Other

By Skënder Minxhozi (Tirana)

In truth, these are two small, disoriented protests, plus a couple of dozen vandals who draw only the attention of the media and the police, without moving a single ordinary citizen to leave the house. This crowd of a few hundred people with two souls, ex-Flamingos and veteran opposition members, spends several hours every weekday in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, disrupting nothing but the traffic on the boulevard, while at the weekend it swells a little and manages to get attention not through its presence but through the violence of molotovs and masks. It has been said time and again that with this many people in the street you cannot get the headmaster of a Tirana high school sacked, let alone the government, the opposition and everything else around them.

And yet the protest, or rather the two mini-protests, stubbornly and nostalgically go on evoking June, when the square filled up and the government trembled in its offices. A process that burned out very quickly, because those who created it had not thought about what they would do once they had climbed to the top of the castle battlements. The lack of a plan left them without having taken the castle of power, and now they are left gnashing their teeth, having missed a unique appointment with history.

But what are the two protests in question? Where do they come from and where are they going? If you go by a vulgar row in a television studio a week ago, the old official opposition and the new parties, not forgetting associations, activists and student youth on the fringes, are the streams that still mostly feed these outings on the boulevard: a few hundred people, up to two or three thousand at most on Saturdays.

The Democratic Party’s relationship with the five-month protests has remained consistently contradictory and insincere. Berisha and his people attacked the Flamingos in the first days of the protests. Once they saw that the square had swollen beyond every expectation and that it was time to jump on the new winners’ bandwagon, the PD and its old satellites rushed to declare that they stood with the students. A golden opportunity appeared on the horizon for Sali Berisha: to draw the old opposition’s small, tired public on the sly toward, and fold it into, a large, energetic crowd full of colours, sounds and banners, like the young people parading down the boulevard every day.

This was happening at the start of this summer, when the PD accepted total capitulation before the students and melted into them, silently enduring even the chants of “Rama to prison, Berisha to prison”, bowing its head and surrendering to the cynicism of history, which was symbolically rattling the handcuffs in its face. The opposition capitulated once more on the boulevard, this time not before Rama but before some “kids” who wanted revolution and overthrow.

The months have passed, and since then the Flamingos themselves have surrendered too, to ignorance and immaturity. Neither Rama nor Berisha sabotaged them as much as they sabotaged themselves. They could not organise, they could not identify a panel of leaders, and they cannot produce a serious political programme. They were left a brass band of the outraged, who say whatever comes into their heads and who do not know what to do with the stillborn infant of the revolution!

The start of the new university year brought not students but vandals onto the protest stage. The passage from the peaceful Flamingos to the violence of masks, fire and molotovs that burned Tirana was the bankruptcy declaration of the summer’s mass youth protests and marked their official end.

For three weeks there have been two small groupings in the square and a gang of masked individuals vandalising Tirana. This is the laughable triad of political and civic disobedience in today’s Albania. The students on one side, the official opposition on the other, and in the front row a gang of wrongdoers camouflaged under the students’ name whose only real aim is to sow destruction and arson.

The students’ protest no longer exists. It fell victim to the trap Berisha set for it, but also to its own, by now well-known, defects. After holding the Albanian political agenda in suspense for months, the protest has turned into a field of competition between the parties. The vulgar spectacle of opposition party men insulting each other in television studios a week ago proves this degradation of the protest best of all.

Berisha’s strategy of asphyxiating the protest “by embracing it” has worked perfectly. If he does not know how to build, the Doctor is a master at dismantling and wrecking. So at the start of November we can say that the Democrats’ operation to sabotage the protest is a hard reality on the streets of Tirana. The PD is no longer able to call mass protests, and it is making sure to impose the same condition on the students.

Today we have a motley ex-protest whose members insult and hate one another, where the new has surrendered for lack of ideas and clarity, but also because of the sabotage the old opposition inflicted on this anti-system project. Those who wanted Berisha in prison are falling for the Machiavellian tricks of the oldest politician of the Albanian transition. Ironic, but true.