Prime Minister Edi Rama has shared a reaction on Facebook, in which he addresses protesters he calls “flamingos,” saying that the civic protest, in his view, has strayed from its original aim and been taken over by political actors and groups with other interests.
According to Rama, the government has closely followed the concerns raised by citizens and the protest began on real grounds, but later, he says, it came under the influence of those he describes as “failures,” “wolves” and “jackals,” who used it as a political tool.
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Dear flamingos🦩
This sad video-postcard was made for those among you who 20 years ago were children or still embryos in their mother’s womb;
for those who, even though they were old enough at the time, have left behind the Albania and Tirana of those days so far that today they seem either never to have existed at all, or as if the memory of yesterday is a burden preventing them from demanding more from today;
and for those who left Albania and Tirana, but who lately return for a quick visit and a couple of errands, on the one hand vacations in the new Albania of a reality transformed through reforms, work, effort and colossal patience, and on the other hand taking to the streets for a “new Albania”; an Albania of magic keys, in whose name it is demanded that the electoral contract with the people be violated by motorcades of cars draped in red and black.
It is preached that democratic institutions must be targeted and “liberated” by force like enemy fortresses.
Violence against the people’s elected representatives is justified, and they are to be prevented from entering and leaving their workplace in the Albanian Parliament.
And a self-proclaimed “people” in the streets decides who is a patriot and who is a traitor, who goes to prison, who is lynched and who is praised.
My aim is not to make you feel that you were wrong, even though your protest was reduced to an enlarged copy of the ugly protests of the political swamp. Because no, you were not wrong at all when you felt trapped in problems bigger than your power to solve them, and found one another with your frustrations and your hopes.
No, you are not wrong even today if you feel good identifying as a large community of people from all walks of life, with the birds, with nature, with the land, with the homeland, with Albania.
No, you are not wrong for wanting to rise above ordinary everyday life and demand much more from this country than has been achieved so far.
This is not only right. It is necessary.
And however strange it may sound to you, I am grateful to you for the light of hope and alarm that you lit with the energy of your peaceful protest, though that is a longer conversation for a day soon.
It is your right to ask for much more from life in this country than what has been achieved in the span of time between the coffin that 20 years ago held a dead man inside and the coffin that last night, on the same boulevard, contained the abyss between you and those who placed the light of your protest inside a coffin.
Twenty years ago, the coffin was used to climb the steps of the prime minister’s fortress and the dead man was turned into cannon fodder, striking its gate as in the Middle Ages, in order to bring down the government. Last night, meanwhile, the coffin reappeared as the entirely predictable result, for me, of an orchestrated effort to break the steps of this country’s further ascent, turning upside down an Albania finally raised to its feet after a long period on its knees, politically, economically and internationally.
Yes, it was entirely predictable for me. Because Albania is neither the first nor the last country where the trained hands of enemies and ill-wishers of democratic societies (whose destinies are tied to the European Union or the United States) step in, seize control and do everything they can to derail, to the detriment of those societies, protests that arise as an expression of sincere feelings from the belly of society, not from international conspiracies.
Naturally, those hands take control of a protest also thanks to the zeal of the louts every country has, and who here are well known to everyone, the loudmouths and their friends, who thought the boulevard had turned to yogurt and immediately surrounded your protest like hyenas around a doe. After the initial confusion, the tired wolves of the Road of Hope also entered the game and, to disguise themselves as patriots, boosted the trade in qeleshes in the middle of the heat. And when you began to drift away from the boulevard, creating empty spaces for the “200,000-strong” photographs of the international media, the “diaspora” jackals from Prishtina and Tetova also mobilized, seeing in the boulevard the long-awaited hearth for the gasoline of their hatred toward official Tirana, where they have found no space and will find no space to develop their national-folkloric delusions. Because Tirana is the capital of the Europe of the Balkans, not the capital of nationalist-communist, nationalist-Islamist or nationalist-isolationist illusions.
Of course, those hands and those forces that have mixed themselves into the coffin stew do not control one another or, more precisely, they have extreme incompatibilities with one another. But no incompatibility matters to them today, because today they are united, some consciously and many others blindly, by the dark aim of stopping Albania and turning it backward, right in the final kilometers of the centuries-long road toward the sun that rises where it sets. But this too is not a conversation for today, especially since you have nothing to do with them.
Today there is one main thing to say. That protest is no longer yours, dear flamingos! You have become, without your authorization and against your will, the alibi for a coffin brought back onto the boulevard as the image of the curse that has followed Albania since 1912; always using the homeland, the flag and sovereignty as raw material to feed hatred among Albanians and as the nails of punishment that, more than once, have locked this country into the abyss inside that coffin.
But this sad video-postcard is by no means a call for you to give up the feelings and thoughts that brought you together. No, this is only a friendly invitation for you never, in any way, to give up your memory. Because history is not a burden we escape by casting it out of our attention, but the compass that does not allow us to lose our way.
Whoever forgets where they come from no longer knows where they are going.
Love❤️
