International community should hold Albania’s political leaders personally responsible
Tirana Times
It’s a sad day, when, because of the recent political turmoil, Albania is being compared to countries outside Europe. Albania is not Tunisia, nor is it Egypt. In both these countries, protesters are trying to overthrow authoritarian regimes similar in nature to dictatorships.
Albania went through that process nearly two decades ago in 1992. This country is not a dictatorship. However, it has a huge problem with getting democracy to function properly.
This time things have gotten so bad, there is a lot of anxiety about what the immediate future holds, because democratically-elected representatives of the people are failing to sit down and hammer out an agreement that will move the country forward instead of throwing it back to the abyss of the late 1990s.
It is clear the two main parties can’t find an agreement as soon as you hear the hate and anger used in the political discourse between the two leaders. The words we hear are those of a virtual civil war, not those of normal political discussion in a democratic country.
After the protest and three deaths on Jan. 21, the country is now in a political stalemate that is too dangerous to be allowed to continue for long.
The government accuses the country’s constitutional institutions – the president, the prosecutor general and the chief of the intelligence services of colluding with the head of the opposition to overthrow the government by force. The claim seems to come out of a James Bond movie. The government says it knows sophisticated weapons were to be used נpoisoned knives, umbrella-shaped riffles and pen-shaped guns. All that resembles the invented anti-communist groups the previous Albanian regime made up out of its paranoia to stay in power.
This is serious however because of the grave fact that three protesters were killed outside the prime minister’s office at a time when they themselves were not engaged in any violent attacks against police or officials. Oppositions protests have been entirely peaceful since then, but the opposition keeps calling for more rallies, which no one know if it can keep under control.
Instead of a professional investigation by prosecutors, the parliament decided to step in with a charade of an investigative committee, staffed entirely with the deputies of the party in power, that resembles more a Joseph McCarthy-style witch-hunt of the imaginative plot mentioned above than a professional legislative committee looking for answers.
The committee had the audacity to summon the head of state and the leaders of other independent institutions that are by law under no obligation to report to such committee.
The committee’s work and stated goal is absurd. But what makes it worse, it is dangerous for democracy in Albania.
The latest unraveling of Albania’s dreams for stability and a European future seems to be part of a repeated cycle in which Albania’s state and the functioning of democracy become so weak, the country risks heading into an abyss.
One of the biggest side effects of the political crisis in the past couple of years is that Albania has woefully neglected its European agenda, moving instead into a road that culminated with the events of Jan. 21 which have now seriously endangered the country’s security and stability.
Unfortunately, at this low in the cycle, exiting from the spiral of virtual civil war that risks producing more violence cannot be done without the intervention of the international community. The sad fact is Albanian leaders are far more likely to listen to representatives of the international community that to the Albanian people they claim to represent, but who they are leading to the abyss.
As a NATO member country and as a signatory of several agreements with the European Union, Albania and its political leaders have some obligations not only to the posts they hold but also the alliance and the European bloc. They should be held accountable to the international standards of these two bodies. The message should be clear that they – the political leaders – will be held personally accountable for what happens next.
