FLASH
Shkruar nga Preç Zogaj
The devil sleeps in the details...
Thursday's consensus resolution was the appropriate act of the Parliament at the stage Albania's EU membership has reached. Despite the images of violence and Molotov cocktails, which have conveyed to Brussels the impression of an extremely politically polarized country, the Parliament reconfirmed the message that the government and the opposition, like the vast majority of Albanian citizens, are united in the aspiration and effort for European integration.
In this context, the DP group took an act in accordance with a specific principle according to which when it comes to integration, the opposition should behave as if it were the government. For its part, the majority committed to respecting the rights of the opposition, the violation of which has been one of the sources of confrontations in the Assembly.
Beyond the standard words in such cases, the Resolution responds, flame for flame, in the form of reflection, to the paragraph of the report of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee in which overcoming internal political polarization and improving political culture were part of the list of challenges for Albania in the final stages of the ordeal. Let's see how long this kind of détente will last.
The same list of challenges also includes strengthening the rule of law and consolidating anti-corruption reforms.
“The quality of the country's reforms will determine the membership timeline,” the same report says. More clearly than that! It means that papers and laws are one thing. Important, of course. But laws are implementation. Implementation is everything. Anyone who thinks that papers are enough will be disappointed.
"Albania must further consolidate concrete results in investigations, prosecutions and final decisions, especially in cases of high-level corruption," the Commission's report emphasizes. Familiar, simple, repeated words, but which in the epilogue of the dream of integration have the weight of the last word.
If we imagine integration as a palace with many gates that we have successfully passed one by one, these words lead us, figuratively speaking, to the Gate of Hercules, the most difficult, which may or may not crown the end and victory of the long journey.
We can replace the expressions in the above-mentioned paragraph with the words SPAK (investigation and criminal prosecution) and GJKKO (final decisions).
The leaders of Albania, Prime Minister Rama and others behind him cannot say they were not warned. We can be fine with everything else. But if we are not fine with justice, with punishing corruption at high levels, there is no integration.
It's been two months since the prime minister, when defending Belinda Balluku, went further and went so far as to invest in a reversal of the narrative about justice, as if the problem in Albania now is accusations and not corruption. Since that day, justice has been under an all-out attack. Which goes far beyond episodes of excesses or correctable errors, aiming for nothing less and nothing more than its delegitimization. Its return to the time when prosecutors viewed politicians as above the law and trembled at the thought of investigating their corruption.
Paradoxically, more precisely logically, for the relationship that the actors of the plural solidary political caste have with justice, in Thursday's consensual Resolution you did not find an explicit expression of support for SPAK. Although SPAK has been continuously evaluated by the EU as the institution that has led the country's progress towards the EU. Nor for the GJKKO. You found general expressions, just to be on the inside, that were said even before the approval of the Justice Reform.
The devil sleeps in the details. We know that for geopolitical reasons, Europe is in a hurry to expand with candidate countries; it is in a hurry to avoid having pockets outside the EU within its geographical perimeter, such as Albania. From this point of view, Europe can even give up on any of the standards. But Europe cannot betray the pro-European people of the former communist countries, by giving laurels and medals to the autocrats of Tirana at the peak of impunity. Anyone who thinks otherwise will be disappointed. Anyone who serves failure will be held accountable before the citizens.
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