The earth shakes and, with it, thousands of buildings. It's November 26th, a Tuesday that could be a day like any other, but it won't. It’s night (more precisely, 3:54 am) and the earth shakes, moved by an earthquake of magnitude Richter 6.5. The following hours will be dominated by panic and the aftershocks that generated it: four of them are shocks of the fifth grade, while another twelve of them are between the fourth and fifth grade.
The data referring to the earthquake that shook the central-northern area of Albania give the creeps: there are so many badly damaged buildings, more than 1450 in Tirana and 900 in nearby Durrës. Besides the infrastructural damages, the death toll continues to worry both the national and international community: at least four thousand people no longer have a roof under which to seek protection, more than two thousand people have been wounded and 51 have lost their life because of the earthquake. Numbers that can partly translate the intensity of fear that overwhelmed the population.
Whole sections of the city were devastated by the fury of natural disasters, reduced to a pile of rubble. The images of the Albanian desolation have been circulating through every possible medium. In just three days The public and private, national and international awareness-raising and donation campaigns raised around 16 million dollars. Broadcasters have tirelessly followed not just the rapid development of the disaster but also the operations necessary to rescue the victims, which have ended on November 30th, four days after the earthquake. It was an aired tragedy, that of November 26th. Yet, despite all this, despite all the terrible data referring to the damages, no one has actually talked about that endless list of serious problems and side-effects that a devastated Albania will have to overcome.
I have always seen the landscape of Tirana as a projection of the country. I have always seen Albania reflected in the old communist buildings of its capital: buildings that are now coloured and renovated, but that are still anonymous and faded, under that garish coat of paint.
At the dawn of democratisation, the Albanian horizon was dominated by old, dull and monotonous constructions, built according to the sad and rigid rules of communism. The greyness of those edifices, which are to be interpreted as the materialisation of the long and depressing period of the Albanian totalitarian regime, continued to fill the citizens’ lives until Edi Rama became Tirana’s mayor, giving way to a process of renewal. Or should we call it a pseudo-renewal?
With a brush dyed with bright colours, Tirana's monotony has been substituted with a kaleidoscopic wave that has only managed to revolutionised the facade of the country: despite every effort, its essence has still remained the same. The essence of that regime that made the Albanians longly suffer and that, consequently, the Albanians strongly hate hasn't disappeared: it’s there, naked in front of their eyes but impossible to recognize, so much is camouflaged, so much is it covered by that incredible vivacity of the buildings of Tirana. Nothing has been able to eliminate that squalid soul, made up of inequalities and problems that Enver Hoxha's communism has left as its only bitter gift.
It seems like the earthquake that shook the territory that November 26th almost turned into a pathological expression of that terrible disease represented by an evil inheritance that, impossible to eradicate, has become the origin of most of the problems that afflict the Albanian society.
I spent hours in front of a television screen, trying to understand the extent of the tragedy that hit my ancestors’ land, and I realised that what scared me most were neither those buildings reduced to rubble nor the cracks that still run through the constructions that I learned to recognize by heart over the years. What scared me most was the disillusion that possessed the victims’ faces: in their dead eyes, eyes that had seen the memories of an existence reduced to miserable ruins, I saw the awful presence of a feeling that does not derive only from the terrible event, but that appears as the product of silenced violences and imperceptible abuses that have endured for decades.
I always had the impression, now more and more ingrained in me, that the Albanians have never trusted their own institutions. It doesn't matter whether they are political, economic or legal. After having found its escape valve in the umpteenth episode of violence, this time due to a natural disaster, the disillusionment previously mentioned is the result of a failure in the process of achieving any national improvement. The promises of democracy, which had long been pronounced in that period of transition that marked the second half of the 1990s, have never been maintained: the Albanian “government of the people” has failed and continues to fail.
In a country where the gross domestic product is the lowest in the European area and where democracy is only seen as a mere instrument of corruption and crime, the damage suffered by the population and the losses resulting from the brutal earthquake of November 26th has threaten to leave the victims in a desperate situation, composed only of unimaginable and unpredictable difficulties. Or at least, this seems to be the most popular opinion, observing the endless succession of interviews broadcasted on national television networks. It is inevitable to notice how that tragedy has quickly turned into the symbol of the popular desire for renewal and, therefore, improvement. I wonder if a glimmer of hope will appear from this desperation. I wonder if the Albanian phoenix will be able to take flight from these ashes.
The history of Albanian democracy is a story of disappointments and failures. After four decades of an iron-fisted communism, in the 1990s the nation was the main subject of a wave of abnormal democratisation that was linked to a student revolution in which the students had nothing but a marginal role: raised in the discouragement of a dictatorial government, the young people who were supposed to lead the transformation process had no real prospects in social terms.
Although they had to be ideologically destroyed, the old Soviet buildings of Tirana were painted (metaphorically, of course) with gaudy, plastic and terribly fake tones: the facade was therefore unrecognisable, but the structure was still the same. And so it was that, instead of being pervaded by that sense of freedom and equality of 1968’s France, Albania was "blessed" with 1997 anarchic chaos and overwhelmed by a deep crisis resulting from the collapse of the financial pyramid schemes, which triggered socio-political disorders and impoverished thousands of people. In a nutshell, since its inception, Albanian democracy has undermined the trust of its citizens, turning them into fundamental mechanisms of a machine in constant motion, of the corruption machine. Simply put, since its beginnings, the Albanian democracy has undermined the citizens’ trust, turning them into fundamental mechanisms of a perpetual motion machine: the machine of corruption.
Since the fall of communism, the weak bases on which the "people's government" was built began to crumble: the post-communist leaders, in an attempt to detain and increase their monopoly of political power, set up a pathetic scenario, a theatre in which a sale of political and work duties was staged. It is not a secret: a malformation within its system is clearly present if a country that, regardless of a majority of the population that struggles to make ends meet, favours the richest clearly presents. And so the deformed national apparatus normalised what was abnormal, legitimised what was illegal. This is Albania: rationality is not a reliable compass.
The level of political optimisation necessary to define the country of the eagles a perfect example of democracy has not yet been reached: according to what has been reported by the democracy index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, the nation has still not registered improvements, continuing to be labeled as an hybrid regime. The authoritarian legacy, therefore, continues to haunt Albania, causing the weakening of democratic sentiment and the increase in disillusionment with the political elite. But how it could be otherwise with a former minister tried for drug trafficking, hundreds of judges under investigation and an opposition leader suspected of money laundering?
The tensions raised within the Albanian territory with the succession of political crises are seriously endangering the prosperity of the country, as well as its highly unstable social balance. The inconsistent path to fictitious economic stability and unreal fiscal consolidation has shaped a frighteningly fluctuating institutional model, in which the reforms undertaken seem to be outlined by a blinkered government. The various stalls and the multiple difficulties that, directly created from this inconclusive process, afflict the entire post-communist history of the nation have a price that Albania will necessarily have to pay over the long term.
The criticality of the current national situation has also strengthened the criminal organisations and, at the same time, weakened the authority of the legal system: despite the fact that it is trying to eliminate aspects that threaten its hopes of joining the European Union, Albania continues to remain vulnerable to corruption, to the growth of organised crime networks, and to governmental and legal institutions decay. The lack of fundamental juridical bodies, such as the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, certainly doesn’t benefit to the disadvantaged general framework: for over a year, the country has started a pseudo-judicial reform that has completely interrupted the work of the its notoriously ineffective legal system, leaving its citizens in complete chaos. In this climate of institutional confusion and legal anarchy the feverish activity of criminal organisations finds its fertile ground: criminality begins to permeate every layer of society with greater intensity, the spiral of violence and illegality continues to thicken, the oligarch system continues its expansion, and the population becomes increasingly poorer, ever weaker, more and more oppressive.
Of purely Balkan origin, the intersection between lawlessness and immorality, nepotist favouritism and disproportionate political influence is negatively affecting the nation's performance. Unstable policies, crime and corruption, judicial systems unable to function properly: Albania must face its old demons as soon as possible, fighting against a legacy that, buried and never eliminated, broke out with brutal force with the collapse of the communist regime. There is no more room for other errors or other missteps.
Durrës and nearby Thumanë were the cities most affected by the earthquake. Most of the buildings were badly damaged, others collapsed completely. While entire quarters tried to regain their dignity thanks to emergency teams from every corner of Europe, the big three-storey house of Albania, with its basement of organised crime, the first floor of oligarchs and the second one of corrupt parties, has remained intact. This large three-storey building is still standing and it seems almost impossible that this ancient and resistant structure could falter.
The unstoppable violence that has upset Albania has been vented in thirty interminable seconds that changed everything: the earth's crust has continued to tremble, moving concrete houses, inevitably collapsed on themselves, and depriving thousands of people of their home, of the their objects, of their memories. It will take so long to recover what has been lost in so little. Even today, Albania is on its knees and tries to fight, to survive in a landscape of rubble and wreckage, to find the light of hope in a daily life swallowed for years by the darkness of despair. Only after such a devastating tragedy the Albanians can find the courage to annihilate that degraded three-story house, the materialisation of their corrupt homeland.
This is the right time to rediscover a freedom that is now denied. Only after such great pain, the much sought-after freedom can finally be imposed on violence, silent queen of the country.
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