Prime Minister Edi Rama: Do not worry at all. Today, we have assigned 10 teams to carry out the verifications. Meanwhile, we have prepared a new service that will appear on e-Albania today, called “My Damage”. Here, you will be able to register by entering all the details: your first name, surname, identification details and business tax identification number, followed, of course, by your email address, telephone number, property details, floor area, insurance company, whether or not you have insurance, and an estimate of the damage caused. You will then upload photographs and video footage, together with any supporting documentation you have, invoices and so on. Your record of meeting your obligations to the state will also be reviewed. Once we have completed all the verifications and compiled a register of all the damage, we will certainly come to everyone’s assistance.
From today, every small business damaged by this wave of blind violence has access to a service on e-Albania where it can register the damage. Meanwhile, as I told our friends affected here at this small business, 10 verification teams from the General Directorate of Taxes will be on the ground collecting information on the damage to small businesses in the capital. We will stand together. We will stand with every family in Tirana that earns an honest living and has lost its property, and we will turn these ruins left by blind destruction into examples of our strength to move forward.
We respect students. I value the power of their dreams and hopes as the driving force of the future, as an impetus for all of us to move forward faster. Their voices, the voices of young people and of every citizen who feels the need to protest today, must and will be heard with respect.
Their right to protest must and will be protected as a right for which we have all fought at different times. But precisely because young people are our future, I will not allow anyone or anything to jeopardise the future of this country, where they and every Albanian child are growing up. Neither for the political gain of those malevolent hands that have returned with their fury of burning and destruction, nor for the sinister purposes of foreign hands that have intervened to stop us, nor for any other purpose.
My responsibility is clearer in these difficult hours than on any good day: to protect our citizens, ensure justice and take Albania forward, together with this governing majority, which has a very clear mandate: Albania in the European Union by 2030.
Do not forget that we have achieved extraordinary things in just one decade. We have begun closing negotiating chapters on the path towards the summit, where we will bring Albania, bearing the flag of Ismail Qemali and Skanderbeg, into our shared European home.
We have tripled the country’s gross domestic product from less than €10 billion to almost €30 billion. We have attracted increasing foreign investment, expanded our tourism industry to a scale unimaginable just a few years ago, and given Albania a dignity it has never before enjoyed in the eyes of the world.
Wages. Wages are never enough, but they have continued to rise, again and again, while public debt has steadily fallen to historic lows. Today, the vast majority of services are just a click away, through a mobile phone or the nearest computer. Today, Albania is a different country, and with these achievements, with this foundation, I will continue, together with you, to take Albania forward, to build here the Europe that has been denied to us for so many decades and centuries. We will protect every Albanian student’s right to an education. We will protect every Albanian’s right to work and earn an honest living. We will guarantee everyone’s right to walk safely on our streets, without question, and we will not allow a bankrupt political establishment, with its masked figures on the streets or its evening clowns, to rob people of these freedoms through violence and incitement to violence. A student holding a placard is exercising a democratic right. A masked individual smashing up and looting a business is committing a crime, and we know the difference. Albanians know the difference, and together we will act accordingly.
Those who indiscriminately destroyed property in the streets, both private property and our shared property, will be held accountable. Those who caused the destruction will face the law every day, while those who suffered it will receive our full support, not only in words, not only from the heart, not only through an outstretched hand, but also through compensation for the damage.
Our children have nothing to do with violence or with these scenes of violence. Smashing windows is not a vote, burning buildings is not a political project, and above all, violence neither has a mandate nor confers one.
Albania will not be held hostage by anyone. Above all, no force can stop Albania, me or you, or turn us back!
