The noise of the government supporters: Safeti the victim, Alma the aggressor

Alfred Lela

The government propaganda machine is full-time even as the sweltering summer calls people to shade and hibernate. A week on from now, its main effort has been changing the direction the narrative takes about the "Gjici" scandal. Accepting it as impossible to counterattack because of the clear and undeniable facts, the socialists have shifted the effort to change the direction of the debate.

All focused on one point: the mayor of Kukes was blackmailed. So, let's not talk about legal or ethical violations, abuse of office, or corruption, but about a well-prepared scheme that includes people from the opposition and crime coming together to overthrow a 'knight of right and good' like Safet Gjici.

First, the other character in the video is to be discredited. The intention is clear: to talk about the woman's dishonesty and not the state official's. This effort gains speed in a society where, as in Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville, 'there is a woman to blame.' In Albania, women are easy targets. It is to be expected in a society whose persona sexuae is manifested and represented by the interrupted sexuality of many men.

The woman in the video sometimes appears as a recidivist, sometimes as a journalist, sometimes as a private detective, and all the contexts in which she appears carry negative overtones. A repeater (she's a whore... that's what she does), a journalist (several erotic videos of them have circulated), a private detective (why, is this a woman's job?!).

Context and language are deliberately colored with contradictory situations for the characters to switch places. Safet becomes the victim and Alma the aggressor.

The logic does not hold, and a woman cannot be punished for being 'free.' A state official, on the other hand, is not free to do whatever he wants in government offices, and especially to ask for sex, which is facilitated by his title and decision-making attribute (let's face it: in a pub, in Glasgow, a redhead will not surge towards him).

The chronology of the video belies those who choose this narrative and cast the woman as a disgrace. In the case of erotic blackmail, from which she expects to derive a benefit, the woman would have the conversation about the possible benefit (the contract to sterilize the stray dogs) before the sex and not after it, as is the case here. She can be accused of nymphomania but not blackmail. Recording the sexual act is undoubtedly abuse, but not aggression.

The defenders of Gjici, people from the government, analysts, or patronagists, must face the counter question: Which would they choose between two cases of abuse? That of the woman who reveals the 'face' of an official (but also her own), or of the official and their supporters, who have the forms and means to hide their wrongdoings?

This is the discourse level of the problem, but the political level seeks to hide beneath. In this regard, the Government and its proxies are persecuting this woman politically. Instead of taking responsibility for the scandal, which is not the first among SP mayors, the Government organizes the lynching of one of the protagonists in the video, "forgetting" the main one.

Safet Gjici is not the victim of that recording or the episode. He is a complete and willful participant, and the ease with which he acts, as if he were in the bedroom, does not allow him to be declared a victim.

No one is a victim in their habitat, will, and freedom. Whoever acts freely from the instruments of freedom must also receive vindication.