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Agreement Rama-Meloni/ Le Nouvel Obs: Mafiocracy! This project has raised international concerns
2024-10-24 18:06:55 / POLITIKË
The largest French weekly, with a center-left tendency, Le Nouvel Obs has published a very long article about what it calls the Albanian mafia. In the analysis article of the issue that comes out on Thursday, the special envoy Marie Vaton aimed to describe the creation of a new camp for holding immigrants in Albania, as part of an agreement between Italy and Albania.
The article states that this project has raised international concerns, especially from the Council of Europe and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. However, Meloni defends her plan as a bold and new approach to managing migration, attracting the attention of several other European countries. The article also describes those Albanian officials who are in favor of the Rama-Meloni project, as well as a history of this idea finalized in November 2023. But the editors of Lapsi.al have chosen to translate the part where they talk about the state of democracy in Albania and about the way our prime minister lures internationals to gain legitimacy for his power.
Besmira Lekaj is not racist. However, in Lezha, this 39-year-old activist has tried to unite people against "these secretly negotiated prisons for immigrants". But apart from a brief protest of a few hours, which was immediately banned by the municipality, the resistance movement did not succeed. "In ten years, the government has extinguished the opposition, suffocated civil society. Nepotism is eroding all parties. The right, the left, nothing makes sense anymore", she complains at the headquarters of her organization: "Hand in hand against national apathy".
After more than forty years of totalitarianism, Albania seems to have slipped into another dictatorship: a "mafiocracy", corroded by oligarchs, organized crime and the media at their service. The formula is that of the writer Fatos Lubonja, according to whom this agreement is another part of the "giant garbage platform" that his country has become, "sold to the interests of the United States and Italy". The political dissident, imprisoned for nearly twenty years in the prisons of Enver Hoxha's regime, knows very well Prime Minister Edi Rama, who was one of the editors of his magazine "Perpjekja" in the 90s: "I have seen him change and create a character to please Westerners.”
On the one hand, he is an all-round iconoclast, at the same time an artist - he studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris - an intellectual, a professional basketball player, the cosmopolitan face 2.0 of Albania, the renovator and stabilizer of the Balkans, the one who promises Antony Blinken, the secretary of the American State, a clean country, free from crime and dirty money. On the other hand, he is a clientelist, a friend of Meloni, Trump and Erdogan, who knows how to forget his connections with the Italian Camorra. When he remembers the list of his relatives accused of corruption or drug trafficking, starting with his former interior minister convicted in 2022, Edi Rama replies that "there is no forest without pigs".
However, the pigs are treated well: they live in VIP prisons, with a personal kitchen and gym. Eleven years after Edi Rama came to power, Albania is still one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, according to the NGO Transparency International. A narco-state that is being emptied of its population: since the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1991, approximately one million Albanians, or a third of the population, have fled unemployment and an average salary of 750 euros.
Those who remain see their country being sold to the highest bidders: Edi Rama has just given Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, a concession on the island of Sazan, also known as the "Maldives of Europe". ”, to transform it into a complex for millionaires, with luxury villas and swimming pools. And that's not all: in 2020, he also awarded the concession of the port of Durrës to the Emaar group, based in the United Arab Emirates, to build a €2 billion marina there.
"This is how it is with Rama: he acts and thinks like an owner with Albania", says Migen Qirashi, an activist of the civic opposition group Civic Resistance in Tirana, sadly. In the capital, the towers do not stop being built and real estate prices are increasing: "Today, an apartment in Tirana costs more than in Munich, Rome or London ", states the 37-year-old architect. Towers mostly uninhabited, also used for laundering money from crime and corruption, according to some investigative media...
This does not seem to bother Edi Rama. In order to please Giorgia Meloni, the Albanian prime minister multiplies bows and funny gestures. So, near the port of Shengjin - and its prison for immigrants - he inaugurated Tratoria Meloni in August, a slightly special seafood restaurant, as it is completely covered with portraits of the Italian leader. Through the walls, she appears at all ages and in all positions of her life, in a very kitsch Warholian homage./ "Le nouvel Obs"
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