Read here Part 1 of the interview
Margo Rejmer: I have the impression that Albanians have heard so much about the great vision of the government, that they don’t trust any of these big plans anymore. People have lost trust and now they are losing hope.
Fatos Lubonja: In 2013 people had hope about Rama because they didn’t think critically. Rama had been the mayor of Tirana for twelve years, and all the structures of power he set up remained the same. Of course Berisha was terrible, but this was not enough to lose hope. When I supported the election of Rama, I thought that the future collapse of Rama’s government would bring disillusionment to the people. They would have four years to understand that Rama won’t change the system, and as a result something new would come. But now I see that the possibility of having something new is far away. Something may have started, but we still need time.
So we have disillusionment and a lack of solutions, a lack of hope and a lack of alternatives. It is a very interesting moment for Albania, when the energy is gone and instead we stay with a question – what comes next?
We have a very contradictory situation: on one hand we need a quick reaction to change direction, on the other hand we don’t have enough educated people or the critical mass to make this possible. We have started now, but we need time to create a critical mass, which will not happen with the upcoming elections for instance. In Albania we have “partocracy,” the rule of the parties. We had a party state during communism and we still have a party-state now. A party–state which now means the Socialist Party (PS) and the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), but it was the same with Berisha, who is complementary to this system.
In the end all the parties have very similar programs and narrations.
Even if the other party wins, everything will remain the same. So what we badly need is the state of institutions, which are more important than parties. The stronger the institutions are, the weaker are the parties. If you have a proper administration, you can’t replace 80% of it with your own party members. We need to go from the state of parties to the state of institutions. I told Lulzim Basha: “If you want to have credibility, which you don’t have because in the eyes of people you are just a person who is waiting to replace Rama in the same structure, you should create a coalition with the civil society, with all the movements, and ensure that you don’t want to be a prime minister, and none of the Democrat leaders will be ministers.” That he really wants to support some honest people.
A cabinet of technocrats?
Not a technocratic cabinet, rather an apolitical one. Like the government of Prodi. In Albania it could be Rexhep Meidani, one of the most honest people who could support the new spirit in Albania. But I don’t think Basha will do this.
So in the end, if even the alternatives are vague and not very realistic, how to survive in the contemporary Albania?
Do you think that we are surviving? What does it mean “survival”? It is a very complicated issue.
I remember what you wrote in your essay about Spaç, that when you were in prison being a human was just a matter of biological survival. So I want to ask you, what has changed in Albania since the collapse of communism? How has people’s existence changed? You said your life in prison was a matter of biological survival, but for many people who were not imprisoned life was also unbearable, a form of survival from one day to another. So how has people’s existence changed with gaining back the freedom?
Even hell has nine circles… (laughs). In my book 1997 I described the situation of a prisoner in an isolation cell that had in the wall an iron chain that bent your arms backwards and a gag tied over in your mouth, called “the ring.” This was a punishment when you were a bit aggressive and you shouted or offended a policeman. You could remain shackled like this for a day, but you could also be sentenced for five, ten, or thirty days. When you were in “the ring,” all you hoped for was: “Oh my God, when will this day finish and when will I stay in the isolation cell and walk and sleep without shackles…” This was your dream. Then, after ten days you were unshackled and you could stay there, and you were happier a little bit about the release, but you already started thinking: “Oh my God, when will these thirty days finish and I will go to the bigger cell with my inmates, and talk and eat food from my family,” because the prison food was terrible. And when you were in the big cell with the inmates, you were dreaming: “Oh my God, when will the day come that I will be liberated?” So of course now in Albania it is better than during Hoxha’s time, I can always escape, I can go abroad, I can speak whatever I want and not be afraid… But hell has many circles. This is a sort of improvement, because you have more possibilities, but also more responsibility to change things.
Are Albanians aware of the responsibility that comes with freedom? Do Albanians feel responsible for their country?
Imre Kertész wrote a book, The History of an Unfortunate Man, about a young boy, and an interviewer asked him why he used the character of a child. And Kertész replied: “Because dictatorship reduces you to a child who wants to survive, and survival means collaboration.” So when the freedom came, Albanians were children without a concept of responsibility. All the responsibility in the dictatorship was with the government, with the system. You had to think this and this way, work there and there, wear this and this.
No individualism.
But also no responsibility towards the others, the community, the society. The adult children of Albania were not educated to be responsible toward others, because the Big Parents were deciding about all their actions. So when these children started a new life, they thought just about taking care of themselves. Look at the architecture of Tirana, where one big block is built just next to another, and people have no sunlight. This childish mentality from the past was married with the new neoliberal ideology, that there is no such thing as society, as Thatcher said, that there are only individuals. So I care about myself and the market will regulate everything. Some Albanians left the country, but even abroad they didn’t create a community. Even the Senegalese people in Italy have their own association to defend their interests, but not Albanians.
Why?
Because the Albanian communism was antisocial in a way. Society means: “we are creating something together,” while in communism everything was imposed. And now we remain in this child-like condition, without learning to be responsible for each other.
Incapable of creating a community.
Even religious communities are weak in Albania, and what is religion, if not an attempt to associate people with each other through an idea?
What is the historical explanation of this phenomenon?
The lack of community or capacity to be together comes from the clan mentality. Survival was possible through the clan, the family. People were living mostly in the mountains, and when you read the “Kanun,” you notice that the most important instrument of survival was the family. Jesus Christ said: “I will make you be against your mothers, fathers and families,” which means: “I will create a bigger community that will surpass the idea of the family.”
But still in Albania the family and the local networks are the most important things.
Because the Albanian nationalism was created late, and when the communism came, it created its own national identity. But this construction of the glorious Albanian past failed, it didn’t succeed in creating unity. Albanians simulate a little bit their patriotism. But if they were real patriots, they wouldn’t destroy their country. The desire for wealth and power makes people unable to think about their country. So what should really unite people is, just as Mother Theresa said, kindness. When an Albanian journalist told her in the late 1980s: “The religion of Albania is Albanianism,” Mother Theresa replied: “You will love your country more when you will love each other more.” So this is the link, the love towards each other. If we love and accept each other, we will love the place we live. According to surveys, the subjective quality of life in the USA has dropped because people’s relationships have deteriorated.
But under Albanian communism people didn’t trust each other. Whom could you trust if one out of every three people was an informant of Sigurimi? People gathered collectively to criticize each other, inventing lies. They were forced to be disloyal towards their husbands, wives, mothers, brothers. The whole system was constructed to dig out what was the worst in people. The system taught people how to hate each other and not to trust each other. How to stay pure and decent when everything around you demands from you a lack of morality…
… and express your worst side as a human being.
A particular situation can drag out of you the best or the worst features, but when the whole system and the authorities demand cruelty from you, it becomes very easy to be cruel. It is almost natural to you. How to live in such an environment?
(long pause) Have you read the play The Rhinoceros of Eugène Ionesco? It is a story of people becoming rhinoceroses in order to adapt themselves to the system, they are becoming fascist.
Ionesco described his friends, the Romanian intellectuals during the 1930s, fascinated by the fascist ideology.
Yes. And in the end the protagonist watches the transformation of his friend. The horn is coming from his head, the whole body is transfiguring. And the character is left alone among the rhinoceroses, and he screams: “I want to be a rhinoceros too!” But he just can’t, it is impossible for him. This shows how easy it is to become a different person, when everyone around is changing. This is my tragedy as well, I can’t become a rhinoceros (laughs). It is not that I am out of the system, because I am working for the media run by the oligarchs, but I always say: “I have one leg inside the system and one leg outside.” I have tried to fight the system from within as much as it has been possible. However, if I wanted to stay pure, I should have committed suicide as a sign of resistance.
I have thought about kids of people with bad biographies. They could never be the best in the class, they were humiliated and kept outside of the system. Some teachers could use the tools the system gave them, and some refused to use them. Writer Musine Kokalari spent her last days in Rrëshen as a streetsweeper, being a scapegoat of the community, although Hoxha didn’t even know she was alive. It was the people who created the chain of humiliation around her. So again the question returns: how to stay moral in immoral times? How to make a decent choice?
My mother Liri wrote a book Larg dhe mes njerëzve (Away from and Among People) about the deportation of our family. When the kids were preparing a historical sketch, the roles were divided as follows: the bad Germans, the people, and the good partisans. And her daughter would come from school crying, because she always played a German. Once my mother came to school and asked the teacher: “Please, I know you can’t make her a partisan, but at least make her people sometimes.” The people who humiliated Musine Kokalari were educated who is the good guy, who is the bad guy, and they were manipulated to believe in a different system of values. When Jan Hus was burning at the stake, one woman approached him to move a piece of wood to increase the fire, and he exclaimed: “O sancta simplicitas!” The woman really believed she had a devil in front of her, and that by doing that bad thing she was doing right. To make a moral choice is a matter of education, you need to know what is good and what is bad. The less educated people truly believed they were doing the right thing, and the more educated people were gripped by fear.
And now?
Now these instruments of power aren’t linked with prison, but they are linked with money, support, privileges. Recently I met a friend who was jobless, and during the last elections he switched from the PS to the LSI, because they promised to find a job for his son. And now the son is a prison guard. My friend was not strong enough to resist this offer, he just wanted to help his family and survive. I met him again and he said: “Fatos, now the guy who helped me wants all my family to enter the Party!”
Exactly the same situation as in the past.
And my friend is not stupid! He blames Rama, Meta, and Berisha equally. But he has no instruments of survival, no pride, although maybe this is put too strongly… I don’t have enough courage to tell him: don’t do this, say no!
But even in the past people resisted to join the party.
I don’t know if now the situation is better than before. In the past the fear and repercussions were bigger, but my father never told me to join the party. The resistance came through reading books, you had more instruments to understand what is good or bad, what is hypocrisy… And now even hypocrisy as a concept doesn’t exist among the people.
So what can we say about human nature in the context of everything we said before? Are people good or bad?
We have two possibilities. We are egoists and we are social beings, just like animals. The human being is the only being in the world who has not only the sense of adaptation like animals, but has a possibility to change their conditions and nature. Human beings can change even themselves, because they have reason. I don’t believe in predetermination, in a project, I don’t think there is a designed meta-narration, and a god who is leading us to in the moral direction. Just as Karl Popper said, I think that the future depends on us, we do not depend on any historical predetermination. We improve ourselves through the different projects we create, and each of them should become better than the previous one. We want to be happy, to experience pleasures, but our own egoism is not enough to make us feel happy. So we try to change this situation.
And create something better than us, not for ourselves, but for other people.
Because we have hate and love inside us. And we learn that love is better than hate, so we try to build something that will make love prevail. But if we are not able to transmit to the next generations the value of our projects and our experiences, if we want to build a society on an island or surrounded by a wall, then we will start to kill each other again. In the past we destroyed, eliminated, and oppressed other nations, but now we are aware of it and we don’t want genocides to happen again. We are not only bad. In the end we have learnt a lesson from the past, that killing is the worst thing that can happen to us.
So do we have a natural tendency to destroy, or to create? Do we need destruction to create?
These are questions that are hovering above our heads, in the recent period more than ever.
