16.07.2021 – 20:23
Just two days after Prime Minister Rama made fun of Greece, saying that our country would be accepted in Europe, when Turkey took over the EU presidency, the Turkish ambassador in Tirana spoke from the lake park, for an awareness of the Albanian authorities about the danger of the Gülenists.
These two episodes, spanning a small temporal and geographical distance, testify to essentially two different approaches to the same problem.
Increasingly, Erdogan’s Turkey is treating Albania as one of the empire vilayets, where the implementation of the will of the high gate is indisputable. This was done by the chief diplomat Yörük, in front of the strange memorial of the victims of the July 15 coup, which the Albanian state has generously erected on the edge of the artificial lake.
In accordance with official policy, he once again blamed the summer coup of five years ago on the followers of cleric Gülen, expressed regret that the organization that Ankara labels as FETO continues to be present here, but also underlined the ‘positive news’. that Albanian institutions are already aware of it.
Precisely to disguise this awareness imposed by the neo-Ottomans, whenever Edi Rama is in the West, he chooses the way he has best mastered, that of jokes and flirtations, to sketch his occult relationship with Erdogan.
The crucial problem is this: none of the Western democracies has accepted as evidence the organizing role of the Gulenists in the July 15, 2016 coup. They have given protection, political asylum or refused to extradite to Turkey those whom the Islamic regime – the conservative has labeled them as coup plotters.
All writers, professors, intellectuals, activists who managed to escape to escape the cells of a country where the rule of law has died, are not considered terrorists by Albania’s western allies.
And here lies the contradiction that Edi Rama seeks to hide. Because inside the country, under Erdogan’s hoof, he has chosen a different stance from other EU or NATO members.
As early as the spring of 2018, during a television interview, he described the Gulenists as a dangerous organization that sought to overthrow by force and with weapons a power elected by vote. Given this conviction, he has slowly turned it into the official policy of his government.
Many schools belonging to the Gülenist movement have been forced to change owners. Students and staff of Mehmet Akif College are witnessing some reprisals by the police, the financial authorities, and even the occult persuasion by the judiciary to close their schools.
There are many cases of businessmen who have been excluded from public competitions or whose winning tenders have been canceled, because the bad feature of being a fan of Fehtulla Gülen has come to them from Ankara.
Even more flagrant at this point is the extradition, contrary to the laws of the Albanian state, of a citizen who was denied the right to political asylum, even though his life was endangered in his country. In early 2020, Harun Çelik, was handed over to the Turkish secret service in Rinas, a case that was denounced by the UN human rights commissioner, who raised concerns that there was a secret agreement between Tirana and Ankara on these types of extraditions.
So these cases are enough to prove that official Tirana is applying under Erdogan’s pressure a different standard from that of Western countries where the rule of law operates.
It does not matter if Rama does this to get more vaccines, to raise funds for a hospital, for the sake of the joint airline he has with Erdogan, to feed the delirium as a mediator in global diplomacy that he expects to come from the Turkish president, or simply that the latter has made it a habit, every four years, to support him in elections.
The truth is that under the sultan’s hoof, Albania was forced to use a double standard unacceptable to its western partners. And precisely for this, we are obliged to hear the rude truths from the Turkish ambassador in Tirana.
Because when he talks about Erdogan, especially outside the borders, our Prime Minister is obliged to use a complicated language, where the reality is hidden behind humor and jokes, such as that of EU accession, when he is led by Turkey.
