Statement of the Socialist MP Luiza Xhuvani:
Words are not enough to express the pain and the shudder of the soul!
Pain for four lost lives!
Pain for those families that today cry over their dear ones who do not live anymore! And, of course, the pain of a mother who today cannot bear the wrongdoings of her son.
I understand that today the easiest thing to do is to blame Kostandin’s parents and family. Even though, it is not about a child, but it is about a grown up 26 year old man.
Gjergj and I represent a family who has nothing to do with that crime. Both of us are people connected to art and culture, dedicated to our profession.
We are parents, as any other parent who wants the best for their child, but apparently we were unlucky in this regard.
What happened today at dawn was a tragic event. But this event has nothing to do with Kostandin’s family. It has nothing to do with his parents and it has nothing to do with the mandate I hold.
There are four families that today are crying over the loss of their loved ones.
There are four families that today are seeking justice.
Justice must treat all equally before the law.
Who is a parent can understand me. Who is a mother can understand me even better. Kostandin is my son and he will remain my son despite everything.
And since a mother must be at her child’s side even in tragic moments like this, being convinced that justice must act severely towards anyone who violates the law, even when this is your own child, in order to erase any kind of alibi from anyone who might think that law is not applied equally for everybody, apologizing for not being able anymore to continue serving and dedicate myself to those who voted me, I submitted today to Prime Minister and Head of the SP my resignation as an MP of Saranda.
I wish for nobody to go through what I am going through. I wish for nobody to experience the tragedy that took place today at dawn.
I am Kostandin’s mother and he will always be my son. I cannot disown him for he is my own flesh and blood.
I will withdraw myself in the depths of sorrow bearing a burden that cannot be discharged.
Let justice make justice!
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Press release of Prime Minister Edi Rama:
Today, I want to address to everybody on the serious criminal event that took place at dawn in the capital city.
I felt as an obligation to react personally to this, since the son of our MP Luiza Xhuvani is involved in this event.
The first thing I thought about since the second I learned the tragic news were the parents.
The parents of the people killed and the parents of the main suspect as perpetrator. The first ones are citizens unknown to me; the second ones are two dearest friends of mine.
I believe I can understand what the mothers and fathers, families and friends of the four victims feel because of the tragic loss, but also because the main suspect for the tragedy caused to them is the son of an MP.
There is no doubt that this fact makes even more difficult their efforts to find the strength to face the inconsolable loss of a child.
There is no doubt that this makes impossible for the public opinion to not be particularly sensitive to this crime that took the lives of four people.
There is no doubt that the history of all these difficult years of a not at all normal relationship of state with crime, where more than once children of politicians have been involved – willfully or because the political war involved them to sully their parents – it has not been a worthy history neither for the state nor for politics. And it has not been a history that would help to wait with patience for justice to speak.
On the contrary.
This history of social dirtiness made the normal people of this country think that there is a law for their own children and another law for children of politicians; there is a state for murderers, smugglers, illegal possessors of weapons, trespassers of any kind without fathers and mothers in politics, and another state for the same type of crimes and trespasses made by politicians, senior officials or their children; briefly, an Albania for the children of the stepmother- the people and another Albania for the children of the mother-politics.
I don’t know how many among those children who have become celebrities of this history for two turbulent decades are perpetrators and trespassers, and how many among them are victims of the criminalizing propaganda of politics.
But today, I know for sure that the time of the two-facedness of the government in the fight against crime and trespassers ended on June 23rd. The time when the son would call upon his daddy to disown his sister-in-law’s husband from the Conference Room of the Prime Minister’s Office or would treat New York Times as a toilet paper from the podium of the Assembly, while 26 people were burned alive by the explosion of the corruption of the family in power, ended on June 23rd; the time when State Police would threaten a waiter who was shot with a gun by the bodyguard of the prime minister’s son in order to withdraw charges, and the time of the prime minister that would send his bodyguards to pay for the support of families whose son was killed by the government in the middle of the boulevard, ended on June 23rd.
I don’t know what police of that time would do, if in the bloody uproar of a nightclub in Tirana was involved one of the favourite children of the power of time bygone.
What we went through lets us no chance to say that police would behave the way the State Police behaved today.
For example, it is hard for me to imagine that that police would follow the child in question who was armed – with the risk of putting their own lives in danger – and would arrest him in flagrante and inform on real time the public opinion on his arrest.
Today was proved once again that State Police is on duty no matter who stands in front of them.
The same, it is completely impossible for me to imagine that at that time justice for the child in question would have been any different from the justice that declared non guilty the murderers of January 21st.
What will happen next is up to justice. But if I have raised my voice with judges and asked for justice, I will not lower it now.
And if the message of Luza Xhuvani’s withdrawal from politics must be for politicians as an exemplary lesson and for politics a turning point in relation to the ethics of its activists, it must be for judges a significant testimony of what has changed in Albania in the relations between the governing majority and the judges of this country.
We have the offices, people have the power.
Children are ours; law is equal for all children.
However, in order to not confuse words, Luiza and Gjergj Xhuvani’s son is not a child.
He is a 26 year old man and the undeserved living tragedy of two wonderful parents who have nothing, absolutely nothing in common with the power of crime, the politics of profit or with low life.
The words that were poured today against Luiza Xhuvani by an opposition that left us with the informal Albania of the occupied land, of sold justice, of stolen energy, of bought diplomas, of weapons in the hands of crime that ruled police forces, belong to low life.
While the woman and mother, who is suffering the misfortune of feeling in every single cell of her body the truth of that saying that goes “What your own child can do to you, even God cannot” and who, as any other man in this country has never done, withdrew from politics for the sake of an ethical sense hitherto unknown in Albania, belongs to the higher life from where she joined politics.
Luiza belongs to the creative life of a couple of artists who made history in the Albanian film and theatre, while today they are two tragically disgraced parents who are forced to live their family life as an endless painful movie, in the old and modest apartment where they have always lived through their creative and unprofitable honest work, with a wonderful daughter who is also a very successful student, and with their son whose road back home is likely to be very long.
My friendship with Luiza and Gjergj Xhuvani dates back to long time ago, when we were students at the Academy of Arts. Their success as artists has made me feel proud to be their friend and I will remain such until the end.
I would have never wished for them such a thing and neither have I ever wanted to be in front of their pain as parents.
Not only I, but all of us who believe in the ethics of politics, in the truth that politics is not only the stage of low life but also the irreplaceable space of good intentions where we can do together the best for our country and our life, feel proud for being friends of Luiza Xhuvani.
For Luiza was today a testimony that being in politics for good intentions is not at all the same as playing in a theatre.
