Extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers on the emergency response after the natural disaster. Remarks by Prime Minister Edi Rama:
First and foremost, I would like to touch upon an essential aspect of the emergency situation and it is all about the serious psychological state, which keeps on weighing on every family and the quake-affected families and children in particular.
We have received an infinite number of messages how parents are finding it increasingly difficult in calming their children, and I believe it is imperative to look for ways to focus on the psychological aspect, trying to convey as much calmness, security and information as possible.
Judging from the meetings with affected-people it is not enough to convince them no matter how much you try to explain and offer guarantees. Everyone seems to expect the same answer and every one of them makes the very same question. Although you are in front or side by side with them, and although you may give an answer to the person in front of you he still keeps making the same question: “What is going to happen to us? What is going to happen to our homes?”
I think it is imperative that Besa makes a special effort and contacts as many teachers’ groups as possible and ask them to focus on ways to relieve this burden as soon as schools reopen their doors and make sure that teachers alternate normal teaching process with communication. It is necessary that over the coming days, especially when dealing with the primary school children, teaching process is somehow avoided and instead teachers engage their schoolchildren in conversations, games, and leisure activities designed to relieve the children’s psychological state. We will have enough time to recuperate teaching process in the strict sense of the word and this is time to do as much as possible in this aspect.
Every schoolchild in the worst-hit areas needs this human assistance and communication. Therefore, hard and constant work needs to be done in this respect and I would urge Education Minister to host meetings with teachers in order to ask them that they focus on parental aspect of their comprehensive role after schools reopen their doors and instruct them to be as creative as they can in the effort to relieve the psychological burden and escape from being haunted by fear, insecurity and nightmare.
On the other hand, I think we can now breathe a sigh of relief by our friends’ strong response to dispatch their inspection and expert teams. There is a number of expert groups already on the ground and more groups are set to arrive. Every country has offered sending such expert teams and it is crucially important that we make sure work runs on schedule in terms of sharing the burden of work. They are top experts and they are trained to work and cope with such situations and they can fulfil their mission within a very short time.
Yesterday, I urged everyone and the work has been already launched to host an information conference as soon as possible that will gather the representatives of all these teams to reveal facts and photo images showing reality of their work and provide as many as technical explanations as possible in order for the people start distinguish among the cracked buildings and the dangerous ones in terms that the buildings’ exterior appearance, the walls’ exterior appearance doesn’t necessarily indicate a dangerous situation.
I look forward to the damage assessment result in order to figure out the real number of high-risk buildings and how much these cracks emerging on the buildings’ walls and facade represent merely surface damages, which are fixable, but of course this requires maximum guarantee and this guarantee will be provided by the coming experts. Although this is not a complex science, our experts too have the capacity to distinguish and determine the level of damage in relation to the solidity or risks a building may pose, but given the current level of psychological insecurity, it takes not two but four eyes, two Albanians and two foreign eyes in order to ensure people that they face no imminent danger.
To this end, I would like Belinda, through the Deputy Minister who has been tasked with coordinating these teams, but also everyone else involved in this process, together with the plenipotentiary chief in this area, heads of the emergency crews, communicate again the need to create case files for each building associated with photographs and explanations, so that all of them are then introduced and revealed to the public at the conference set to be held in the coming days this week. In the meantime, I want everyone to take actions in order to find the conference venue, invite participants and ensure participation, so local government representatives and central government institutions take part in this gathering.
The National Rebuilding Committee will convene today and it will bring together some cabinet members, representatives from humanitarian organizations involved in charity activities and solidarity with people in need and they have raised significant financial contributions, representatives from the construction associations, engineers, architects, representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, the Albanian Development Fund, business and trade community to commence a discussion process and combine all our efforts to make sure that the contributions keep growing and the planning process is fully harmonized.
The Ministry of Finance and the chairman of the National Rebuilding Committee, together with a team of experts, are already working to review the state budget in view of efforts to address this top priority.
Meanwhile, the reaction from our friends and partners, the international bodies is really an encouraging one, because the great need to establish a solid funding base that would support all reconstruction operations and projects. We should also make sure that all affected families are properly identified so that we can then speed up rebuilding efforts in order for the process not to take years, as it has been the case in many other more developed and much more powerful countries than ours.
Dajna has been tasked with dealing with all families of the quake-victims in order to make sure that the quake survivors are ultimately housed in new houses, which means that the devastated families in Thumane should be provided the opportunity to choose whether they want to continue living there or move to Tirana instead. We have a solution for tem in place, but I believe leaving that village would be the best choice for the hardest-hit families, because deciding to stay there would make their psychological recovery extremely difficult.
It is crucially important this process completes urgently. By mid-December at most, they should be all housed in new houses. The same goes over the affected families in Durrës and Tirana. Meanwhile, the government’s normative acts on their cash aid to the quake survivors should become active immediately.
The funding of 1 million lek for each quake-affected family and survivor should be made available today and don’t forget that two families, currently accommodated in Kosovo, should be contacted in order to benefit the funding. Meanwhile, the quake-affected children will be granted a monthly payment of 15,000 lek, which they will benefit until their university graduation.
As for the retired people, I would like to clarify that we are not talking about a usual retirement payment, but a special pension granted by the Republic of Albania to individuals with a significant contribution to the country and which is the highest pension payment in Albania. All retired members of the quake-affected families should be eligible to this special pension and the payment should be allocated immediately. So, if the pension payment is issued in December, it should include the November pension payment too. I want to be clear about these details.
Frankly speaking, I feel a sense of unease about a missing element, which, in my view, is the only missing element in this whole effort to join all forces, and that is the opposition’s scepticism or hesitation to become part of this process and send its representatives in this whole network. I can’t really understand that kind of refusal approach towards the desperate need for all political parties to sit in a table and make concerted efforts to understand each other and it is really the time to reflect about this. This is not about politics in the sense of the meaning that has been unfortunately given to politics in this country, because politics was born exactly for this. It was born so that people all together work to address challenges and tackle that cannot be necessarily best addressed, or cannot be resolved at all, when others refuse to cooperate and you are completely on your own. The politics is an instrument to work wonders and it should be not in the way it has been regrettably reduced to.
On the other hand, I can’t don’t understand why a meeting of the elected people in this country is a propaganda show. Propaganda means abandoning people to their fate when you have the opportunity to do a lot more and instead you talk about things that are up to other people who should take care of, and it is up to the people on the ground to make sure that all this… – I don’t want to engage in no debate of whatsoever, because I am not interested at all and I have no time to waste by engaging in political debates. Once again, I appeal to Lulzim Basha, I appeal to the opposition not to spare the Albanian people of this need. This is a need for the Albanian people and it is not my personal need and I am not asking that this is done for me, or for us. It is in the people’s need to see positive energy sources everywhere, to see everyone unite with others, see everywhere people they may hate in normal conditions, but are ready to extend the hand to each other as human beings.
My appeal is to stop wasting time further and spare people this natural urge under these circumstances. Moreover, I was really pleased to see and I have respectfully welcomed a message conveyed the opposition leader calling for unity. However, words are not enough. It takes deeds and actions. Not only that, when words are not accompanied by actions, they just sound hypocritical, which, I am totally confident, this is not the case. I would like to believe this is a hard-felt message, because we are all humans. This is probably the case to understand and perhaps not to forget that those on the other side of the barricade are humans too, and not monsters.
I am really very sorry about the media’s absolutely problematic role in this process. Not every media outlet, of course. I feel very sorry for the frustrating climate created by the media debate. What usually are political talk shows, which these days often degenerate into surreal debates featuring all sorts of delusional who render opinions based on surreal correlations between Roman antiquity and the most recent earthquake, or other unfounded opinions.
I have watched the synthesis of these debates via the briefing I am provided with every day and I am deeply shocked at the lack of understanding some of the hosts of these talk shows towards the desperate need of the people and this nation to receive messages of calm and listen to the reasonable voices and stop even for a moment the annoying debates on the TV studios. Let alone the scandalous incitement of anxiety and the sense of insecurity, as well as the sporadic episodes that stick to the people’s mind. However, this is up to them. We can’t do nothing but just ask for some more understanding and commitment from them.
The events over the past few days have exposed an acceptable weakness in the Ministry of Interior concerning the entire chain of the fight against cybercrime. Zero capacity and abilities to react towards the fake news and misleading information, react against expression of hatred or racism remarks, and react against the cybercrime. Zero reaction. This is one of the aspects that deserves to take note in the ongoing process of structural overhaul of the State Police in all links. We should bear in mind the need to strengthen exponentially the fight against cybercrime sector. Cybercrime is a big concern nowadays and we are seeing over these days in Albania how dangerous it is to be exposed to cybercrime, to fake news, to fraudsters who present themselves as benefactors and that lead to financial fraud.
Likewise, it is also essential to maintain intense relations with entire international community, not only in terms of my or Gent’s communication with them. This is one of the toughest duties we should carry out tomorrow in terms of dealing with the acute crisis, as we should constantly inform the network of our friends and partners and do utmost efforts to channel all this effort into a common direction and provide all necessary conditions and help them financially and through human resources.
Asking then for a report from the public by some of you, because we are in contact all the time, I have to re-emphasize the psychological aspect is a big battle. Cracks and rifts in buildings are alike in people’s minds. They are fractures, invisible traumas, which require extraordinary attention and a great deal of work. I would also like Blendi, who is currently working to provide shelter to the quake-affected families and individuals in hotels, to work together with Ogerta and Besa in order to make sure that psychologist service is provided in all these accommodation structures. It is not just a matter of psychologists, in terms of specialists, but also it is in terms of treating these people very carefully by the staff there. They are not tourists, they are not clients, but patients and should be treated as such.
