When everything is traded, death wins in the end.

Alfred Lela

In a high court of the Republic, just after noon, on the first day of the week, in the heart of the capital, an Albanian — surely driven by despair and his own helplessness — decides to draw strength from a gun, to solve what neither the state, nor the courts, nor even God Himself has solved for him.

He surrenders, and with that act, a judge’s life comes to an end.

The surrender is not his alone, but everyone’s, in part.

And it will continue this way, for as long as judges, criminals, the dispossessed, the powerless, the exploited, the resigned, the MPs, the narco-traffickers, the politicians, and the portal-journalists all move within the same labyrinth — one without boundaries, without rules, only traps.

He who is the quickest, the slyest, the most shameless, wins — by deceiving the other and taking something, preferably everything.

Today, in the media, we encounter fragments of decrypted SkyECC conversations, where the brother of a newly elected government MP chats with killers. The MP in question is a writer, and before these transcripts came to light, someone might have said: “Well done, Rama! He takes writers and makes them MPs!”

But the motive was elsewhere — not in literature.

This, then, is the erasure — as if with a rubber — of all boundaries. A nightmare where one cannot tell the first from the second; where the criminal and the parliamentarian are separated only by a line on a CV, because the same cars, with the same license plates, are sometimes driven by one, sometimes by the other, and sometimes by both together.

Without that separation, the system, authority, the state, reputation — all vanish first, melting away like fat on a dog’s back. What remains is chaos, and the fragile hope that we won’t be hit by a stray bullet, a ricochet meant for someone else, a whispered bismillah at the start of another fearful day in a homeland turned dystopian — a society without safety, because its caretakers have become merchants.

Some things must never be traded.
And when everything becomes a matter of trade, life itself loses its value.

This is what happened today — at the Court of Appeal.

Once more, the image of Christ must be recalled: “Drive the merchants out of the temple!”