Rama after the protest: Once the coffin carried a dead person; today the protest has fallen into the hands of loudmouths, political wolves and jackals from Prishtina and Tetova

After the protest held a day earlier, Prime Minister Edi Rama reacted publicly, linking the coffin used by the protesters to events that took place 20 years ago.

In a lengthy post on social media, Rama said that, unlike in the past when the coffin had “a dead person” inside, today, in his view, the protest has ended up “in the hands of loudmouths, political wolves and jackals from Prishtina and Tetova,” thus losing its civic spirit.

Full message:

Dear flamingos🦩

This sad video-postcard is for those among you who 20 years ago were still children or still embryos in their mother’s womb;

for those who, although they were old enough then to understand the times, have left behind Albania and Tirana of that period so completely that today it seems to them either as if they never existed, or as if the memory of yesterday is a burden that keeps them from asking more of today;

and for those who left Albania and Tirana, but who have recently returned for one reason or another, on the one hand for holidays in the new Albania of a reality transformed through reforms, work, effort and colossal patience, and on the other to come out in protest 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, as if they were enemy fortresses.

Violence against the people’s elected representatives is justified, who according to this logic must be prevented from entering and leaving their work at the Parliament of Albania.

And it is a self-proclaimed “people” in the streets that decides who is a patriot and who is a traitor, who should go to prison, who should be lynched and who should be praised.

My aim is not to make you feel that you were wrong, simply because your protest ended up reduced to an enlarged copy of the ugly protests of the political swamp. Because no, you were not at all wrong when you felt trapped in a web of problems greater than your power to solve them and when you found one another amid your frustrations and hopes.

No, you are not wrong even today if you feel good identifying yourselves as one 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 when you seek to rise above ordinary daily life and ask much more of this country than has been achieved so far.

This is not only a right. It is a necessity.

And however strange it may seem to you, I am grateful to you for the light of hope and alarm that you lit with the energy of your peaceful protest, but this is a longer conversation for a day soon.

You have the right to demand from life in this country much more than has been achieved in the span of time between the coffin that 20 years ago had a dead person inside and the coffin that last night, on the same boulevard, had inside it the abyss between you and those who placed the light of your protest into a coffin.

Twenty years ago, the coffin was used to climb the steps of the prime minister’s fortress and the dead person was turned into cannon fodder, striking its gate as in the Middle Ages, with the aim of toppling the government. Whereas last night, the coffin appeared again as, for me, the entirely expected outcome of an orchestrated attempt to break this country’s climb upward, by overturning an Albania that has finally risen to its feet after a long kneeling, politically, economically and internationally.

Yes, for me this was entirely expected. Because Albania is neither the first nor the last place where the trained hands of enemies and ill-wishers of democratic societies, with destinies tied to the European Union or the United States, step in, take control and do everything they can to divert, to the detriment of these societies, protests that are born as expressions of sincere feelings from the heart of society and not from international conspiracies.

Naturally, those hands manage to take control of a protest also thanks to the zeal of the louts every country has, and who here are known to everyone, the loudmouths and their friends, who thought the boulevard had turned into yogurt and immediately surrounded your protest like hyenas around a roe deer. After the initial confusion, the weary wolves of the Road of Hope also entered the game, and in order to disguise themselves as patriots they gave a boost to the trade in qeleshes in the middle of the heat. And when you began to drift away from the boulevard, creating gaps for the “200,000-strong” photos of the international media, the jackals of the “diaspora” from Prishtina and Tetova were also mobilized, seeing on 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 cultivate their national-folkloric delusions. Because Tirana is the capital of the Europe of the Balkans, not the chief qeleshe of national-communist, national-Islamist or national-isolationist illusions.

Of course, those hands and those forces that have been mixed into the coffin stew do not control one another, or rather they have extreme incompatibilities among themselves. But today no incompatibility matters to them, because what unites them, some knowingly and many others blindly, is the dark aim of stopping Albania and turning it back, precisely 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 only one main thing to be said. 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 to the boulevard as the image of the curse that has pursued Albania since 1912; always using the homeland, the flag and sovereignty as raw material to fuel hatred among Albanians and as 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 not to give up memory in any way. Because history is not a burden from which we escape by throwing it out of our attention, but the compass that does not let us lose our way.

Whoever forgets where they come from no longer knows where they are going.

Love❤️