For those who chant “Albania is ours” while turning on Albanians

Behind the image of a civic protest — one that speaks to a real feeling among many Albanians that they have been shut out of power — something uglier is beginning to appear.

In the shadow of the protesters handing flowers to police officers on the boulevard, another face of the movement is emerging: people damaging property, confronting police and turning on anyone who does not think like them.

Politicians, public figures, writers, journalists, businesspeople and successful professionals are all becoming targets. To the self-appointed leaders of this revolution — many of them failures, or half-made public figures — anyone who has achieved something seems to have stolen their share of the sun.

Today in Rrjoll, an angry crowd destroyed the fence around a construction site. The company there had received a building permit on land owned by a private citizen. Yet many of the same people who present themselves as leaders of the Tirana protest helped lead the attack.

This is a dangerous precedent.

Those chanting “Albania is ours” need to understand something basic: that does not mean other people’s property belongs to the protest. Property belongs to its owners. A protest platform cannot become a land registry office. Nor can it become a place from which people are publicly marked for punishment because they are disliked by those manipulating the crowd.

Protest is welcome as a democratic right.

It is not welcome as a licence to intimidate.

I do not know what message these protesters think they are sending to Albanian business when, the moment they see a fence around a construction site, they rush to tear it down in the name of civic protest.

The investor has not taken anyone’s land. The land has a legal owner, someone who inherited it more than a century ago and lost it only under the communist regime. That owner has signed a development contract. I understand those who claim the land as theirs. But their dispute is with the owner, not with the investor.

Creating a climate of hostility toward Albanian investors is not patriotism. It is the opposite. It tells major Albanian businesses to take the money they have earned here and invest it somewhere else, in a country where they feel safer.

That is a double betrayal.

A fence means little to a major investor. It costs money, but it is not the real damage. The real damage is the fear it creates: the idea that investing in Albania can become unsafe overnight because a crowd decides your project is illegitimate.

That is a time bomb. And it is being wound up beneath the flowers on the boulevard, beneath the image of a peaceful protest that is increasingly carrying anger toward anyone who does not agree with it.

Never in Albania, except during the gang violence of 1997 — when Fatos Lubonja, together with the people around him, was again at the front — has there been this much hatred, or such an effort to frighten anyone who stands against them.

But the gangs of 1997 are still in prison. Fatos Lubonja is free.

Those chanting “Albania is ours” may really believe every inch of land and every asset in this country belongs to them. They need to wake up from that dream.

They own their anger. Nothing more.

And that anger may be legitimate only until it turns into intimidation, destruction of someone else’s property and an attack on the legal certainty Albania needs if anyone is to invest here.

The global campaign against Jared Kushner found Albania as a useful stage. But now, under the soundtrack of patriotic songs and revolutionary slogans, it is turning into a campaign of pressure against Albanian investors.

Things have become so absurd that it now sounds almost patriotic to say something obvious: big Albanian businesspeople are not the enemy. They are among the people who keep the Albanian economy alive.

For a moment, it feels as if some people believe this country will be developed by bloggers, protesting journalists, NGO activists, embassy-funded commentators, opposition propagandists and video producers — not by those who invest their own money, employ people and push the economy forward.

What happened today in Rrjoll must be condemned in Tirana.

It must be condemned from the protest platform itself.

That platform cannot become a place where property certificates are handed out or business permits are approved. Nor can it become a platform for issuing public verdicts against businesspeople, journalists, public figures or politicians whom the protesters dislike.

They have every right not to like them. They have every right to oppose them. But they do not have the right to use the silence of the protest as permission to target anyone they choose.

I am not a friend of Ben Blushi. I have no closeness with him. I have been one of his harsh critics. But the language of hatred directed at him from the protest is shameful.

The same is true of the vile slogan against publisher Carlo Bolino, paid for by the Berisha family and waved at the protest, insulting him in racist language as an Italian “drinking the blood of Albanians”. It is ugly racism. It shames everyone, especially journalists who have joined the protest while still lecturing others about professionalism.

Most of the journalists in my newsroom support the protest. Some have taken part in it. That does not stop me from keeping them at work. If I had the spirit of this supposedly civic protest, I would have fired them all.

But I am not a revolutionary.

I believe in the evolution of society. I distrust revolutions.

The only protest I ever joined was between December 9 and 11, 1990, and for 35 years we have been judged for it. Now some people want to drag the country back to the time before December 1990, when anyone who thought differently from the revolution was denounced, stripped of property and sometimes killed.

In 1944, before taking Tirana, the communists issued liquidation orders for the city’s intellectuals and the few journalists it had. They killed them before November 29 at the Kursal café.

The excitement among some protesters that not only Albania, but also the law and the government now belong to them, is a dangerous delusion. In a few months, many of them will regret it and say: this was not done in my name.

I have seen this happen more than once in Albania. The fire of revolution dies down. Revolutionaries become ordinary people again. Then everyone pretends they were never part of the madness.

Right now, it is very easy to divide society between those who want to intimidate and those who are simply trying to live and work. That division has only one likely result: Albania will distance itself from this gang of revolutionaries.

And that is the fastest way to kill what was genuinely beautiful about this protest: the feeling that it gave voice to a marginalised part of Albanian society.

But no protest can justify public intimidation.

The government must stand by investors and the rule of law, even against revolutionaries who think “the day has come” because Albin Kurti’s people have arrived to lead them.

If the state fails to do that, then everyone may start defending themselves with their own hands.

But that would no longer be a civic protest.

It would be civil conflict.

Do not call it into being.

Originally published in Albanian as: Për ata që thërrasin "Shqipëria është e jona" dhe linçojnë shqiptarët