The Republic is not Property: The Three Ownerships of Zvërnec!

By Arian Galdini

There come moments when a country must not ask only who is right in a conflict.

It must ask who is trying to take ownership of the conflict.

In Zvërnec, the struggle is no longer only over land. It is a struggle over ownership.

Who owns the territory?

Who owns the protest?

Who is preparing to take political ownership over tomorrow’s Albania?

These are the three questions no one has the right to avoid.

Because a country is not endangered only when its land is taken.

It is also endangered when anger over the land is taken into ownership.

It is endangered when a real wound is turned into a stage, when the square becomes someone’s property, when the microphone becomes another fence, when the citizen who comes out for his own right becomes raw material for the next power.

This must be said clearly from the beginning.

The wound of Zvërnec is real.

The absence of the file is real.

The questions over property are real.

The concern for the environment is real.

Private violence against the citizen is a wound in the authority of the Republic.

The right to protest is sacred.

But no real wound makes innocent every hand that climbs upon it.

No just cause gives anyone the right to take ownership of the square.

No protest becomes untouchable simply because it speaks in the name of the citizen.

A protest too can be taken hostage.

Anger too can be privatized.

The microphone too can become another fence.

Here the division begins.

I am not against the citizen who enters the square.

I am against those who want to take ownership of the square, just as others want to take ownership of the land.

I do not accept that protest be privatized.

I do not accept that investment be used for the political privatization of Albania.

I do not accept that development should require a silent citizen, a delayed file, and a state acting as the notary of the project.

I do not accept that the name of the West, of America, of foreign capital, or of strategic partners be used to silence the Albanian file.

In Zvërnec, one side speaks of property.

One side speaks of protest.

Another side is watching tomorrow’s politics.

And the citizen risks remaining, once again, the one used by everyone and asked by no one.

That is why the first question is the land.

Who has it? How did it become private? Through whom did it pass?

By which decisions, permits, map, environmental assessment, ultimate beneficiaries, and with what relationship between private property, beach, channels, dunes, lagoon, roads, and public access?

“Private” is not an answer.

It is the first question: how did it become private?

In a serious Republic, private property is a foundation of freedom.

Precisely for that reason, its history must be clean.

If the property is right, the file protects it.

If the file damages it, the problem is not the citizen who asks.

Private property is not private darkness.

Strategic investment is not a permit for strategic fog.

An international name is not a substitute for an Albanian document.

This is the first file: the file of the land.

It is not the same as the file of the protest.

The file of power is a state obligation.

The file of the project is a public obligation.

The file of force is a legal obligation.

The file of protest becomes a political obligation the moment protest seeks to speak not only for the citizen, but in the name of the citizen.

The citizen in protest is not equal to the government that administers territory, permits, law, police, the protected area, and the relationship with the investor.

The government has a state obligation to open the document.

An investor entering strategic territory has a public obligation to accept transparency.

The police and private security have a legal obligation to give account for force.

Protest is a civic right.

But when protest produces representatives, political demands, negotiators, calls for government, a new mandate, faces who emerge as owners of the square, and a claim to speak in the name of the citizen, then it enters the zone of public responsibility.

Then the file of the protest is born.

The file of the protest does not seek to criminalize the citizen who enters the square.

It seeks to know who calls it, who finances it, who amplifies it, who writes its demands, who chooses its representation, and who benefits from its growth or its failure.

These are not questions against protest.

They are questions meant to protect protest from its hidden owners.

A protest that demands the file of power must not fear its own file.

The right to protest is sacred.

Hidden ownership over protest is dangerous.

When a protest asks only for the file, it is a civic cause.

When a protest begins to speak about everything, to declare representatives, to demand government, to produce new faces, to open a path for old actors in new clothes, to turn a wound into a political ladder, then it is no longer only a voice.

It is an object of power.

And power, in a Republic, is not taken by noise.

It requires a mandate.

The square may raise the citizen’s voice, it cannot invent a mandate in the citizen’s name.

This is the thin line where many just causes lose their purity.

They begin as a wound.

They continue as a microphone.

They end as the political property of whoever was fastest to climb upon the pain.

In a society where fear has been a method of government for years, sudden mass courage should not be mocked, but neither should it be accepted without questions.

When the cost of fear falls suddenly and unexpectedly, a serious Republic asks not only what awakened the citizen, but also who made that awakening possible, who directs it, and who seeks to inherit it.

Perhaps conscience awakened the wound.

Perhaps.

But perhaps someone understood that this wound could be turned into a stage, a mandate, a subject, a party, a new bargain.

A serious Republic asks both questions.

A country can be stolen twice, the first time when its land is taken, the second when its protest against the taking of land is taken.

When land is taken through companies, permits, decisions, contracts, fences, and speeches about development, the citizen loses the place.

When protest is taken through microphones, unelected representatives, cameras, trends, parties, media, public figures, and new owners of anger, the citizen loses his voice.

Once his land is taken.

Once his voice is taken.

Then someone seeks to take his tomorrow too.

This is the third ownership.

Ownership over the Albania that will emerge from this conflict.

Who is preparing to be born from this anger as a face, a structure, a mandate, or a new owner of tomorrow’s politics?

I do not oppose the birth of the new.

A country needs the new.

It needs courage.

It needs citizens who no longer wait for permission from the old.

It needs voices that are not afraid.

But the new is not born clean simply because it comes out into the square.

It must show its source, its financing, its connections, its interests, its mandates, its path, its moral boundary, and its relationship with truth.

Because in Albania many things have been born saying, “we are against the old,” and then became new forms of the same darkness.

That is why it is not enough for me to see the crowd.

I want to know who holds it.

It is not enough for me to hear the megaphone.

I want to know who finances the voice.

It is not enough for me to see the new face.

I want to know who placed it in the light.

The square does not frighten me.

The invisible owner of the square does.

This does not cleanse Rama.

On the contrary.

Rama is the main source of this fog, because for years he has built a state where the project enters faster than the citizen, where the file comes after the vision, where territory is treated as a stage, where the investor becomes an international photograph, where the word “strategic” is used as a beautiful name for dark priority, where his chair appears as the guarantee of projects that should have been protected by law.

Rama did not invent only the project as vision, he invented the way in which the project asks for trust before the file.

Rama does not administer only the project, he administers the darkness that makes the project ask for trust before proof.

When a prime minister ties the fate of a private project to his own chair, he admits, perhaps without wanting to, that the project is not held only by institutions.

It is held by him.

This is a disease of the Republic.

Rama is not threatening to leave.

Rama is showing the price of his staying.

He does not see only land.

He sees an entry card.

He does not see only a project.

He sees an international photograph.

He does not see only an investor.

He sees a political shield.

He does not see only a crisis.

He sees an opportunity for bargaining.

He does not see only a protest.

He sees a tool for saying that without him everything returns to chaos.

This is his method.

The old politics, too, cannot enter this square as an innocent witness.

It did not invent today the wound of property, the coast captured by clientelism, the state that serves the strong, and the citizen who always comes last.

Part of it may benefit from the fire against Rama without wanting to open, down to the root, the history that made this fire possible.

That is why anger against Rama must not be automatically inherited by those who were co-authors of the old Albania.

But the impurity of the protest does not cleanse the project.

And the impurity of the project does not sanctify the protest.

This is the formula the Republic must hold.

Rama cannot say: the protest is captured, therefore my file does not open.

The protest cannot say: the project is suspicious, therefore no one may ask who owns our voice.

The investor cannot say: the property is private, therefore the public interest must be silent.

The opposition cannot say: the anger is against Rama, therefore it belongs to me.

The media cannot say: I am covering the protest, therefore my own interest does not matter.

Neither the government, nor the investor, nor the protest, nor the opposition, nor the media, nor the new faces can ask for trust without a file.

The Republic is not property.

It is not the property of the government.

It is not the property of the investor.

It is not the property of the opposition.

It is not the property of the protest.

It is not the property of the screen.

It is not the property of those who want to be born politically upon its wound.

The Republic belongs to the citizens only when no one can take ownership of it without giving account.

That is why today three files are needed.

The file of the land.

The file of the protest.

The file of tomorrow’s politics.

The file of the land must show the property, the permits, the ultimate beneficiaries, the environmental assessment, the financing, the contracts, the status of the area, the boundaries between public and private, and every decision that made the project possible.

The file of the protest must show who calls it, who holds it, who finances it, who amplifies it, who represents it, who writes its demands, who speaks in whose name, and who benefits from the road the anger takes.

The file of tomorrow’s politics must show who is preparing to emerge from this wound as a face, a party, a structure, a negotiator, a new voice, a new owner of anger, or an old continuation under another name.

These three files are not against the citizen.

They are his protection.

The citizen must not pass from the fence of the project to the megaphone of the square’s new owners.

He must not pass from the dark project to the dark opposition.

He must not leave an invisible owner of the land only to surrender to an invisible owner of anger.

If the protest demands light, let it stand in the light.

If the government asks for trust, let it open the document.

If the investor asks for certainty, let it accept transparency.

If the opposition asks for a mandate, let it show its source.

If the media asks to be conscience, let it show its interest.

If new faces seek to represent citizens, let them show who raised them, who sustains them, and to whom they will answer.

Whoever cannot endure the light has no right to speak in the name of Albania.

Land, protest, and power must pass the same test, light.

Not light only upon the government and darkness over the protest.

Not light only upon the protest and darkness over the project.

Not light only upon the investor and darkness over the parties.

Not light only upon Rama and darkness over those who want to inherit the anger against him.

The same light for everyone.

This is the republican standard.

It is the standard that protects property from the crowd and the state from the strong.

It knows that the country is not material for the next experiment, and that the West is not a great name in a contract, but document, competition, transparency, control, and accountability, precisely because it does not accept that the land, the square, the coast, the mountain, the protest, and Albania’s tomorrow should become anyone’s invisible property.

I do not want an Albania that moves from the hidden owners of the land to the hidden owners of the protest.

I do not want the fence to be replaced by the megaphone, the dark project by the dark opposition, the old power by the new owner of anger.

I want a Republic.

And the Republic begins where land, protest, and power endure the same light, with no hidden owners over any of them.

Arian Galdini