As excavators were literally digging up the boulevard and streets to create a stone-free moat around his office and his “Garden of Eden,” which he claimed had been threatened by remotely controlled firebomb drones, the Prime Minister took to social media to improvise one of his increasingly erratic responses to the student protests, wearing the same white shirt and black suit as the last few days, in a room surrounded by a wallpaper filled with his mediocre drawings, at the desk displaying not the affairs of, but boxes of crayons.
Instead of taking responsibility like a proper statesman for the events of yesterday, which saw the indiscriminate use of teargas, rubber bullets, water cannons, stones, beatings, and overall extreme and disproportionate violence and cruelty by the police forces, the deployment of RENEA anti-terrorism units to protect the Prime Ministry, and the torching of the Bank of Albania, High Court, and several commercial banks, the Albanian people were treated to what one would hope to be the final ravings of a madman, hauled up in his safe space.
The transcript below to a certain extent makes Rama sound more composed than the actual video depicts, but since I doubt that many people will take the time to sit through a 10-minute iPhone monolog of the narcostate leader, here it is preserved for posterity.1
The past, the one we have seen, lived through, and to which we have paid every tribute – and I have not allowed those same tributes to be paid to that past also by those who are growing up today amid a thousand and one difficulties, the greatest of which is the chaos of social networks, the chaos of disinformation, the chaos of hatred, of division, of envy: “Why does he have it and I don’t?”
Those kids who went into Vodafone to grab iPhones – they are the victims of the clones. Of the clones who show them their backsides on Instagram. Of those who pose for them and make them feel completely worthless because they don’t have the iPhone. Not a book – an iPhone.
Rama starts his monolog by casting himself first and foremost as victim and scapegoat. There is a long history to this, starting with his ghostwritten election manifesto Kurban (“Scapegoat”) from 2011.
We should first of all recall here that Rama does not come from a family that suffered under the dictatorship. He comes out of a nomenklatura family, with his father being the most celebrated artist of the regime.
He has also consistently filled his cabinet with members of former nomenklatura families, such as Belinda Balluku, who is the granddaughter of a former (and executed) Minister of Defense. In other words, it is not Rama who has had to pay “tributes” to the past. He got served the present on a silver plate when he was called from an art residency Paris to Tirana to become Minister of Culture in 1998.
He then continues, in one breath, to blame the current protests on the “chaos of social networks.”
Again, it has been Rama himself who has profited most from social media, using sophisticated strategies to maximize his reach, using his state power to shut down TikTok when he couldn’t control it, using German companies to get opposition Facebook profiles shut down, and using his oversight over national digital infrastructure to throttle public access.
Disinformation, hatred, and chaos have been spread first and foremost by state policies demanding likes, retweets, and clicks from every single civil servant and evaluating government performance based on social media stats.
And so that we are very clear with one another: this is not a question of my power. I have nothing left to prove to myself. I may once have had [?] the desire to meet the great [leaders] of this world – which is normal, to be with them, to meet them, the desire to have photographs taken, the desire for that sort of thing, the desire to go.
I have looked the great [leaders] of this world straight in the eye, and they have looked me straight in the eye. I have proven to myself that I can represent the country with the highest dignity. Not with arrogance, not with arrogance, but with pride. What? I only make the trips that are necessary. I no longer have any desire [?] for this power, for wealth [snickers].
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The truth of the matter is that Rama, unfortunately, still has everything to prove.
His entire legacy is at this moment at stake. He stands on the brink of repeating exactly the same mistake as his predecessors: unable to judge when to leave power.
He also severely misjudges how he is seen in the eyes of the world, which sees him as the leader of a mafia state acting like a clown in white sneakers; as the lapdog of Trump and Netanyahu, who would sell the pride of his country for just another year in office.
The little snicker at the end of this section, after the word “wealth,” of which he no doubt has amassed tremendous amounts in offshore accounts, reveals everything about his insincerity.
What can I tell you – it is pointless to talk about this, pointless to talk about this, but I know this much, and I repeat it: it is not my power that is at stake here. What is at stake here is the European Union negotiating table – it is as simple as that. And Albanians must think this through very clearly, very, very clearly: do they want this [holds up pavement stone], or do they want the European Union?
Now you will say, some will say: “But why? If you leave, we won’t get into the European Union? Why you?” Well, fine.
I’m not saying that would necessarily be the case, that you are incapable of taking Albania into the European Union; you are a pack of incompetents, a pack of violent thugs, a pack of mediocrities, a pack of envious people who do nothing but incite violence, because you cannot beat me at the ballot box, you cannot beat me with words, you cannot hold your own in an argument with me, and so your day has come for the stone. You started with water bottles, with eggs, and now you have arrived at the stone.
This has been his main talking point against any form of opposition the last few years: only his government would be able to magically follow up on the incredibly cumbersome process of EU accession, only with him at the top will Albania have a serious chance.
This is of course delusional.
EU accession is indeed complicated and extremely bureaucratic, but its main component is aligning Albanian legislation with the EU acquis communautaire, of which the Rama government actually has not that good of a track record, specifically within the very important fields of environmental and consumer protection – in fact, the very reasons the anti-government protests started this spring.
The second paragraph is typical Rama rhetoric, of the form “I am not saying that you are…” while then listing all the insults his heart really desires to utter.
If you look at this section of his speech, it also quite clear he really wants to insult his opponents in this way, while under the plausible deniality of a mumbled “not.”
So yes, let’s say you were just as capable. Let’s say they were just as capable. The negotiations have a calendar. The calendar runs until the end of 2027. The window is open now. That window, as the histories of other countries show us, opens and closes, opens and closes. For us it is open now.
And the calendar requires that every day, every day, every day we send things, we give and take with the Commission, and every day there are flights to Brussels and from Brussels to here, to share information, to share what we have done. That would be interrupted.
No such calendar exists, except in his head. Of course there are certain Commission-determined deadlines and benchmarks, but these are not necessarily inflexible, and regime changes in other acceeding countries have not necessarily adversely affected the process.
An argument could even be made that any post-Rama government immediately repealing the Law on Strategic Investments and other abusive pieces of legislation that contravene the acquis would speed up accession rather than interrupt it.
There is no doubt that (at this moment) any incoming new government would be strongly pro-EU, since it would need high levels of EU support to make the painful and lenghty transition out of a narco economy.
Why? Because if I leave, and let’s say some neo-Ballist or some neo-communist comes along – or let’s not even get into the matufepsi, the curufjapsi2 – it would take a long time: no, you; no, me; no, this one; no, that one; no, I’ll come; no, not like that; no, these ones; no, those ones; no… what is this?
I’m presenting the simplest view here. But on the other hand: the state does not surrender – it cannot happen that the state surrenders before this [holds up stone]. A state that surrenders before this does not recover for years, and years, and years.
What would have happened if Ramiz Alia during the student protests in 1991 had insisted that the state cannot surrender?
What if he, like Rama, would have insisted that his rule was legitimate, and that mass protests did not sanction a legal, popular mandate? What would have happened?
This question is that should haunt him. But rather, he forecloses it altogether:
So let us break off here, and I invite anyone who wants dialogue, anyone who wants to meet me, anyone who wants to talk – with cameras, without cameras, with photographs, without photographs, at the Prime Minister’s Office, at the university, at… wherever you like. Let us sit down and talk: what you have, what you want, what we can do for you, how we can make things better. Of course, certainly.
But don’t go… I’m talking about those girls and boys who go there not to throw stones, but whose vanguard has the stones, the masks, and then they say “the police hurt us” – it is no ballet there. That is no football match with a referee where, if you touch the other guy, you get a foul. What is being faced there is this [holds up stone] – a hail of stones and flames.
Indeed what is being faced is a “hail of stoned and flames” by the police, a police which has proven completely incapable of performing its lawful task of securing the safety of those “boys and girls” who peacefully want to exercise their human and constitutional right to protest.
And they protest because the Rama government has proven, for months on end, completely unwilling to “sit down and talk,” to listen to the legitimate concerns of the people, and put an end to the rapacious policies destroying Albanian cities and the countryside that profit only a tiny class of mafia-linked oligarchs.
Instead, fearing their end is nigh, they have ramped up their attempts to steal public property from the Albanian people.
The state police fired rubber bullets. Do you know why rubber bullets were fired? Because a police officer was hit here by a steel die, his jaw was split open; the other one – the comrade at his side pulled him away – or tried to pull away, I don’t know whom… the criminal who shot him with buckshot. How? Just look at the police in France, lined up, firing rubber bullets as if they were at the shooting galleries of Disneyland. What is this?
Yes, RENEA came out. RENEA has the duty to come out the moment there is a threat. RENEA also comes out when the Serbia–Albania, Albania–Serbia football match is played, or any football match where there may be grounds for disorder. What does that mean?
Of course it came out, and it will come out – that is not up for discussion. And of course the net will tighten around those in masks. The law, too, says you cannot conceal your identity. Whoever wants to talk to me without a mask – I am here. Whoever wants to send me messages with stones and masks will find me and the state standing against them.
Thank you very much.
It is difficult to see in a single, anecdotal injury suffered by a police officer a justification for the endless rounds of rubber bullets and teargas fired against protestors in their teens and twenties with barely any physical protection.
And Rama now tries to justify the deployment of the RENEA paramilitary forces, armed with semi-automatic rifles, by pointing at France saying, “look it’s worse over there!”
That is not an argument.
In Albania there is the Albanian legal framework, and that framework is quite clear on what types of state violence are acceptable in which circumstances.
And this framework, and Rama is in the end fully responsible for this, has these days completely collapsed under the raging impunity of the police and total dereliction of duty of the state functionaries such as the Ombudsperson who should provide the necessary checks and balances.
As an afterthought Rama also dedicates a few random thoughts to the material damage of the protests, careful to avoid mention of the many state institutions that have been affected by fire:
And I say wholeheartedly to those whose businesses have been damaged, and I say to the others: the damage, as we have seen from the inspections, is in fact much smaller than it appears, because it is the evening clones and the owners of those screens who amplify it [the damage] to the maximum.
As of yesterday around midday we had about 50 businesses affected, most of them counters and shops of banks and telephone companies. So, small businesses – fortunately we had few – but we have no problem with the number: as far as we are concerned, we will stand by them and we will do it all, the way I know how to do it, better, stronger, because whatever doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger. And what is happening now will make Albania come out stronger.
“Whatever doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.” That sounds like an invitation.
1. [?] marks words or phrases that were inaudible.
2. Mocking coinages; cf. matuf, “senile old fool.”
