When the government faces protests and scandals, it chooses to blame Iran. But the hybrid war alibi cannot cover the deep crisis of public trust nor the failure to implement its own strategies.
Prime Minister Edi Rama complained while attending the EU Summit for the Western Balkans that Iran had attacked Albania and that the country was facing a hybrid war. While he did not say it directly, the prime minister hinted that the protests that have been going on for 6 days in front of his office were also influenced by this war by a known enemy.
But while pages or profiles on social networks connected to Iran, or that distribute Iranian propaganda in Albanian and other languages, which BIRN has identified earlier, are using the protest to disinform and have fabricated fake news mainly with anti-Semitic content, the massiveness of the latter is hardly inspired by the Revolutionary Guards nor by Homeland Justice’s Telegram profiles.
Three or four anti-Semitic banners or young people who believe in conspiracy theories do not make the protest a product of hybrid war. But on the other hand, they point out firstly the great crisis of trust between the citizens and the ruling majority and secondly the failure of the latter in the plan to adapt a strategy for protection from foreign interference that was voted at the end of the last legislature.
The first and most important reason is easily understood in the protest. If a 30-year-old chooses to believe an anonymous Instagram page that the prime minister is selling the country, the prime minister and the majority should ask themselves what they have done to be seen as land sellers. And the answers are in the protest where the participants count corruption scandals of the government, one more shocking than the other. Incinerators, AKSHI, expensive roads without standards, lack of medicines in hospitals, problematic education and basic shortages such as water and a multitude of stories that some live on their backs, some see them happen.
For days now, the Prime Minister has been committed to clarifying the “project”, which, as he says, on the one hand does not exist, but on the other hand, it will bring billions from unknown sources. But for more than two years in a row, from the moment the idea was thrown until Pishë-Poro Narta was surrounded by barbed wire, Albanians received information about it through foreign media.
So “secret” and so “hidden” was the project that none of these planners went to spend an hour explaining it to the residents of Zvrnec. Even when the caravans that accompanied Ivanka Trump with architects and investors passed there first, no one stopped in the village, which regardless of whether or not they have the right to the properties, is directly affected by the alleged investment.
For two years in a row, aside from renderings that talked about 10,000 housing units and a marina inside the shallow lagoon, no one sat down with the environmental organizations and activists who spend their days counting birds in the lagoon and tracking turtle nests on the dunes and who were shocked by these ideas. (Now Rama says that these plans that Jared Kushner presented to Bloomberg are not true).
For months, through requests for information and questions, journalists from a variety of media tried to learn about the plans and received mostly long messages about trade secrets, personal data and excuses denying access to information.
This silence and mystery continued until the day when the excavators flattened the dunes and the protected area was surrounded by barbed wire even though there was nothing inside that needed to be guarded with security measures like a prison yard. And when this happened the government did not go to communicate with those who were concerned. The first thing he did was lie and relativize. “There is no site”, local officials and those of the territory protection told BIRN on the phone, when they were asked after the environmentalists’ denunciation. “It is private property,” said Rama, when barbed wire surrounded beaches and natural monuments that the law recognizes as inalienable public property.
For its part, the company that received the permit was hidden offshore with shareholders below 25%, fixed so as not to be declared. They even tried to stay hidden even when their presence was clear and the documents revealed that there were many controversial characters with them.
When a mob of toughs, dressed in black and posing as security guards employed by the company, took hostage, beat and dragged one of the village protesters for no reason, the first reaction of the police was a lie. “They escorted him,” said the police. “He was violent,” the police said. Thousands of citizens who saw this happen on social networks reacted immediately in waves of comments, which beyond language proved the loss of faith. Televisions with national licenses and the public one were silent in the meantime about everything that was happening.
But it didn’t end here. When anger erupted in the streets, along with conspiracy theories, the government did not apologize or share information. Instead, it launched a hybrid war of its own. As if the thousands of commenters who attacked the pages of activists and opposition politicians who supported the protest were not enough, MPs and government spin-doctors on the spot created fake protesters and buses coming from Greece. They used AI photos and surveillance cameras to intimidate citizens into not protesting. Labeling them practically as traitors and opponents of the development for which, apart from the barbed wire show that shows the date, there is neither a project nor any other information.
Media close to the government and ironically also those close to the opposition, which were silent about the protest in its first two days, were used and are being used to attack the protesters. These are labeled with all sorts of names from TV studios by people who haven’t even bothered to talk to any of them.
Now while this was happening, that is, from the beginning of the siege, until the attacks on the media with national licenses against the protest, the fake news spread on social networks by those profiles that have been sharing Iran’s propaganda in Albanian for years or the massification of these products in foreign languages, was forgotten by the government and the majority.
The same as it turned out to BIRN during the monitoring that the strategy approved with fanfare “against Foreign Interventions and Disinformation” had been forgotten. The Assembly of Albania, controlled in the overwhelming majority by the socialists and the Prime Minister who were tasked in the strategy to set up the mechanisms to protect themselves from exactly this kind of war that Rama and his deputies complain about and which they want to use as a reason behind the protest, had done zero work in the first 6 months after the adoption of the strategy to put it into practice.
A zero that translates into a lack of dedicated structures “for the identification and response to foreign information interventions and disinformation, provided for in the Strategy as an inter-institutional coordination mechanism”. The first consequence of this is certainly the citizens, who, in addition to being lied to by the government, are also misinformed by propaganda networks. The second consequence is representatives of the majority who look ridiculous when they shout that we are in a hybrid war and sometimes blame the neighbors and sometimes Iran.
In the end, this inability of the government to protect the country from disinformation, while it spends unaccountably on the production of propaganda and media control, to which it has also given strategic investments, is just one more reason to protest./BIRN
