The well-known British newspaper the Observer has published a report on the protests in Albania, where citizens have been calling for Edi Rama’s removal for more than three months.
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The journalist Andrew Anthony himself attended one of these protests and shares his impressions of the demonstration.
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On a hot and humid evening last month, I joined protesters on Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard, just south of Skanderbeg Square, Tirana’s large central plaza, which is a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian occupations. During the communist years, this neighborhood was a strictly guarded sector reserved for the party’s elite officials. Known as the Block, it had access to shops stocked with food and the kinds of consumer goods that the rest of the country could only dream of.
Now it has been taken over by citizens. Every evening, a series of speeches is delivered through a sound system. Tonight, the most passionate speaker is an elderly woman dressed in black. Her name is Lavdije Nela, a former prisoner during the communist dictatorship. She is also the widow of Havzi Nela, a poet and critic of that regime who was publicly executed 38 years ago, on this very day. His crime, essentially, was that he wanted to be free.
His widow tells the crowd that the dictator Ramiz Alia, who succeeded Hoxha after his death in 1985, had signed the rejection of her husband’s plea for clemency—in effect, his death warrant. Alia considered himself open to change. He relaxed the rules so that farmers could own two sheep—as long as they were of the same sex, because breeding was strictly forbidden. But he still had a tendency to execute dissidents.
Another signature on the rejection of the plea for clemency belonged to a sculptor named Kristaq Rama, who was a member of Albania’s People’s Assembly. As the crowd knows, Rama was the father of the 62-year-old prime minister, who has led the country since 2013.
“As his body swayed from the gallows rope,” the elderly woman says through tears, “the party led by Edi Rama was dancing.”
In 1991, the communists, who were known as the Party of Labour of Albania, changed their name to the Socialist Party of Albania. Rama has never directly condemned his father, who died in 1998, although he has questioned whether his signature is authentic. He described Havzi Nela’s execution as “a very sad case,” but has not gone so far as to apologize for it, either as the country’s leader or as Kristaq’s son.
“Only in Albania can the son of an executioner become prime minister,” Lavdije Nela tells the protesters.
When I mention Nela’s comment to Rama, he simply says: “I understand why this story may seem dramatic to your readers, but it has no place in this discussion, not least because the facts are not as they are usually presented.”
A former professional basketball player and trained artist, Rama is a larger-than-life figure who has played a leading role in Albanian politics for almost three decades. First, as mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011, and later as prime minister, he was instrumental in transforming the capital’s center, where a series of multicolored towers designed by renowned foreign architects have reshaped the city’s skyline and received positive reviews from critics for their designs.
Many Albanians are unimpressed. Flavia Osmani, a 26-year-old computer engineer and Flamingo protester, sees the high-rise buildings as symbols of Rama’s ego and a drug economy. “The main source of these investments is drug money,” she claims.
There is a widespread belief that Albania, which still conducts much of its commercial activity in cash, is awash with laundered drug money coming from criminals in the diaspora. The truth is not easy to establish, but a report by the Albanian Center for Economic Research estimates that 50% of construction financing in the country comes through “informal channels.”
“According to the latest census,” says Vladimir Karaj, a journalist with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania, “there are 40,000 empty apartments in Tirana alone [a city with a population of around 600,000]. At the same time, property prices have risen dramatically.”
In addition to the unoccupied buildings in Tirana, large areas of the coast are filled with blocks of empty apartments, while along the main highways there is an endless line of petrol stations, almost one every 800 meters. Many Albanians believe their main function is to launder money. Rama is dismissive of this kind of thinking.
“Many widely held beliefs are becoming increasingly detached from the truth, facts, science and even basic arithmetic,” he says. “This is one of them. The figures simply do not support this claim.”
