The problem Albanians face today is the collapse of the moral authority exercised by all political parties, along with many other public “forums” like the media or businesses. Normally, issues would be resolved through communication in these “forums”. With how things are looking, violence will likely be the only means of communication for a while.
In a normal situation, the so-called “Rruga e Kombit tax” would have been discussed in forums, within political parties, social centers, medias, business organizations, etc. In an abnormal situation, nothing of the sort happened. The tax remained to be discussed on the Rruga e Kombit highway, the language used to communicate being violence and arson.
The people of Kukës have never been infamously violent. There have never been anti-government riots in the city. The violence used by protesters las Saturday can hardly be labeled as an unjustifiable transgression. It might possible that, as the government claims, the opposition may have played a part in the protest, yet the opposition can hardly create violence out of nothing. In the media footage of Saturday’s events, you could see elderly men throwing rocks at the police. Additionally, the infinite praise sang to the arsonists on both conventional and social media, a sort of general excitement to “show the government its place”, discussions of “oligarchs”, and calls to boycott oil company Kastrati (part of the concessionary consortium of companies), point to a very unpleasant situation.
The biggest problem is that Albanians don’t really seem to expect change to come through the vote. The opposition is as disgraced as the majority. The few businessmen that have been able to accumulate capital, mainly due to their connections to politics, are, today, labelled “oligarchs” and calls to burn their properties are becoming “normal”.
In a normal situation, political communication, both within and outside parties, would have had to avoid these kinds of escalations. The government, after all, doesn’t have to wait until it sees fire to know that Kukës is Albania’s poorest city. There are multiple statistical reports that have demonstrated that. It is also unreasonable to wait for violence in order to understand that the highway, in the majority of cases, is used because of need, and only occasionally, for recreational purposes.
Normal communication doesn’t work in Albania, and it likely never did in the past. Political parties violently impose power top-down, instead of the other way around. Other social structures normally meant to provide a counteracting pressure limiting the government’s power seem to be weak or non-functioning. The parliament is not a government-controlling organ. The Prosecution seems very determined to investigate protesters, but never showed much interest in investigating concessions.
What is alarming is that the government, it seems, is well aware of the situation, yet it operates on the principle that it should exploit the people for as long as they are willing to endure. There is a trend of tax increase, in the last few years, based on the idea that the people will endure it. In many instances, these taxes do not even make sense as taxes, meant to serve the “common good”. They are, at their core, abuses of power. This is the reasoning behind realpolitik. Votes do not depend as much on one’s ability to convince others that s/he is offering an alternative. Rather they depend on one’s ability to concoct political technologies that use coercion, blackmail, bribery, and, occasionally, direct violence, to accumulate votes. These political technologies, that we have seen in action election after election, need money to function, and their need leads to the imposition of ever increasing taxes and the mismanagement of larger and larger amounts of money from the state budget. Currently, the state budget doesn’t seem to be scarce. The government often finds itself unable to spend the tax money it collects and, therefore, hardly needs any more taxes. The current government has been unable to build even a road or water supply system. The government, even though it has money, is unable to finish any public investment. Money disappears mysteriously. The cost of public works has inflated. 20 years ago, €1 million was enough to build a kilometer of a highway. Today, not even €20 million suffice.
This kind of politics causes great imbalance, extreme social inequality, and social and environmental degradation. Take, for example, the “Rruga e Kombit” highway toll. Three governments, the last “right-wing” one and the two “left-wing” ones that followed, wanted a highway toll for this segment, after the first government spent over a billion dollars to build it. The construction was followed by prosecutions for accusations of concessions abuse. Nonetheless, the “Rruga e Kombit” highway toll is expected to provide an annual revenue of several million euros, while, only last year, an oil company received the government’s blessing to refuse to pay over €60 million in taxes. IRTC’s 2017 pardoned taxes will be paid for in the following 10 years by the citizens of Kukës, Kosova, and Albania, be it via the highway toll, be it as state budget transfers. All the while, the police and Prosecution remain ignorant. No arrests were made in the night over the unpaid €60 million. The €60 million are business as usual.
This political system is not unique to Albania. There are numerous global cases in which political technologies built on extortion have been able to win elections in order to extort even more. Concessions, widely used by the “Democrat” government, the “PS-LSI” one from the last four years, and the current “PS” one, are the main fuels feeding this insatiable machine.
Take, for example, the polite, yet entirely reasonable, statements of the International Monetary Fund. IMF states that the government doesn’t have the capacity to properly appraise the cost and profits of these concessionary contracts. It insists that the cost of these contracts be considered as “public debt” and that the government must “exercise restraint” in awarding new concessionary contracts. What the IMF is very respectfully saying is that these concessionary contracts are not in Albanians’ best interests, their real cost is “hidden”. Many citizens, perhaps less politely, but certainly more directly, call these contracts theft. The past Democrat government is responsible for hundreds of millions of euros worth of contracts, and so is the current government. The cost of these concessions has dramatically affected Albanians’ wallets. But there are cases when the people cannot endure anymore. And, in these cases, arson seems like a reasonable alternative to political channels of communication.
The way in which the government has decided to react to this reality is very “by the book” in crisis management. The main tenet of crisis management is dismantling it through a combination of violence, corruption, postponement and derailment of the discussion.
The arrests of tens of protesting citizens during the night, with no motive whatsoever, followed by the public denigration of their image as “persons with a criminal record”, demonstrate that the government is determined to counter violence with violence. The government seems to think that the problem is not a result of it instituting a private tax considered by citizens a theft that exceeds even the ones they have been conditioned to endure, but rather a result of it failing to propagandize this tax and its necessity properly. The government refuses to answer a fundamental question: how much money will the concessionary companies give and how much money will they receive?
Chaos is a real danger in this situation. Violence is a relatively easy option to take compared to the normal instruments of politics. Someone must ask how we came to this point, a point where politics and the so-called “business” (that is, essentially, an extension of politics), can understand no other language but violence.
