The "Chechens" of the SP and those of the Renaissance

Alfred Lela

Two bronze medals won by the Albanian team at the Paris Olympics have turned into another golden occasion for the government's public narrative.

 Edi Rama, like King Midas, was presented as the one who turns everything he touches into gold. As with the first European and the second of the National Team, in a tale out of misery, the prime minister is the first in line to connect even the most modest achievements with the new wind of his government.

This modest success, even lower than Kosovo, a new Fringe state, is not only not due to governing policies, but more than that explains their absences.

Rama, his ministers and the mayor of Tirana were primarily interested in passing any success of Albanian athletes under the government's laurels. All the government's interest in sportsmen with national or international performance started and ended with a photo opp (a publicity photo).

Even a 'rewarding' initiative for medal-winning athletes, Rama took in imitation of the Greek model, offering military ranks. Thus, Rama turned Albania's few athletes with records into his subordinates, political showcases, and propaganda tools.

In a diabolical move he managed to control them twice: first by parading them on camera as government propaganda appendages, and second by lining them up.

Exactly those boys and girls whose career goal is to reach the first place, KM moved them to the second place. At first he himself arrives, he is the record holder.

This deep temptation to turn everything that happens in Albania into propaganda has also served us a paradox: two Chechen/Russian athletes are colonels of the Albanian army, a NATO country.

We just have to pray that his delusions don't come out and tell us that Edi, in addition to other successes, achieved the most unimaginable: he made Russia a member of NATO!

These are, of course, nothing more than symbolism, but there is nothing more dangerous than a government that is more concerned with the veneer of symbolism than with the country's growth policies.

The fact that we hear for more than a year about the golden number of 10 million tourists, and nothing about the reality of the tourism industry in Albania, is a fresh case of this philosophy.

But the Albanian left, from "Enver's volunteers" to those of Ed (the patronageists), projects the moral rust of the past into the luster of the present.

When you hear them today returning to Philo-Chechnya, you remember their former phobia for "Chechens".

More precisely, their compatriots from the north of Albania, embedded in the suburbs of Tirana, mainly in the area around Kamza. The derogatory name for these 'athletes of free movement' in their country was exactly what they are praising today. In this term, "Chechens", two political opponents are packaged. One insider, the leader of the anti-communist opposition (later President Sali Berisha), and one outsider, the people of the province of Chechnya who, in the 1990s, became a staunch opponent of Russia in the struggle for independence.

For the left of Tirana, born from Yugoslavianism and nourished by Stalinism, Russia's opponents could only deserve a pejorative name. Thus the term Chechen became a tool of contempt to explain, not only the internal reclamation after the fall of the communist caste, but also the post-Soviet nostalgia on the external plane.

Today, the term "Chechen" is sugarcoated, due to the need of the complex to polish a place for themselves in the chronicle of the day.

History doesn't matter.