Ndrenika’s embrace is the only intellectual courage of our time

Erion Veliaj has his haters. Like every politician, he also has his supporters. But the campaign now being sold as the humiliation of a great actor is not really about Robert Ndrenika. It is about Erion Veliaj.

Veliaj’s haters have found a new target because, with Veliaj himself, they have already released their anger by seeing him in prison. Like every lynch mob, they need another person to attack.

That is why there is little point in debating Robert Ndrenika as an actor, or in arguing whether he went to court simply as a citizen or as someone who feels sympathy for Veliaj.

The real issue is different.

Anyone who has followed Veliaj’s case calmly and without personal hatred can see why some people now view him as a victim. What began as a corruption case has increasingly looked, to his supporters, like a public lynching driven by the personal anger of a prosecutor and encouraged by political zeal from both sides.

That is the part no one wants to discuss.

That is also what brought Robert Ndrenika, and others, into that courtroom. Ndrenika spoke because others have refused to speak — including the anonymous cowards now preaching morality from behind a keyboard.

First, the Socialists are silent. All of them. His friends and his enemies inside the party alike. That silence has only made Ndrenika’s gesture heavier. What Veliaj’s haters call servility was, in fact, an act of intellectual courage.

It was a gesture that rose above the muteness of the Socialists and the rage of the haters. The legal lynching of Veliaj is so blatant that even the leader of his haters has admitted it.

Second, many of those leading the smear campaign against Ndrenika are the same people who line up every Monday outside SPAK to shake the hand of Sali Berisha, whom they present as Dumani’s “martyr.” That is the truly humiliating public scene: a leader ordering his supporters to wait for him in the SPAK courtyard. Veliaj has neither that possibility nor that mentality.

Finally, Ndrenika’s human gesture has provoked such fury because Veliaj’s haters had already decided that their prey was finished. In their minds, the man taken from his office to a prison cell and held there without trial, against every European standard, was already politically dead.

I do not know what they will say if Strasbourg eventually declares this whole lynching campaign unlawful. I do not know whether they will apologize to Ndrenika. But I do know why they are angry today: their prey has not died. And a great actor — the greatest living actor in Albania — publicly expressed sympathy for him.

Nor is Ndrenika alone. Helena Kadare also went to the courtroom. Like Ndrenika, she does not need Veliaj’s name for anything. But that is what separates an intellectual from others: an intellectual makes a gesture when others lower their heads, hide behind anonymity, or pretend not to see what is happening.

Haters are wounded by love more than by any other weapon. Ndrenika wounded them by embracing the prey they wanted dead — and by shaming all those who do not dare speak about what is happening.

Originally published in Albanian as: Përqafimi i Ndrenikës është i vetmi guxim intelektual i kohës