On this last September 11th, I began my address to the Parliament to present the Government’s programme with the mention of the tragedy of twin towers and the barbarian deeds of the Syrian slaughtering regime.
It was the time when Assad’s chemical weapons had caused an appalling massacre in the eyes of the world and everyone of us.
The United States, France, and Great Britain declared they were preparing for a military attack against Syria.
Hence, being fully in line with Albania’s strategic foreign policy pillar and with the new Government programme, I emphasized that Albania would stand, as always, “by the side of the United States and any alliance they would establish in every frontline required by this war.”
The events rolled on to the United Nations Resolution on the disarmament of the Syrian regime without war, by defusing the chemical stockpile of Assad’s criminal regime.
Albania gave this resolution its support, in complete conformity with its honour and dignity, as a country that has been openly engaged to contribute to freedom, democracy and peace anywhere in the world.
We were, then, contacted directly by our great partner and ally, the United States to consider the participation together with other countries in principle in the operation to destroy Syria’s chemical stock.
Like a series of other countries, our response was the one that imposes our history of these 23-years; our strategic foreign policy axis, which goes beyond any partisan difference, until yesterday morning; our obligation to be by the side of our greatest allies in every their major effort to make the world a better place and, no doubt, the response was the one that dictates our own national interest which is intrinsically linked to our special relationship with the United States:
Yes, we are ready in principle to be part of this operation as a support spot in the Mediterranean, but we lack internal capacities to participate directly, therefore, everything related to the transport, technology, expertise has to be covered by the United States and the other countries.
As it is obviously understandable, we were required to maintain absolute confidentiality on the matter, as the organizational process was only at its inception stage that involved the establishment of the contacts in principle.
Allow me, dear co-citizens, to make a question in this first moment of my utterly sincere confession to you:
Could and should Albania have said “no” in principle to the United States for such an enormous effort taken to the service of the humanity?
Is it possibly imaginable and how can one even picture that the United States have taken over such effort to take the chemical weapons away from the hands of a murderer only to kill then Albania or any other country involved in this endeavour together with them?
How can a normal mind, no matter how hostile it is towards the United States, reach to the point of believing that the United States would develop such an operation in the eyes of the entire planet only to lead the ally countries to death and devastation, by killing first their own troupes of experts and themselves while all the world is watching?
I am not saying that defusing chemical weapons is just a walk in the park.
Neither am I trying to state that destroying chemical weapons in Albania should make us feel peacefully pleased, just like anyone who would have watched something similar happen somewhere far from the country they live in.
What I am affirming instead is that, yes, this is the hard part of being engaged against the enemies of the humanity and by the side of the United States of America and the countries of the Euro-Atlantic alliance.
This is the hardest part of a strategic relationship from which, as Albanians, we should know better than most others that nations and countries benefit more than they are able to give back. It is exactly this hard part without which Slobodan Milosevic would have continued to even today to breathe down the neck of half of our nation, while us, Albanians of Albania, would not only have never become part of NATO, but would be out of any international consideration of any kind.
However, I do know very well that today only a few want to recall the US bombings that freed half of our nation and that there are many who might even be mocking at me adding that unless a share of hardship is taken, life, the country, the world can never become better.
That’s why I would go back to Assad’s bombs, which the Democratic Party tribune and some badly poisoned information sources claim that a man as insane as Assad, the Prime Minister of Albania, wants to explode in the country.
At this point, I want to look everyone straight in the eye, one by one.
First, all of you who bestowed your priceless faith in me on June 23 and who, today, are terrified and scared in the face of the apocalyptic scenarios on Albania.
These hallucinating scenarios are the ones which have been carved in your minds all these day in the most ignoble, vile and brutal way by unscrupulous politicians who have everything but love for Albania, media owners smeared with dirty bargains and debt-choked who have lost the privileges of yesterday or others who, either deliberately or due to lack of knowledge, rushed to fill and inflame your imagination by articulating all kinds of monstrosities and absurd allegations.
You, who voted me for the dream of this country’s Renaissance, you who supported me through hard times and brought me to the Prime Minister’s Office so that you were never murdered from the windows of this building out there in the boulevard; so that the legitimate interests of your family and our common country were never disregarded; so that you were no longer the last to be considered in the governance of this country;
You, parents and grandparents, girls and boys across Albania and outside the country who are waiting with a trembling heart what I am going to say about all the horrors and defamations you have been overwhelmed with in these days;
You, young girls and boys who banished away from your protest those who left Albania crippled, full of debts and filled with garbage, and you who keep protesting under my window today;
All of you, 1 million people who turned June 23 into the great popular referendum against wastes and their import thereof, please listen to me today and never forget, I humbly beg of you, until the day you will hold me in this office:
I would never betray you, not for any interest or at any price whatsoever, and not in any time or for any reason would I do behind your back anything that would have even a remote harm for your life, your security, your future.
Equally so, never would I take a decision in any similar case and for any purpose no matter how high, as it is the disarmament of a cannibal who killed 100,000 people like you as if they were merely bugs, without first sharing it with all of you, without going to the Parliament to obtain the votes of those who you have elected, and without finding peace in my heart because of your troubled souls.
But, listen to me carefully, neither would I take such decision behind your back, nor anyone has asked me to do so over the matter in question.
I have already told you all of this before.
I even said so specifically in relation to this issue twice these last days. But the noise was too loud and the anxiety stirred within by the fabricated horror stories was too strong and made my few uttered words hard to be discerned.
Why did I not tell you more though??
Why could I not inform you on what was being discussed between our great allies and us?
Why did I not make before the so-called transparency that has been so badly misused by those who until recently used bullets against you and called you the scum of the society?
Allow me, then, to tell you now that it is possible for me and explain why it was impossible to speak until yesterday night.
This, dear friends, is a complicated civil and military operation and, being such, its organization cannot become subject to public debate.
This never happens in any serious country, where the Government, the public and the Parliament are called in a debate only when an operational plan is already in place, not at its development stage.
Moreover, I would like to assure you today that we committed ourselves with great focus and determination with a technical group throughout the discussion process, asking from the expertise of our partners to provide answers for every question raised by environmentalists, every concern you have expressed, every argument coming from experts and pseudo-experts that whipped up your worries in TV and newspapers.
In the meantime, I strived with so much will and passion not only to receive full certainties that no harm would be present and no residues were left in the Albanian territory, but also to reach an understanding so that Albania’s weak shoulders were not burdened with more than it could bear in this extraordinary endeavour of the great powers.
We found answers, one after the other, we received guarantees, one after the other, but that took time.
Nevertheless, except for our readiness in principle, as I stated, I have taken no final commitment to take the matter to the Government and the Assembly of Albania for endorsement, because I was constantly aware all the time that in order to take such step, I had to be utterly convinced not only that full technical security was in place, but also of the benefits that our society, our country, our nation deserved to draw from this extraordinary contribution to all humanity.
I could hear from my window today the repeated call of the protesters, “We want Albania to be like Europe,” and allow me today to tell you frankly, by looking at you straight in the eyes, that this is what I have relentlessly tried for all these days and nights of talks.
That was my repeated request to our great US and European friends:
Help us show to Europe that we are a part of it and not a garbage dump in the middle of Europe!
Help us come out cleaner and stronger from this story, so that we can help you with whatever we can!
Help us contribute to the greater good for the humanity, while you contribute for the good of our people!
I want to make a question to those who today were rightfully saying, “We want Albania to be like Europe,” do they know that Albania counts 31 hotspots of chemical wastes inherited from the past, which do not explode but kill slowly?
These are hotspots recognized as such since years, marked in the planet’s black list, but our impoverished Albania, just like any other poor country in this world, cannot avoid paying salaries and pensions to afford the huge cost of cleaning such wastes.
A young mother from one such hotspot in Elbasan, texted me a message reading, “Prime Minister, there are children diagnosed with tumour each year in our village, and you want to kill all of our children?”
This was one of the messages I read to our partners during the talks and, at the end, all agreed that Albania definitely deserved that the world’s best experts, together with the highest chemical waste cleaning technology did not leave Albania upon finishing with Assad’s chemicals, but continue their work in Patos-Marinza, Ballsh, Fier, Elbasan, Rubik, Laç, Berat, Lushnja, Bajza, Rreshen, Fushe-Arrez, Prrenjas, Burrel, and other sites, to do away once and for all with the hazardous waste remaining from fifty years of communism, plus twenty of environmental barbarity.
I asked them to clean the considerable amounts of inert wastes in river deltas, national roads and beaches and, little by little, we found understanding on that. At the same time, we reached the ultimate understanding on the non-negotiable condition that all wastes from the second stage of dismantling Syrian chemicals would be retrieved from Albania; because, dear friends, those coming to Albania were not the notorious bombs that are being defused in Syria, but the chemicals extracted from them (that is, not the bullets, but the powder).
On the other hand, the incineration and burial of wastes following the treatment of the substances arriving in the country would take place elsewhere, in other countries.
Thus, not even the smallest trace of chemicals would remain on the Albanian soil.
As I am trying to confess all the truth based solely on facts and with absolute loyalty to you, let me tell you that I have represented you and Albania throughout this process with the greatest respect for the United States, and with utter humbleness in favour of our national and public interest.
Faithfully I confess that, like any of you, a persistent question has afflicted me day by day: “Why only Albania?”
But that was in no way a question because of any suspected imperialist exploitation, like some people resembling characters of the movies of Shqiperia e Re Film Studio who fought against Soviet military bases cried hysterically about on TVs and newspapers, to the shame of Albania.
No, contrarily so, this question afflicted me because the Albania we were left with could be easily attacked as a poor country filled with garbage and that is why I felt that Albania’s involvement as the only host spot was the biggest hindrance.
It is a fact that all the humiliating wave of international media depicting the country as a dump spot was produced by the very truth that, being filled with garbage indeed, Albania would have a certain cost to bear from the negative publicity associated to such an operation.
I shared this concern with partners quite sincerely.
Bearing the same concern as you do, I have tried to explain that such afflicting question required more than the well-known and fully true and legitimate answer that the United States consider Albania as a highly loyal ally. At the end of the day, they are only asking from Albania a supporting land spot, a military base which is entirely isolated and made available for the arrival, defusion and departure of the chemicals, to be then incinerated and buried elsewhere, outside Albania.
But, both the increase of tensions in the country, fuelled 24 hours a day by a part of the media (which did not stop at covering the civil protest, but turned into trenches from where citizens where thrown a perfidiously disconcerting poison) and the deadline expiring today for a commitment by the Government of Albania to consider and subject this operation to the process of legal approval did not give us enough time and opportunity to exhaust such highly sensitive aspect.
At this point, it is obviously the turn of my predecessor and of those who wrote the most disgraceful chapter in the relationship between the US and Albania, by causing a rift for the first time in two decades of politics in relation to the US and by transforming the parliament into an hysterical stage where our great partner was treated as if it were Assad himself and the only thing left unsaid was that Assad wants to exterminate Syrians, while President Obama wants to exterminate Albanians.
I am aware, ladies and gentlemen of the opposition, of the great pain you still suffer not simply due to the loss of 23 June, but due to a deeper wound, that of losing power over Albanians’ money and being afraid of the consecutive blows given to the economic underworld, which you raised as a curse marking the body of Albania.
My imagination, though, did never truly picture that your pain would be so deep as to make you resort to Assad and his bombs to attack the US, in addition to the government and myself personally.
I could not believe that you, who blew away a piece of Albania, killing 26 innocent Albanians and burning hundreds of families, would dare to go that far as to cry for Gerdec not to be repeated!
Was it the United States who caused Gerdec, you “pigs satisfied” of Migjenian dimensions, who are playing today the role of the “Socrates dissatisfied” allegedly on behalf of this people whom you abandoned in the streets, amidst the garbage, debts and world’s despise?
Do you think that this humanitarian operation is a business for my son and the greedy businessmen of your entourage, you who dismantled weapons in Gerdec by the hands of desperate mothers and young offsprings of poverty, which you planted as a disease across Tirana and in every corner of Albania?
What do you think the United Nations are, your gang of plunderers which runs after a madman, who, after having turned Albania into a dustbin for imported wastes, orders his Little Luli of enormous damages ask for a popular referendum against the United States?
Stick it in your mind today and up the day when you leave the old man in his loneliness that Albania already held its popular referendum against the wastes on 23 June!
Where is the decision which you screamed that was allegedly taken behind the backs of Albanians and would be made public today, on Friday?
There is no such decision, because Albania could not make any decision without the one millions who already held the referendum against wastes and without those men and women who represent these one million Albanians in the country’s parliament.
Right now, I would urge all Albanians to stop allowing anyone to take them for fools by drawing the ugliest parallel between the garbage that asphyxiated Albania just for business sake until 23 June and the chemicals of a fight of the humanity against its sworn enemies.
I spoke in the beginning about the hard part of aligning side by side with the world’s most powerful countries as Albanians and NATO members.
While I am heading towards the conclusion, there is one question I want to make:
Don’t you think that it could not happen for Albania – yes, yes, our small Albania, which has been torn by so many injustices and misfortunes – to have been either first, or second or further in a row to refuse being involved in this operation, but that it should have stood to the end and try faithfully to create the most optimal conditions that would enable it to participate in accordance with its needs and capacities?
I had no dilemma over this and that is what I did on your behalf, on behalf of Albania.
We are indeed small and impoverished, but I assure you that we won’t become bigger or richer by rushing to behave as if we are, when we are not and by calling, “Ethnic Albania without chemical weapons!”
Neither do we become so by deliriously striving to compare ourselves to those who are greater and stronger than us, who for entirely other reasons adopt stands that are different from ours.
Dear young protesters,
Your protest in social networks and in the streets of Tirana or Albania was the only swallow of hope in the sky filled by the dark shadow of hatred, of rage, lies, delusions and fears that erupted among us.
Although you were drawn to protest because of your hearts being heavily burdened by all this hysterical propaganda, I feel so good about you. I feel good in particular for many parents who only yesterday were scared of protesting, whereas today they get to the streets with their children, without being concerned of the special forces and weapons appearing from the windows of the Prime Minister’s Office. I feel good about this fresh democratic wind blowing from June 23.
I fully respect your courage and many of you who stood by me everyday until June 23, in the unforgettable journey of our endeavour to bring Renaissance to the country, in order to move faster towards the Albania that we want.
No problem, nothing personal, as my friend, Elsa Lila, wrote me yesterday before streaming her video on YouTube.
Today is not the day to change your mind; that I know and won’t ask of you.
Today is the day to commend you, because even though we do not agree on such an important matter, we agree on an equally significant one, that is, Albania needs good government officials as much as it needs good protesters.
However, today is the day for me to tell you this:
The United States do not kill people. It is them instead, whose people have been and continue to be murdered more than any other in war fronts for the good of the humanity.
Without the United States, it would have been impossible for the world to win over Hitler and the Communist Empire, and, if that had not been the case, we cannot imagine how both Albania and Europe would have been like today.
Without the United States, Albanians would never have been free and independent in two states, as they are today.
Without the United States, be sure, that no protests against chemical weapons would take place in Albania, but probably no protests would be held in the last 23 years and prisons would be still piled up with political prisoners.
Thus, let us make things clear friends.
Leave to their madness those who want to mess again with the minds of this people by instigating anti-American feelings, which is a shame for us as a nation, as a country, as Albanians and as citizens; those who seek to poison and hold you in disbelief with defamations, lies and with rancour of any kind, as they have done here for years now; those who want to feed you with the empty spoon of their ignorance and evil against this country.
And in order to separate things and focus the matter you are protesting over, there is only one issue I stopped at, without any possibility to overcome in the discussions with our partners:
The lack of possibility for one or two countries that are part of the chain of chemical weapons’ destruction operation to be involved within the established deadline, not with reference to any lack of financial terms or expertise, because they are in place, but what I am referring to is their direct participation.
In case some other countries had progressed in time to become part of the operation, I would be ready today to tell you: “This is our plan, this is our agreement with partners, this is how little of a risk we will take and how much we will gain morally as a nation, but also physically as a country if we were to participate.
Nobody would then say why only Albania or that an impoverished and polluted country as Albania today is what the operation needs.
But, unfortunately, this element which is as important to you as it is to me is currently lacking.
This is why, fully faithful to Albania and with the greatest respect towards our irreplaceable friends and partners, who have already been informed about my decision that you will learn now:
It is impossible for Albania to take part in this operation.
Thank You!
