Prime Minister Edi Rama’s Address at the State Funeral Ceremony for Former Prime Minister of Albania and Founding Chairman of the Socialist Party, Fatos Nano
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Prime Minister Edi Rama: There’s a saying, “Only in death do they begin to love you.”
How I wish, dear Fatos, that we could sit tonight at one of those rare dinners we shared in recent years, enjoying the calm that had finally settled between us, and spend the evening going over that endless chronicle of events and characters, of all that’s been said and written about you since the news broke that this time, you have gone forever.
But how much they’ve loved you and admired you, old friend!
Even those who never missed a chance to throw a stick in your wheels or a stone on your back!
They could hardly wait to show you their love and admiration the moment they learned you’d never open your eyes again.
Even those who threw you in prison accusing you of theft, those who came to kill you in your office branding you a murderer, those who for years and years hurled at your face every curse the Albanian language could produce, just look how beautifully they’ve now embroidered their words of admiration for you!
It drives me mad that we’re not at one of those dinners tonight, one that would have been priceless.
And yet, instead of sharing a laugh with you today, I must now put together the words of a farewell, one I honestly never imagined, not even when our friend wrote to me with deep sorrow that you had fallen into an irreversible coma.
At that moment, my thoughts went only to your steadfast wife Xhoi, who I knew would continue to keep vigil at your side, perhaps for many more years, like a loyal guardian of your endless sleep. But I swear, I never once thought of you, not like this, not lying in a coffin, truly leaving behind this life that you so deeply loved and lived to the fullest, stealing away its small hours of the night, draining its glasses of fate to the bottom, taking in its smoke-filled chapters with the same passion, whether you were rising to the top, hitting the bottom, or simply stepping aside.
Yet here it is, this day of mourning, arriving suddenly for me, and I am faced with the difficult task of giving the first farewell that the head of the largest political family of Albanians offers not just to a predecessor but to the very first chairman, the founder of our family.
And of course, this time is very different from all the others, because the man who departs today with no return from Tirana, the city where he was born, grew up, was both adored and anathematized, and made history, is a truly exceptional case to be bid farewell with mere words of formality, without sounding ridiculous, as I must say many have seemed to me these past few days, speaking of Fatos Nano.
With Fatos, we shared, broke, and shared bread again many times, but the story of our relationship, with all its extremes, from my “adoption” into the socialist family under his blessing to the moment I took up his mantle, has no place in this eulogy.
Or rather, it has room only for one fact: if I stand here today as the voice of grief for our great socialist family, it is undoubtedly due to the intuition and courage of the founding chairman who once invited me and gave me a place in the hall of our political home, breaking at that time a great dividing wall with the society of that era, when the house of the socialists had not yet been fully aired from the scent of the past.
I have often asked myself over the years whether Fatos Nano truly desired the burden of leading the Socialist Party, or whether it simply fell upon his shoulders with all the rough weight of a fait accompli, during those days and nights when the shattered communist army was burying the Party of Labour in the middle of the desert, with the tattered flag of the dictatorship of the proletariat hanging at half-mast, and with morale crushed beneath the soles of their worn-out shoes after forty-five years of marching toward a red horizon that only kept retreating until it vanished into the exhausted throat of communism itself.
It was right here, in the grand hall of the Palace of Congresses, that communism uttered its final calls for battle against the whole world, even as the irresistible wind of change blew and crashed upon the “congressmen,” turning their fierce lament of despair into a whistle both shrill and absurd, as from the podium was finally declared the surrender to reality.
I remember him there, among the pale faces of the leaders, their voices drowned by the coming of the end, and the sun-burned secretaries hardened by the fields, the factories, and the construction sites. “The blind one,” as his comrades called him and as we too called him among ourselves, always seemed to me both a protagonist and a captive at once.
I never doubted that it was precisely this non-schematic profile that gave Fatos Nano, willingly or not, the scepter of the newborn left after the burial of the Party of Labour. Yet I believe that the many rises and falls of his political journey, beyond the defining power of events, some of them very harsh, were the reflection of a deeper duality: that of a great protagonist and a man captive to a duty he often tried to escape from whenever the chance arose.
But it was precisely that duality, born of his non-dogmatic and unsystematic nature, combined with his absurd imprisonment, which laid bare the primitive dogmatism of his captors, not only of Fatos himself but also of the democratic movement that became the fate of the Socialist Party, that ultimately sanctified Fatos Nano as the uncontested leader of the socialists, giving the Socialist Party a new breath of life and a genuine perspective to rise again as a dominant force in Albanian politics.
Without that imposed sacrifice of his, the socialists would have had a less generous fate. But perhaps Fatos himself, without that imposed sacrifice, might not have become such an enduring leader in a time of turmoil and confusion, both inside and outside the party. His leadership was far more spirit than presence, far more space than time, far more improvisation than planning. The nature of his leadership together with his dramatic returns after his escapes make up a historical and socio political material of exceptional value for anyone who one day will take on the task of truly unpacking, and not hypocritically fastening shut, the decisive role of Fatos Nano, not only on the chapter he once led but also over what the Socialist Party later became.
In the party headquarters he led, there stands a now well known photograph of him that, for me, remains the most meaningful image of Fatos Nano immediately after leaving prison. I am always struck by the striking difference between that Fatos and the Fatos who was handcuffed before the judges who jailed him.
The Fatos who stood trial is the economics professor who clung fiercely to the eyes of the people before his imprisonment, a double captive of that day, both by the heavy burden placed upon him, which maybe he never truly wanted with all his heart, and by his crude persecutor, who certainly wanted him behind bars.
The other Fatos, the one at the party headquarters newly released from prison with his left hand pointing forward and his eyes shining full of sparks, is a rare political animal who, above all and regardless of everything, has the foremost merit that the Socialist Party never wavered for a moment from the gravity of the national interest. That quality remains to this day a taboo and makes the Socialist Party proud of being a steadfast voice, a defender and an unwavering promoter of the great interests of the country and of the Albanian nation.
Among those who honored our chairman with grand words after his death were also those who had called him a traitor when he met Slobodan Milošević during an international event in Thessaloniki, and for many other things not worth recalling.
I heard from him the conversation with the butcher of Belgrade and I have no idea whether Fatos left that conversation written down somewhere. But not only is there nothing traitorous in that meeting and that conversation, when the words said at that meeting, and in the meetings and collaborations of Fatos Nano with the patriots of the national movement for the freedom and rights of Albanians in Kosovo and in Macedonia, are properly brought to light, then no one, absolutely no one, will be able to question the patriotic contribution of the founding chairman of our party to the liberation of Kosovo and to the signing of the Ohrid Agreement. That contribution puts Fatos Nano in the honored ranks of Albanian history.
After the burial of the Party of Labour, Fatos Nano was instrumental in leading the socialists through the desert and uniting them with the democratic world.
I recalled his joy yesterday after the meeting in the adjoining main hall when he announced the acceptance of the Socialist Party into the Socialist International as a family of progressive ideas of the new era. “This is like graduation day,” he told me, laughing.
As head of government he had to lead the people out of the pyramid schemes and restart the work of state-building from zero after the devastating chaos of 1997, facing a primitive, vengeful and destructive opposition that went as far as armed attacks on institutions and on him personally and physically.
Of course, today is not the day to write the history of Fatos Nano, but the day to say goodbye to him.
Dear Fatos,
I will miss those rare friendly dinners, our communication like that between the first shift driver and the second shift driver of the same car, where we understood each other without words and when we happened to share a strategic dilemma your advice always came well refined, clear and sharp.
And when I think about what kind of Soviet four-wheeled wreck you took over in that first shift, and what a much better vehicle I later received in the second shift to turn the Socialist Party into the fast-moving brand for a European Albania that it is today, it comes naturally to me not to say farewell, but simply, may you never die, Fatos Nano.
