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OP-ED

Neo-mountaineering and Neo-security

Politiko 2026-06-17 20:16:49

Alfred Lela

Marjana Koçeku and Frrok Çupi are two people with very different stories. This is not the place to compare their respective journeys in life and work. For this article, it is enough to look at the relationship each has built with the civic protest movement of recent weeks.

Koçeku has taken two significant steps over the last two days: she has broken with the Socialist Party and declared war on what she calls the “Bajras” — the powerful clan-gang from Shkodra, widely regarded as Prime Minister Edi Rama’s economic and electoral allies in the city.

Çupi, meanwhile, has written two articles. In one, he attacks the Catholic Church and its clergy; in the other, he attacks the Ghegs. Curiously, he is himself both a Gheg and a Catholic.

In his anti-Church piece, he draws from a repertoire one might expect from a former journalist of Zëri i Popullit, who has been publicly accused of having served as an agent of the communist-era Sigurimi. The article resembles less a commentary than a freshly raised pickaxe against churches and places of worship, carrying the dark legacy of the period when Enver Hoxha ordered them demolished or converted into warehouses. Deep within Frrok’s subconscious, now in old age, have surfaced those old mutilations that people try to hide but can never fully suppress. It is precisely what the far left traditionally embodies: the absence of enduring values, concealed behind globalist themes expressed through terms that promise everything while meaning little, emptied of substance through overuse.

In his second article, Frrok turns against the Ghegs, fanning the same fire he enthusiastically helped ignite at Koha Jonë in 1997, when he warned of a “northern threat to the rebellious south.” At the time, amid gunfire and civil collapse, such cries could perhaps be understood. But where exactly is this conflict between north and south today — except in his own mind? For what reasons? Under what motives? Where is the actual conflict?

Following Rama’s own quasi-Enverist obsession with “foreign enemies,” Frrok has recalibrated the theory of the internal enemy: the Gheg and the priest of socialist-realist films — characters which, according to him, were apparently not portrayed inaccurately after all. There are no facts supporting such claims, no visible signs of any such threat. But those who have decided to cloak themselves in disgrace in old age rarely concern themselves with reason.

Marjana, on the other hand, has chosen to stand alongside the Catholic Church, the only religious institution to have taken a public position on the protests — and not for the first time on sensitive social issues. Frrok, meanwhile, has brought forth from the darkest corners of his conscience the crippled remnants of his communist self and turned his anger against those who dared tell Edi Rama, on behalf of believers and ordinary Albanians alike: “Stop for a moment.”

Frrok and Marjana are not merely two individual stories. They represent two standards. Two Albanias are colliding at the gates of protest. Two mindsets are struggling for legitimacy in an age increasingly defined by the refusal to recognize any legitimacy or authority at all. This is the most fertile ground for the contemporary left, and it is precisely in the sulfurous atmosphere of such terrain that Frrok and those like him rise.

They are echoes from a distant past, hostile both to faith in God and faith in man.

Today, those in the square and those watching from their sofas face a choice: Marjana, who leaves the Socialist Party and moves toward the Citizens’ Alliance; or Frrok, who sacrifices himself as a stone laid upon the grave of what can only be called the Alliance of Filth.