After waiting hours on end in front of his house and then in front of the Parliament building, a group of well-fed citizens showed their public solidarity with former Minister of Interior Saimir Tahiri, enthusiastically shouting and screaming every time he showed himself before them.
It seemed as if the fact that the prosecution had requested his arrest for narcotics trafficking, as part of a criminal organization (otherwise called the mafia) didn’t bother them in the least.
For them the fact that a former minister, while in office, has had frequent contacts and has traveled with cousins, no matter to what the degree, that trafficked drugs and kalashnikovs for Italian mafia families has no value. Nor the fact that he began his office as minister with a battle against gambling, which ended in total confusion. Nor the fact that he sold his luxury car on the black market, committing tax evasion in order to avoid paying compensation money imposed by court order. Nor the fact that the entire country knows that his police was widely involved in drug trafficking without any response from his side. Nor the fact that he has arrested hundreds of people for not paying their electricity or water bills or for illegal extensions of their house. Nor the fact that during his mandate Albania has become known across the world as a country whose main export is marijuana.
Edi Rama had called him the best minister in the history of the country, and as such he has remained in the hearts of his supporters – all of them quietly ready to swear that it’s all a plot to bring down the government, it’s nothing serious.
He’s accused by someone who is wanted by justice, Rama stated yesterday emphatically, referring to former police chief Dritan Zagani, who received political asylum in Switzerland. This is coldly repeated by Tahiri’s successor, Fatmir Xhafaj – at least the latter has his reasons to be solidary.
Even the self-declared opposition – those who remained outside the government – doesn’t seem very shocked by the revelations. Moreover, it seems happy, because Tahiri’s arrest gives them the possibility to complain in television studies that it’s true after all that Tahiri used drug money to buy votes.
Because this is the true issue for the supporters of the government that show up in front of Tahiri’s house, just like for the representatives of the united opposition: power. Not drugs, not crime. Power.
The former minister is not guilty of anything, except that he has lied to stay in power.
It is a portrait of society that now has become completely accustomed to evil, that has lost any type of sensitivity and no longer feels any pain. Of a society resigned to leaving their children and children’s children a future of prostitutes and drug addicts, without feeling any remorse that it has built a world based on crime, violence, and struggle for a mafia state without project – a world without dignity and without future.
It is a portrait of new “citizens,” deprived of any rule or right, trained to submit to any oppressor, motivated by an uncontained rapacity, insensitive to any heartbeat of love, without respect, without dignity.
It is the new man that communism failed to create, but miraculously rose from the transition.
