When no one smells their own stench

By Mero Baze

Countries that often face corruption scandals, like Albania, have different ways of dealing with its punishment.

Some are dramatic, like Romania’s; others, like Croatia’s, are brutal but symbolic, limited only to the top levels. Albania seems to make even its stories of punishing corruption banal, just like corruption itself.

As most senior officials of Edi Rama’s government face justice and many figures linked to them are on the run, Albania’s confrontation with corruption has turned into a film without a director, where everyone offers their own tape to the public, but no one the real tape to justice.

Now each of justice’s victims is trying to find another enemy to denounce as the culprit of their own story, converting their former relations inside power into relations with justice.

In Romania, after the justice reform, when the main figures began to be convicted, major scandals erupted. When the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office investigated and brought senior politicians and officials before the courts, a debate broke out over how the case files had been built.

In 2018, the secret cooperation protocols between the Prosecutor’s Office and the SRI intelligence service were made public. In 2019, the Constitutional Court found a constitutional conflict regarding the 2009 protocol and required courts to review the legality of evidence in the relevant cases.

The head of the secret service, on the run, later turned into a blogger who every night told on YouTube how he, the prosecutor and an American diplomat covering for the CIA would go to dinners and decide who should be arrested. This bred disgust toward the tangible results of the justice reform and ended in a prolonged political crisis.

In Croatia, the specialized USKOK Prosecutor’s Office opened the case against former prime minister Ivo Sanader, arrested in 2010 and later convicted in several corruption cases. There everything was focused on one symbolic case, to teach others a lesson, while the debate continued over the effectiveness of the reform.

In Albania, this test is a mix of Romania and Croatia. Here two former presidents have been indicted, along with nearly all of the most senior officials of today’s power, in office since 2013 — except Edi Rama, who is still in office.

So we have symbolic trials and real trials alike, as well as various confrontations with justice by its victims.

So far, European integration has two martyrs: Erion Veliaj and Ilir Beqaj. Only they have been arrested and fought the battle with justice alone, refuting the charges and clinging tightly to the legal basis of their rights.

Sali Berisha and Ilir Meta, as two former presidents, have opposed the charges politically and accused Edi Rama of standing behind them.

Everyone else, who are part of Edi Rama’s entourage, are even more ridiculous. They find an enemy inside Edi Rama’s power and claim he did them in.

For example, Arben Ahmetaj thinks Veliaj did it to him together with Balluku. Klodi Mërtiri suspects Arben Ahmetaj wanted to take the incinerator from him, while the latter thinks Ben Blushi took it with Veliaj. Balluku suspects Veliaj and Gysi did it to him, though both are in prison by SPAK as well. On the other hand, Ergys Agasi suspects Balluku dug the hole for him, while Vlora suspects Klodi Lala did it with Serbian agents.

All of this is an Albanian giallo that turns your stomach. And this not because something happened that never happened before, or somewhere else, but because the way they are confronting justice is new and untried before in Albania.

This is the hour when, among other things, you must also show a bit of manhood to face your own past.

In this whole race of scandals, it seems the characters are also changing professions. Most accused politicians are becoming bloggers, podcast authors or their characters, starting from the misunderstanding that evil came to them from the media and from their opponents inside the government.

The greatest damage after this is the creation of a primitive culture of confronting justice. In trying to face it alone, all former state officials are making the Albanian state ridiculous, airing its dirty laundry in public, hoping that the dirtier they make the country, the cleaner they will look compared to others.

Apparently, they rely on the principle that no one smells their own when they soil their pants.