"Dear Edi.”
So began European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's statement in a joint press conference with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on September 30. She continued:
It's wonderful to be back. And you have been working hard to turn Albania's European dream into reality. So my first message is simple: the goal is in sight. Albania is among the frontrunners in our accession process. Since I was last here, Albania has made remarkable progress. You opened the final cluster of negotiating chapters. And in July, you closed your first three chapters. Including external relations. This is important progress. It means Albania is fully aligned with our common foreign and security policy. We see the world with the same eyes, and this is very important for the accession process. We stand together when our values and interests are challenged.
It has become, however, increasingly clear during the last few days that while Von der Leyen and Rama may see the world with the same eyes, those eyes are not the eyes of the people. And that when the European Commission President speaks of alignment on foreign and security policy, when she speaks or “our values and interests", these are not the values and interests of the Albanian people.
The EU is not interested in Albania because of its people and their desire for a better future for themselves and their children, which is actually the main reason most Albanians are in favour of the EU. Rather, the EU is much more interested in using Albania as its security buffer, where Frontex has free reign to hunt down “illegal” immigrants, while at the same time patrolling the rights of Albanians to travel into the Schengen zone.
The EU is further interested in Albania as a testing ground for “solutions” to its so-called “immigrant problem", turning the illegitimate Shëngjin and Gjadër detention camps established by the Italian Meloni regime into a broader clearing house system for the illegal extradition of asylum seekers to “safe” third countries.
The disalignment between the EU and the Albanian people has become even more pronounced with the recent statements of both the European Commission and the EU Delegation in Tirana, which utterly failed to condemn the extreme police violence used against teenagers and students protesting on the Albanian streets against the widespread, eye-wateringly gargantuan corruption.
These are not judgemental errors on the Commission’s behalf; they are an expression of the alignment between the EU and Rama government that the popular protests threaten their respective goals.
The European Commission said:
We condemn the use of violence in Tirana and other cities in Albania, including arson, attacks on State institutions and the destruction of public and private property. Violence has no place in a democratic society, and the response to it must remain within the law and proportionate.
This last part, on “proportionate” violence (by the police, that is), was removed in the statement of the EU Delegation, to make their support for the government even more abundantly clear:
We strongly condemn the violent escalation at the protest and the destruction of public and private property.
We call on protestors to exercise restraint and to refrain from any acts of violence. Violence has no place in democracies.
As we can see all over the EU at this very moment, in fact, violence very much appears to have a place in democracies, especially at those moments that the ruling class needs to be reminded that their vaunted “democratic” mandate under heaven is not of an eternal nature (and let us ignore Von der Leyen was never democratically elected in the first place). Von der Leyen and Rama don’t like to be reminded, but Albanian social media have already understood this, as is shown by the following Instagram post:
Several reasons why I believe we will enter the EU:
— attacks on the first aid post with teargas and flash-bangs
— burning down our food supplies
— attacks with clubs by unidentified persons
— kidnapping of people from the streets in unmarked vehicles
— attacks with rubber bullets in the neck and chest
I believe that all of these pave the road to integration into the EU!
The kids are all right.
The alignment between the European Commission led by Von der Leyen and Prime Minister Rama is also reflected in the only argument Rama has consistently employed to justify his grip on power: EU accession. Rama, however, doesn’t want to lead the EU accession process because he believes it will benefit the Albanian people, but because he believes it is the only thing that will keep him in power, in that it will give him access to new streams of revenue to keep an economy (and his party apparatus) going that is currently purely running on drug trafficking, money laundering, and some low-cost, unsustainable tourism.
As Von der Leyen indicated in her speech: “You have achieved over 80% of reform steps. You have already received 213 million euro in EU funds. More payments are expected in the coming weeks.” Who knows how many millions of those EU funds have already appeared in the pockets of Agasi, Mane, Kastrati, Balluku, Rama, and all those other criminals – oligarchs – politicians?
But we do know they desperately need these funds to keep the Albanian population in check: to pay the employees of the Territorial Inspectorate of Tirana to defend the headquarters of the Socialist Party; to pay the criminals going from door to door to snuff out protesting students; to pay the masked gangsters harassing doctors in the hospitals; to pay the special forces shooting teargas on first aid posts; to pay the anonymous phone calls telling parents to keep their children at home or else…
That is where all those EU funds are going. That is why Rama needs Albania in the EU. And Von der Leyen? If it were up to her, she would turn Albania into a giant migration camp.
Shpërndaje te miqtë
