By: Adela Halo
Albania’s electoral campaigns, leading up to the June 28th elections this year are utterly discouraging, not only due to their vague approach to the country’s pressing issues, but also due to the sham that their crowds are.
The issue of the use of children in political rallies has once more come to the fore. Both leaders of Albania’s main parties, Sali Berisha and Edi Rama, have included children in their tours around the country. The problems with the instrumentalisation of children for political aims need no elaboration, especially when it all occurs during class time.
What yet remains to be thoroughly discussed is the instrumentalisation of adults. Many employees were brought to Tirana from other cities a few days ago in buses to fill the capital’s square. The message had been clear. You either get into the bus, ride and become a face in a faceless crowd, or you lose your job. Plain and simple.
A friend remarked that in a way this is a positive sign. It means that parties are unable to get support unless they force it, reflecting the quality of their proposals for Albanians. Yet, the effects and pressures created by forcing, blackmailing people to political rallies are disturbing. As the safety and privacy of your vote is sharply eroded, as the safety of your non-political job is debated, as the lack of basic, very basic freedoms is exposed, democracy is ultimately experienced as a real sham.
The upcoming elections have long been framed as a test for basic standards of democracy in Albania. The vicious contest that continues to unfold, however, has made all democratic benchmarks, starting from the right to vote, to those of children and adults, quite simply negligible. What must never be neglected, is the size of the crowd, projecting the image of a false victory. And we have yet to see the end of this frenzy.
When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in February 17th, 2008, Belgrade was set on fire, metaphorically and literally. Certain embassies were attacked, and waves of nationalistic protesters crowded the roads we heard, as Vojislav Kostunica reassured the nation that Serbia would never recognise a ‘false state’. False, it turned out, was the actual degree of Belgrade’s protest against independence. Later reports revealed that the streets had been crowded with people brought in from other areas of Serbia especially for that effect.
The 9/11 attacks were immediately followed by images and reports of celebrating crowds of Palestinians – images that certainly nourished abhorrence in the traumatised United States, and not only. Later on, detailed investigations and release of the full footage told a different story. First, there had been no actual crowd one could speak of. The cameras had been skilfully used to amplify the number of people and forge the crowd effect. And second, people in that imaginary crowd had actually been a bunch of children who had been given candy and asked to play happy.
Whoever said that size does not matter was very wrong indeed. When it comes to crowds and political rallies, the size of the crowd is quintessential. In Belgrade they knew that, and those that produced the images from Palestine knew it too. The visual effect of masses is indisputable – it is the indisputable proof of support and commitment to a cause.
It is certainly encouraging and inspiring to see people form masses against the war in Vietnam, against the war in Iraq, against apartheid, against genocide, against the violation of human rights, for human dignity. But it is precisely the latter one that we completely lose sight of in the cases above, and more to the point in Albania, in our political rallies in the midst of election fever.
