Who Is Abusing the Children?

Tirana Examiner Newsroom

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. On a Monday morning when every school in Tirana was open, children of that age stood in front of the Kryeministria in numbers this publication’s reporters had not seen on any day of the past week. Yesterday there were some. Today there are many. And they are not there in school jackets. They are there in helmets, goggles, gloves, gas masks and rain jackets, all new, handed to them on the square by adults.

One of those adults filmed herself doing it. Arvina Lleshi, a stage speaker at this protest since the summer, arrested once and back the next day, a woman who tells the public she is unemployed, went live while she fitted riot equipment onto children. She did not lower her voice. She did not look over her shoulder. She bragged. She talked to her followers the way a shopkeeper talks about stock, and the stock was children’s bodies being prepared for tear gas and batons.

This is child abuse. An adult who takes a thirteen-year-old out of school, puts a gas mask on his face and sends him toward a police line is abusing that child. She is using a body that cannot consent to the risk, for a purpose the child does not understand and would not choose if he did. The law of this country on the rights and protection of the child exists for exactly this. It does not pause because the adult has a cause.

And the purpose is the sickest part. Nobody equips a boy for tear gas unless they expect him to be in tear gas. Nobody puts a helmet on a girl unless they have pictured something hitting her head. The people distributing this kit have already imagined a child being hurt. They have priced it. They have decided that if a baton touches a fifteen-year-old, it is their victory, because that picture ends the government’s week and nothing else they have tried has.

They want blood, and they have worked out that a child’s blood is worth the most. That is why the children arrived today, after six days of adults failing to produce the image. Last Tuesday the organisers invented intubated students. The rumour collapsed. This Monday they stopped inventing young victims and started manufacturing them. A fifteen-year-old in riot kit in front of the police line is a human shield, chosen because he photographs well and because the police cannot clear him without producing the shot the organisers need.

Who is paying for this? Not for the gas masks. For what the gas masks are for. Somebody in this city has decided that the next move in their political plan is a child from Tirana bleeding on live television, and has paid for the equipment that puts that child in the frame. Multiply the kit by the children on the square this morning, add the adults wearing the same models, note that it all arrived in volume on a school day. That is an order placed and an invoice paid. An unemployed activist does not fund it. She hands it out. Behind her is a buyer who looked at a budget line and saw a fifteen-year-old on the evening news with blood on his face, and approved it, so that the picture could be sold the same hour to the embassies, the Brussels spokespeople and the foreign correspondents as proof of a brutal state.

This publication is not naming the buyer. It is saying the buyer can be found. Customs has import records. The kit has brands and suppliers. The square has cameras on every corner. The prosecutors who have spent the week counting arrested adults have in front of them the easiest case of the week. Daylight. Video. A named adult. A minor. It should be opened today.

And the embassies. The same embassies that issue a statement when a tree is cut on a Tirana boulevard, that post within the hour on a court appointment, a journalist’s dismissal, a mayor’s remand, that found the time this week to instruct the Albanian police on restraint, have watched children being fitted with gas masks live on television for days and have not produced a sentence about the rights of the child, a phrase they otherwise cannot finish a paragraph without. Silence of that kind, in front of something this visible, is not caution. Missions that speak about everything and go quiet about this one thing have made a choice, and the choice places them next to the adults on the square. Accomplices is the word, and this publication uses it with the evidence in hand: six days, hundreds of hours of live footage, zero statements. The embassies that know how to ask who paid for a lobbyist have not asked who paid for a gas mask.

The children will be on that square again tomorrow unless someone in this state decides they should not be. Somebody has already paid for them to be there. This publication will be counting, and it will report who looked away.