We Must Assume Ferit Hoxha Is Joking

Albania’s Foreign Minister has written the statement the EU Delegation should have issued. We take it as a lesson for Brussels. The other reading is less kind to the minister.

Ardit Rada

Ferit Hoxha is a careful diplomat, and on Wednesday evening he produced a careful text. Albania, he wrote on X, has built international trust and respect over years and decades; that reputation can be easily damaged; scenes of violence, destruction of property and attacks on institutions or diplomatic premises are unacceptable; peaceful protest is part of democracy and violence is not; and every such scene casts doubt on the country’s capacity to move toward EU membership.

Nobody in Albania needed to be told this. The petrol bombs had been on every channel for two days. The Nunciature flag had been on the ground since Tuesday, and the minister’s own ministry had already condemned that in the morning, in the correct form, naming the Holy See. By nightfall there was no Albanian left who thought arson was good for tourism.

So the question is who the evening text was for.

At 12:55 on Wednesday the EU Delegation had given Report TV seven sentences on the violence, and at 14:00 it had issued the same seven sentences as an official statement. They addressed the police, the government and the right of assembly. They did not condemn anything. They did not call anything unacceptable. They did not mention that a diplomatic mission in their own neighbourhood had been attacked. They did not use, about the men with the petrol, any of the rule-of-law vocabulary they use about everyone else.

Read Hoxha’s post against that list and the craft becomes visible. Every item the Delegation left out, he puts in, in the Delegation’s own register. The missing adjective, supplied. The attacked diplomatic premises, named. The distinction between protest and violence, drawn in one line. The link to membership, made by a minister rather than by the mission whose job it was. He does not address the opposition. He does not mention the Delegation. He simply writes the statement it should have issued, in Albanian, on a platform where the Delegation’s press officers could hardly miss it, and leaves it there.

This is a sophisticated piece of work. It is the diplomatic equivalent of returning a colleague’s draft with the gaps filled in and no covering note. It commits the minister to nothing, it offends nobody who is not already looking for offence, and it puts on the record, under a government name, the sentence that Brussels’ mission in Tirana spent a day declining to write. Capitals that found the Delegation’s text wanting now have a better one to point to. We assume this is what he intended, because it is the only version of events in which the Foreign Minister of Albania spent Wednesday evening doing his job.

Consider the other version. In it, the Foreign Minister read the Delegation’s statement at 14:00, noticed nothing, and sat down that evening to explain to his fellow citizens that arson damages the brand. In that version the man whose office is to defend Albania’s interests in its relationships with foreign governments had no view on a foreign mission that had found specific words for the conduct of his police, specific demands for investigations into their actions, and nothing comparably specific for the men throwing petrol bombs. He had a view only on the arsonists, which every mayor, columnist and tourism board in the country already shared. He was, for one evening, the Republic’s press officer, and he was a competent one.

A foreign minister is not a press officer. He may speak to his own citizens, but he is paid to speak for them when others get the facts wrong. When a foreign mission issues a text that treats the burning of his capital as a policing matter, his duty is to answer it, through whatever channel his position allows. Irony is a channel. A sermon to Albanians is not.

We therefore decline to believe the second version. We choose to believe that the statement was addressed to Brussels, that every sentence was placed, and that the lesson was intended. Because if we are wrong, Albania does not have a Foreign Minister making a diplomatic point. It has a Foreign Minister who no longer knows which direction his office faces, and that is a matter for a letter of resignation, not another post on X.