The eggtivists: the hen that hatches no flamingos

A young Top News reporter was attacked by a female protester while reporting from the protest. The reason was simple: the protester did not like Top Channel.

Two days earlier, from the same protest podium, Grida Duma and two of her guests had been singled out for abuse. They do not speak to be liked by all Albanians, but only by those who choose to believe them.

That abuse in the square led to violence against a young Top Channel reporter who may well have been sympathetic to the protest herself.

The aggression with which the woman went after her reminded me of another woman, one who seems to have trained herself not to worry that people might mistake her for someone who has escaped from a clinic.

For days, she has been following MPs as they enter and leave parliament. Sometimes she insults them. Sometimes she films herself insulting them. Then she throws eggs at them and feels proud of it.

Her act has now been copied by a wider of eggtivists around the protest.

Years ago, Self-Determination used the same method in Pristina. Its activists hid tear gas canisters and eggs wherever they could before throwing them at Isa Mustafa as he entered parliament or went home.

Then, after one counter-reaction, they pretended nothing had happened.

They did not repeat that madness again.

Tirana’s eggtivists now seems delirious from applying the Pristina manual in Tirana. Since they are still on the early pages, where the manual speaks about publicly “delegitimising” enemies, they have created a lynching squad.

They harass MPs they do not like, journalists they do not like, politicians they do not like and public figures they do not like, turning them into targets.

Today I watched a video of this woman pushing her phone into Erion Braçe’s face and filming him as he went to his office, demanding that he answer for everything under the sun.

Braçe happened to be in one of his better moods and laughed. On one of his usual mornings, when he wakes up furious, he might have thrown her phone in the rubbish.

Two thugs barbarically attacked the publicist Ilir Demalia after identifying him as someone on the state’s side. Hundreds of comments from eggtivists wished him dead as soon as possible.

Not even in Palestine was there this much approval for the attack on the Twin Towers in the United States as there is now, among the “flamingos” of Tirana’s eggtivists, for Demalia’s death.

The same group attacked the talented actor Gaz Paja with rumours they themselves spread around Tirana, only because he has not appeared on their side.

I later found out that the same woman had filmed me from behind while I was walking near the protesters, and that I was apparently guilty because I was not among them.

I noticed what looked like an unshaven man with messy hair standing in front of me. The person lowered the phone when I saw that I was being filmed. When we passed each other, the filming started again from behind, and only then did I realise it was a woman.

I asked around and was told her name was Anisa Caka. People gave me explanations about her troubles and said this is how she gets by.

I did not need all those explanations, though they were useful in one sense: they showed that behind behaviour like this there are often troubled people stripped of dignity and then used for political purposes in the name of “dignity”.

I have worked every day as a journalist for at least 35 years, and I have never seen a campaign of public lynching against politicians, journalists and public figures like the one being carried out by this group of eggtivists.

The closest comparison was the Committees of Public Salvation in 1997, which drew up lists of politicians and journalists who had to be removed. But even they were not exactly diligent about carrying those threats out.

When you met them, as Zani Çaushi used to say, their real objective was: “We want to eat, we want to drink, and we want to…”

These people are more vulgar than Zani Çaushi and his friends.

They are also more dangerous to society, because they are not doing this simply to lynch a few MPs or politicians who cross their path.

They are doing the opposite.

They want someone to react physically against them, so they can create a new cause, because no revolution survives without victims.

It is a great achievement for the revolution that it has reached the point of producing people ready to sacrifice themselves for it.

Some may imagine 72 virgins waiting in the afterlife. These lynching women probably imagine seeing their monument on Instagram.

But they should be clear about one thing.

For all its egg-throwing theatre, this group of eggtivists does not hatch flamingos.

It hatches crows looking for carrion.

And Albania is not ready to become a corpse in order to feed this breed of ignorant people, perverse abusers and political kamikazes who want to turn the culture of hatred into normal life.

Originally published in Albanian as: Vezëvendosja, "klloçka" që nuk pjell më Flamingo