By Lorenc Vangjeli
Prison has a strange alchemy. Someone can enter a cell as a man and come out as a rabbit. Others go in as rabbits and come out as men. The case of the mayor of Tirana does not belong to either extreme. Veliaj is serving a long pretrial detention, into which he was placed as a local administrator, an administrator of a pole of power whose force, weight and scale he himself had not managed to understand or wield even while he was free.
Chances are that when the day comes for him to leave the cell, whenever that is and however long the restriction of his freedom lasts, should he be found guilty of a possible offence, Veliaj has a good chance of kicking off his prison slippers and putting on a politician’s suit. Transformed from a local administrator into a wounded politician and, probably, into an administrator of a new pole of power on the left.
It was enough for an ambiguous congratulatory status on the victory of the Student List in the Belgrade elections for the parallels with Tirana to become very visible, and for his break with Rama to stop being a conspiracy theory and a vain curiosity.
After the constitutional court ruling that still formally recognises him as mayor in office, Veliaj has made some timid shows of force, as if calling out to be heard on appeal: I am here, and count me in too! Staff movements in the Municipality, with some exceptions of the ingratitude he should have spared himself, are appointments or returns of his crouching, frightened dependants, tamed by his chains.
In Tirana’s tripolar power structure of government, opposition and SPAK, Veliaj saw in the student protest the creation of a fourth centre of power. A centre that was still timid: when it was massive and violent it had no leading head, even though there were thousands of angry heads on the boulevard, and it was vague in strategy, even when it articulated itself in ultimatums and was declared an enemy en bloc by the entire political class. Starting with Rama and Berisha. With the latter, Veliaj has the traditional enmity; with the former, he has quietly declared a hostile relationship. And since the protest has these two strong men as its enemies, Veliaj presents himself at least as its ally, with the instinctive pragmatism that makes the enemy of my enemy a friend.
Mayor Veliaj does not need to have his people on the boulevard. Nor is it necessary for them to accept him among them. What matters for the boulevard is to understand that Veliaj has given up the valium with which he kept alive his hopes of being tried in freedom. At first he placed his hopes in Edi Rama. He wanted to believe that the prime minister, whom he called “my brother”, was far from the hands that were throwing him onto the grill like sacrificial meat. He considered the rivalry with former deputy prime minister Balluku and a band of socialists, some of them also his friends, to be the cause of his misfortune. At the same time as he was darkening his first days in the cell, servile socialist sarcasm was raising champagne toasts only a few hundred metres away, celebrating precisely his imprisonment.
But an unbelievable whim of fate, which knocks you down just when you think you are completely on top, using the instrument of SPAK, dramatically changed the fortunes of Mrs Balluku herself. The former deputy prime minister was caught in a spiral of accusations even heavier than those against him, and only Rama was left on the field. Mentioned less and less in Veliaj’s statuses, Edi Rama officially remains his “brother” again, but in another kind of brotherhood: one is Cain and the other Abel. One up and the other down. One alive and the other dead.
Perhaps this is exactly what Veliaj himself had in mind when he insistently sought the prime minister’s authorisation to classify as a state secret the order transferring him to a prison 120 kilometres from his office, and his two minor children. Next to convicted murderers and in almost total isolation. But this is the least important detail of the story. Sooner or later someone in the General Directorate of Prisons will be made a scapegoat and will go down like a bucket into a well for abuse of office. Seven years in prison is what SPAK is seeking as retribution.
Veliaj will also add this detail as another decoration of victimhood in his status as a criminal defendant and politically persecuted man when he appeals to Strasbourg. The essence of the story lies elsewhere. An essence that can only come to life if Veliaj accepts that heroic expression of the Albanian language which regards prison as the house of men. In this case, first and foremost to himself, he would prove that he entered the cell as a fragile local administrator and will emerge into freedom as a wounded politician.