Albanian Government Council of Ministers

Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama at today’s plenary session in the Assembly:

Sali, I have the same boring question for you: Will you allow the Democratic Party to vote the judiciary reform? And don’t look at what the digital citizen writes, but look me in the eye and answer my question. Why don’t you say a word about the judiciary reform, and why the DP in not sitting at the table of the committee to vote the draft approved by the Venice Commission?

Actually this is a rhetoric question. Suffice it to see what happens in court with that mountain of reinforced concrete, the permission for which was granted by the chairman of your party, to understand why you are the first to be completely disinterested in judges and prosecutors of this country going through the vetting scanner and give account, according to the norms set by the reform project, on everything, on their past, on their decisions, their properties and their ability. How can you accept such a thing, when you have encouraged, supported and still continue supporting a corrupt system that provides services to you personally and to your people, thus hindering the judiciary reform?

An unprecedented shame. A court caught red-handed, which refuses to apply the most minimal thing, take into account the conflict of interest, and form a panel that would judge the most unprecedented shame that a mayor has ever dared to do in the history of municipality of Tirana, a mountain of reinforced concrete on the lake dam which threatens not only the park but the life of an entire neighbourhood, and is considered dangerous by a national committee of experts.

Even today, when the court had decided to forcibly take the decision, it was forced again to withdraw because another judge came as a direct client, a direct buyer by the person suing the state prosecutor, a company suing the state. You that got engaged even with guns to prevent the construction of a playground, not only keep silent, but on the contrary, you engaged the president of the republic who you have turned into a complementary chairman of the Democratic Party, to appear publicly and take under his protection the most corrupt panel that a normal mind can envision, if you read the law and see the conflict of interest of all its members. How can this happen?

Then make a fuss why the mayor protested. He protested, and he did the right thing, because hadn’t he protested and hadn’t he shared with the public that shame that was prepared, the court would have made public today only the decision signed by a panel clearly involved in the conflict of interest.

This is very odd, because here in this room you act like you know nothing, and above all you use none but one arm, the daily criminalization of everything that the government does or is trying to do. You are completely hypocritical, and you are betraying the Albanian people every day. You tell Albanians nonsense every day. Meanwhile you have no capacity to counter with an alternative, with right-wing liberal ideas or proposals for the reforms that this government does. You pronounce no word but scandal. Everything you say is built on hypocrisy and on a monstrous attempt to manipulate the public opinion.

Sali, you have related me to narcotics since I started planting the red plums. There are many people who listen but can remember nothing. It was another time, and there were not so many televisions back then. People didn’t have access to information like they have today, for there were neither social networks nor digital citizens. When you were president of the republic and told about a group of PS from Libofshe, who were beaten up by you, you declared that “Libofshe gave today democracy the most beautiful bouquet of flowers”, or even when you would say that the red plums that I planted along the road Kavaja, in my titanic endeavour to restore civility in Tirana, you said “that money came from the narcotics”; “one red plum launders 50 thousand Euros earned by drugs”.

These are your words. These are not my imagination. I have imagination, but I have it neither to throw mud whoever comes my way, nor to deal with all the family of my opponents. I have imagination to do things that you cannot even imagine, let alone realize them.

According to you, my drug ties are very remote. They are rooted in the red plum tree in Kavaja Street, and in every activity, every job and in every other effort I’ve done which has put you in a difficult position, and therefore you wanted nothing but insult. So, I’m not at all impressed by this.

What is important to me in this moment is that Albanians, our partners, our children, the next generation for which I am working, need to have today, not tomorrow, the answer from this parliament, from this party, why the judiciary reform is not being voted, and confront you, your party, and all of you here. You who are the original, and all the copies who speak like you and bring nothing new, but keep repeating your old song. The song of a man who was educated in the school of your party, knows no opponents but enemies. For you and your school, whoever stands in front of you is not an opponent to whom you can talk, but an enemy who you must denigrate by any means and at any costs. You lack just one last tool, the trial to condemn without defendant the one who is standing opposite you.

It is not something new, neither is it recent or very old, the truth that you are a pathological liar. Here you have the statement by EUROPOL, even in English. You can google it, since you cannot look me in the eye. Read it! Although I have seen you reading. We were together in this pulpit, and you removed or added phrases in the text according to the party’s needs.

This is the statement by Europol that says: “On May 9, 2016, 17 individuals, 11 Greeks and 6 Albanian, belonging to a criminal organized network that was involved in trafficking on a broad scale, were arrested in a coordinated operation of law enforcement agencies, led by Greece and supported by Albania, Belgium and EUROPOL.”

You are teaching wrongly your own copies. You are the only original, but you have only counterfeit products in your hands.

I bear full responsibility for this. The statement was printed directly from the website of EUROPOL. I believe that as soon as the prosecution concludes investigation on the interception device, you will still read the truth in a foreign language.

Who is listening to us can verify what I just said. There is nothing original in the hands of Sali. Only Sali is original, and everything else is a counterfeit product, and I have been a witness of this, I repeat this, we were both here looking at the same text and I saw how you read it.  However, there is a third party who can verify this, they just need go to the website of Europol and understand who is telling the truth and who is lying.

That’s not all. There is more than that. You do nothing by lie, slander and throw mud on everything. You talk only about directors, while we have made only one proposal for the decriminalization law: to include in the law the entire state or public administration. We asked to have the state or public administration included, be it or not civil servant, so that it can be subject to the decriminalization law.

Your attempts to criminalize the Socialist Party, to make the Socialist look like a place teeming with criminals, are desperate attempts that may involve only the losers, not reasonable people.

I believe that the Albanian people do not need our help to understand the truth when you when you speak, when your copies speak, or when we speak. We take their time, their energy and wear them out on Thursday, which is a gloomy day for the truth, a gloomy day for every moral, civic and political morality. A gloomy day for anyone who has been given by the people even a single vote, and continues to fuel every Thursday this unprecedented shame which makes us look like individuals with a tail, not like MPs elected by the Albanians to take forward the agenda of reforms and the process of integration in the European Union.

You don’t want justice reform. You and these here, but these are more innocent because they are not responsible for what they say. They have made the pact with you and have indicated their path to the top, what costs they had to pay with their conscience in terms of their relation to the truth and the mechanism of reasoning, to get your support to be here representatives of all those who want to be right, but you think that they will be happy only with breadcrumbs. It’s a shame!

There is no greater shame than speaking only about criminals, bandits, crime, drugs, and not doing the first thing that anyone does, be it an individual, a group, an association, a community, a party, when they are threatened by injustice, crime and corruption. This thing is justice reform.

You do not want to strengthen the power that ends speculation and takes decisions on the basis of the Constitution and the law, and tells who should be free and who deserves to be punished, or go to jail. You like this chaos, this swamp that you have created for years, the gloomiest part of which is the justice system.

If the justice system emerges from the swamp and really becomes the place where all the accusations, allegations, slander and insults are answered, you will lose your job and will radically change the way of understanding and doing politics. Not only that, but you are utterly exposed to the danger of facing your past. And you have a lot to hide and be afraid of in relation of the many years you stayed in government.

The history between you and us is very simple. We do reforms, you talk about scandals. I have said and I repeat it: A political party, a ruling majority, a government cannot be judged based on the behaviour of one individual or another, but is judged based on its responsive capacity to any behaviour and to any act that violates their principles, moral and unquestionably legal ones, when the law is violated.

You come here and count the captives. As if they were caught by you! You come here and count those who, thanks to our response capacity, were taken before justice or chased away from the Socialist Party. What do you judge them for? Everybody bears personal responsibility. There is no collective responsibility. Above all, throwing mud against the opponents because of an “X” or “Y”, to whom opponents have reacted like you can never imagine.

You kept in charge the director of Taxation who was under house arrest, and you said “this is the country of courts. I will wait for the final decision of the court”. Under house arrest, in handcuffs, and you still kept him in charge! There were even cases – very few unfortunately, two or three among the thousands you have insulted and outraged – that when verified, have been chased away by us from state offices. But when we do this, we are compared to Stalin, and when you speak, you are democracy.

Forget about finding any reasonable Albanian citizen who would relate me to drugs and the dark heroes of the world of narcotics trafficking. But you who started with the red plumes keep going, and consider anyone who is declared a fugitive, who has been caught or arrested by the police, any person for whom the police cooperates with partners, as directly related to me. Actually you prove but one thing, what I have always said: When someone accuses you of something that you haven’t done, he is able to do it himself. I could never imagine how someone can put 5 thousand Euros in the mouth of someone else. Since you say this, you must have done it so many times.

I am afraid that you do not want the reform also for another reason. You know very well that the adoption of the constitutional package and the start of the reform implementation open the door to negotiations.

I heard here Mrs Topalli who shamelessly said that I have urged to not issue visas to Albanians, because Albanians are criminals, and that 1 million Albanians would move abroad. Actually, I wanted you did for Albania, in the eyes of everyone, just what I am doing. Nothing more. I would be really happy that, despite the differences and the gap that divides us, you did for Albania in the eyes of everyone, just what I am doing.

The judicial reform lays above all of us like an imperative for which we are forced, and I am forced to listen to you more than I usually do, and sit in this room longer than usually. We have even invited you, and I am repeating it today, an open invitation: Let’s sit together as soon as possible and untangle this knot, which is a great treason against Albania and the next generation, if it suffocates the reform.

I want to make it clear to all those who want a referendum for the reform. The referendum cannot be done only with the votes of the majority. Although we have a qualified majority, we do not have the constitutional majority to make a referendum. This is why you act stubbornly like the strong ones, by obstructing and delaying the justice reform. This is why you cannot hide the enthusiastic pathos when you see something that you can hold onto, and you hold on everything that crosses your way, trying to turn it in a great reason cause until the end of the week. Then you wait for another week to come up with another thing, and then another one. Meanwhile, these weeks should be spent on justice reform.

You speak about scandals, but we haven’t seen any, for if it is a scandal that we collaborate with our partners to neutralize a trafficking network, we will continue with such scandals. If it is a scandal that we warn anyone who crosses the line, we will continue with such scandals. If it is a scandal that we work together with our closest partners on how to increase the police capacities since 1991, we will continue with such scandals. You call them scandals, we call them duties.

Therefore Sali, be a man. Come here and speak about justice reform. Say whatever you want, but just speak. You have been telling here and pointing out all sort of things, but when it comes to justice reform it is as if the cat got your tongue. Come and tell here whether you are going to allow your party – which you has left adrift, just like you left the country – to the justice reform.

As for the rest, the more you and your copies speak, the more you show nothing but your despair and how badly you have ended. You’ve made a big fuss that you were spied on, because you think you are being spied, but it was nothing but one of your bubbles which are an offense to those who voted you, listen to you and feel the obligation to believe you even when you talk nonsense.

An old man in Vlora was very upset about the fact that Sali came here in the last hearing and defamed Ali Asllani. He asked me why I did not react. To what should I react first? In the end I asked him what he wanted to tell Sali in no digital ways, for I never use the digital ways to come and complain in front of the parliament. He asked me to quote Ali Asllani, just for you:

“Dhe zotrote kapardise, diç kujton e diç pandeh, kundër njerëzve të vërtetë zë e vjell e zë e leh.” (These lines describe a person who shows off, thinking he knows everything, while picking on simple people.)

© Albanian Government 2022 - All rights reserved.