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OP-ED

Edi Rama’s Kosovars in the Albanian government: Provocation or Obsession?

Politiko 2025-10-28 18:12:26
Edi Rama’s Kosovars in the Albanian government: Provocation or Obsession?

Alfred Lela


Edi Rama has done this before. He has a habit of recruiting Kosovo Albanians into his government — a political reflex disguised as regional vision. It began in 2018, when Besa Shahini, a Kosovar, was named Minister of Education. Soon after, in early 2019, Gent Cakaj became Foreign Minister. Before them, Rama had drawn Shkëlzen Maliqi into his advisory circle and relied on Baton Haxhiu as a kind of éminence grise for regional politics — and for his delicate tango with Aleksandar Vučić.

Neither Shahini nor Cakaj will be remembered for any defining reform, except for being the first Kosovars to serve in a Tirana government since the time of King Zog — or, at best, since the puppet cabinets of the Italian and German occupations.

More than a decade later, Rama has returned to his “Prishtina experiment.” But this time, it looks less like an attempt at pioneering and more like a calculated move: the recruitment of former collaborators of Albin Kurti.

He began by appointing Vlora Hyseni — once the head of Kosovo’s Intelligence Service under Kurti — as director of Albania’s own intelligence agency, SHISH. Days ago, Liburn Aliu, a former minister in Kurti’s government who resigned in August, was placed in charge of the Port of Durrës.

Both figures have now crossed the corridor from Kurti’s antechamber to Rama’s — the “brother-enemy” of the Prishtina prime minister. Both now occupy strategic posts: one with access to state intelligence secrets, the other managing the country’s largest port — a gateway that has long been shadowed by the traffic of cocaine from Latin America.

So what exactly is Rama after?

Is this a provocation aimed at Albin Kurti?
An attempt to suggest he’s finally putting a cork on the narcotics entering Durrës?
Or perhaps a way to gain new intermediaries for the city’s underworld networks?

Maybe it’s nothing more than his enduring mania — to make news rather than to make progress.

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