Who is next in line?

By Albatros Rexhaj

On Monday, in Tirana, Bledi Mane was walking down the street with his phone to his ear when someone called him a “servant of Rama”. Then came the eggs. Stones were thrown as well.

Mane asked: “What do you have against me?”

The question was not as naive as it sounded. Bledi Mane is not the government. Neither is Ylli Manjani. Nor am I.

Later, Gent Progni took the microphone and turned what had happened into a matter of turns. Mane, according to him, had been hit ahead of his turn. Manjani should have been first, “Albatros” after him, and Mane later.

The second one is me.

From here on, the egg does not interest me much. An egg breaks, dirties your jacket, washes off, and that is the end of it.

The list does not wash off.

A list requires thought. Someone has put the names in order. Someone has decided who should be first and who comes after him. And, apparently, the criterion is not public office, power or state responsibility. The three of us are not ministers, we do not vote on laws, we do not command the police and we do not sign tenders. We are people who speak publicly and who, each in his own way, do not fall in with the line of thinking that today dominates a large part of the media and the opposition in Tirana.

The studios are full of people who criticise Edi Rama. The portals too. Most of the analysts I see on screen think differently from me.

Good for them. It is their right.

But a right does not become smaller when you remain in the minority. That is exactly where it begins to have meaning.

Gent Progni may think I am wrong. He may oppose me, write against me, mock me, go on television and say my analysis is not worth a penny. That is called debate. He may protest against the government every day of the week, if he wishes.

But he cannot assign me a turn.

To make a citizen a target for hitting, first his status as a citizen must be taken away from him. “Servant of Rama” does exactly that job. Three words and the citizen disappears: his opinion becomes an order, his word a service, and he himself an extension of a power that the crowd has declared an enemy.

After that, the stone seems lighter.

Try saying it without the label: “We hit a man in the street because we do not like what he says on television.”

It does not sound good, because it is not good.

Put “servant of Rama” in front of it and suddenly, to someone, it looks like a protest.

The man is the same. The stone is the same. Only the moral permission to throw it has changed.

Here begins the Thought Police. Not necessarily in some office, with files and uniforms. It can also begin in a square, when a group convinces itself that it has the right to decide which opinion is wrong and who must be punished for holding it.

They will say I am exaggerating a banal incident. That does not worry me. An egg is banal. A list of people who “have their turn coming” is not.

It is a joke when nobody has been hit. Here a man was actually hit, and afterwards another man came out publicly and said that two other names should have been ahead of him. This does not end with laughter. At the very least, the prosecution should take an interest.

The state should take an interest too.

We have given the state the monopoly of force for one very simple reason: so that I do not need to gather my people, and Gent Progni his. So that the street is not decided by the number of people each side can bring. So that the Kanun does not return where the state leaves the place of the law empty.

The state tells me: you walk free, I will protect you. If it does not do that, the citizen begins to think about his own protection. And there we have entered a place much uglier than political debate.

The Union of Journalists condemned the attack on Bledi Mane. It did well.

About the list, silence.

Journalists’ associations, media freedom networks and international federations are usually very quick when someone lays a hand on a journalist. This time I have not seen the same reflex.

Nor from the European Union. Every year they read us the report on media freedom, the safety of journalists, democratic standards and the conditions that must be met to enter Europe. A journalist was hit in the street and three names were publicly placed in a queue to be hit. So far, from the Delegation I have not seen a single sentence.

Freedom of speech is not proven when you defend the person who thinks like you. It is proven when you defend the person who annoys you, the one you would not invite to your table, the one you would like to be wrong.

Gent Progni, I do not ask your permission to think. Nor to speak.

You may oppose me as much as you want. You may write against me. You may say I am wrong. I have no problem with that.

But if one day you think that your right to protest gives you the right to step in front of me, to block me, to touch me or to force me into silence, then we are no longer in a debate. The law has entered there. And the law recognises not only your right to protest, but also my right to defend myself.

I will go on thinking as I think. I will go on saying it. Neither the egg, nor the stone, nor the microphone changes anything here.

But the list interests me. Lists have a bad habit: they start with names, then they demand their turn.

I want to know who wrote it.