Welcome to Albania, Madam Ambassador

An EU ambassador in Tirana has one job: to stay European. Tirana has absorbed every one sent so far. A letter to the one who arrived this month.

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

Welcome to Tirana. You will hear a lot in your first weeks. Most of it will be told to you in confidence, by people who know, about people who cannot be named. Let me save you some time.

Tirana is the capital of rumours. That is the polite version. The rumours that circulate in political and media circles are at best half truths. Most of them are plotlines, written with care, for the person who is meant to hear them. Everyone in this town believes he is a puppet master. Half of them are right, and it does not matter which half.

Nobody here expects you to analyse anything. They expect you to accept. Their facts are the only facts, and the story they bring you is finished before you open the door. Perception is treated as evidence. Ask for the evidence and you will get a second perception, delivered with more feeling. Ask for a witness and suddenly nobody has one. An ambassador who asks questions is not admired here. Due diligence is treated as distrust, distrust as insult. The easiest thing an ambassador can do in Tirana is become lazy, and the town will reward you for it every day.

I have no reason to doubt that you came here with good intentions, loyal to your mission and to what the Union says it stands for. I have every reason to doubt that this will last. Your predecessors gave us that reason. I am not saying they were bad people. I am saying that they went native, all of them, and it is bizarre how fast it happens.

Going native does not mean taking orders from the government, from the opposition, the Flamingo Movement, or the local businessmen. It means becoming one of us. Everything I described above stops being what you observe about Tirana and becomes what you do in Tirana. You hear a rumour and you pass it on. You are told a perception and you repeat it as a fact. You stop asking for the witness, because asking is rude, and you have learned the manners. You acquire a camp, and the camp acquires enemies, and one day you notice that you defend your side with the same certainty and the same absence of evidence as everyone else in this town. You have a version now. You have friends, and the friends have a version too. You speak of Albania in the first person plural and do not hear yourself doing it. By then the Delegation has become a Tirana office with a European flag on it.

The process starts before the dinners with politicians, inside your own building. You inherit an office your predecessors designed, a staff that learned Tirana alongside them, a filing system of who matters and who does not, and years of explanations for why things are the way they are. The people who brief you on Monday are good people. They are also the town’s memory, and the town’s memory is one of its instruments. The first Albania you meet will be an Albania already interpreted for you. Treat it as one more perception.

We have enough genuine Tirana people running the local circus. We do not need one more running the EU Delegation. To be exact, we can no longer afford one. All clusters are open, three chapters are closed, and the government has set itself a date. When you presented your credentials you said membership is not about clusters and chapters but about improving the lives of citizens. Good. Then you already know which of those two things this town will try to make you forget.

Your record helps you here. You ran training for judges at Trier. This country now has a judiciary that fixed its own pay, litigated for it, and obtained a court order compelling the state to pay. It has a prosecution that decides whom it watches, and a parliament that returned after six weeks with nothing to say. Somebody will explain to you why each of these is normal. Ask for the file instead. You also spent five years in Lisbon as the eyes and ears of the Commission. Tirana will try to reverse that, and make you its voice in Brussels. Do not take the job. One of us cannot represent Europe to us.

Stay European. Stay impartial. Keep your distance from an environment that will work, warmly and without pause, to make you one of its own. They will try to make you native before you notice you have become native. The warmth is real. So is the purpose behind it.

Mirë se erdhët. And check the sources.

Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and analyst with a background in national security studies and nearly three decades of experience in political and security affairs.