The “Hyseni case” takes us back to the same eternal crisis

By Skënder Minxhozi

Vlora Hyseni was among the senior figures of the state with no prominent public profile. The job of intelligence chief helped her stay in the shadows, away from the daily political debate and media spotlights. The first time she was exposed, after the scandal in which she found herself implicated together with Ergys Agasi, she proved she had done very well not to speak. She spoke as a secret-service chief should never speak, and revealed a great deal about herself.

Behind the Vlora Hyseni scandal lies a long, multi-year history of appointments, promotions and personnel moves that has become a veritable conveyor belt of names and faces in the socialist state. The ease with which this conveyor belt moves, the superficial and often naive and flighty logic with which today’s appointment policy is applied on the upper floors of the Albanian state, determines to a large extent the subsequent lack of professionalism, the scandals, the gaffes, the mistakes and the low quality of this elite of people — not rarely accidental and incapable of performing the duty entrusted to them.

This majority has already traveled a long road, burning through almost all of its human baggage, while also exhausting the ideas and the will to move forward. It is demonstrating all the chronic diseases of long, worn-out governments. This, together with a gradual concentration over the years of power and decision-making in Rama’s hands, has produced a toxic microclimate in the Socialist Party. This political force has ceased to be a living organism, giving itself over to the formality, the propaganda and the dry demagogy of successes sold every day on social networks.

The executive power this party has delegated has for years functioned no longer on the principle of meritocracy and experience, but on sudden and random promotions that are sold as renewal. The place of the old but solid Latin principle “scripta manent, verba volant” has been taken by improvisation, the avoidance of procedures and, not rarely, the disregard of the red lines of the law.

The WhatsApp app icon is today the largest virtual office of the state, through which it communicates, decisions are made, and policies and projects are set. This app is today the metaphor that best personifies the easy, superficial governance of the socialists, which dominates the administration but also the political elite.

Vlora Hyseni’s story is part of this multi-year behavior toward merit and promotion. It is a story with many unknowns, which will likely be uncovered in the coming days and weeks. Hyseni cannot be blamed for creating a Frankenstein secret service like the old one under Gazidede, nor for wiretapping opponents in favor of the government. We have heard no such claim in these years, and that is proof that SHISH has stayed in its place, removed from political developments. Perhaps more removed than it should be — so much so that appointments in the institution became just as random and easy as in the other posts of the state.

The concrete problem with the SHISH chief is that Hyseni, too, was exposed in an inappropriate relationship with a wanted person, did not resign, but waited for justice to enter the game. Even those who appointed her stayed silent, neglecting to defuse a crisis that has now gripped the entire institution and the country’s political life.

In itself this is a repeated crisis of direction and representation displayed by Albania’s senior administration. A crisis that comes from many factors, but above all from improvisation and carelessness in the policy of selecting, recruiting and imposing professional standards and the logic of the law on all those who knock on the doors of the state.

Today’s government is full of people whose origins are unknown, who take and leave posts often within a few months, with no tangible record. Their names and faces tell the ordinary Albanian nothing, because they are passing, identity-less chess pieces. Just look, for example, at the multitude of deputy ministers who come and go as if they were players substituted during a sports match at a referee’s whistle.

The same phenomenon that has seized the executive today dominates in respective proportions in the legislature as well. If a national media contest were held on what percentage of Albanians know the current parliament members by name, the percentage would surely come out laughable. MPs elected with formulas similar to Big Brother contestants, MPs who, once they receive their mandates, start courses on “how to become an MP.” So they get the license, then enroll in driving school!

In the same logic — only much dirtier and more corruptive — works the judiciary. In the power of the “new justice.” The only power that, after the approval of the justice reform, passed through theoretically rigorous control and selection filters. And precisely for this reason — because it acts and seals in the name of vetting and purity — this power has today become a large, all-powerful and uncontrolled edifice, which acts by very often abusing the power that the law and the sovereign have given it.

If there is a sector where sides, clans, money under the table (a lot of money in hand), the twisting of laws and procedures to the tastes of prosecutors and judges, the frightening relativization of the judicial process and the sidelining of the defense — all these phenomena that we thought had been overcome by the 2016 reform — are still there. Even stronger, because they are untouchable and because formally they are called “vetted.”

Judges and prosecutors who have acquitted murderers and criminals, or who have endless wealth, have still managed to pass the vetting and recycle themselves, and today they kill and cut in the name of the new justice. The filtering of investigation file details is one of the most abusive aspects of today’s Albanian justice. It was in this ugly, anti-state ritual that the “Hyseni case” was also handled. Although in a trial against the head of the secret service everything should “obviously” be secret and closed, the permanent media clients were fed this time too with spicy phrases between Vlora Hyseni and Ergys Agasi. A phenomenon that the apathetic and frightened Inspectorate of Justice refuses to see and investigate, although the cases have become a mountain and the playing with investigation files in the media has become a popular sport of the special prosecution.

The Albanian state is beginning to close the negotiation chapters with the European Union. Which means it is truly in the last kilometer of EU accession (not like Berisha’s last kilometer toward power)! Yet if you take a look at how this state selects, promotes and picks those who run its affairs in the legislature, executive and judiciary, you understand that the “Hyseni case” is neither an isolated accident nor a separate practice. On every floor of this state there are appointments and careers advancing in violation of criteria, through friendships, money, and above all through promotions that should never have happened.

We have built an Albania that does not know how to handle its own affairs, that does not know how to solve old and new crises, that does not know how to do the right thing, because all too often we have at the helm of affairs people who came from nowhere, or from the party, or from friends and acquaintances, or simply because of their readiness for servility and sides. That is why the state is caught with leeks in its hands, that is why incidents like Vlora Hyseni’s are destined to continue with other names and circumstances. Until this state is put in order, until leaders and managers with integrity — not friends and comrades of the party or the neighborhood — come to the top, this will be the music we listen to. Unfortunately.