The story that today's portrait of Ilir Meta tells us about tomorrow

Alfred Lela

Today, Ilir Meta’s face revealed the prison he is living through. In a country accustomed to senior officials who, once jailed, suddenly fall ill, discover convenient medical conditions, file endless complaints, and occasionally obtain privileges, many had dismissed the former president’s letters from prison as staged episodes meant to secure leave, public sympathy, or judicial leniency.

As we saw today, Ilir Meta was not lying.

His portrait — where exhaustion was more visible than defeat, misunderstanding more present than evil — seemed to carry from the other world of prison a cry on behalf of those who are arrested before they are investigated, judged before they are tried, publicly lynched before they are convicted, and only later, perhaps, perhaps rehabilitated.

Meta has asked for two elementary, fundamental, and universal things that the Republic has failed to guarantee him: an open public trial, where he can defend himself publicly just as he has been publicly condemned, and normal prison conditions. We know the answer to both requests. As for the second, no answer was needed: it was written on the Munch-like face of the former president.

But Meta also carries a third decoration bestowed on him by the Republic he once served in several of its highest offices: an entirely unnecessary, theatrical, and violent arrest by the State Police.

By any measure, Ilir Meta has been subjected to two forms of violence: physical and symbolic. My impression is that the second has weighed more heavily on the former weightlifter who entered politics — a sport in which the higher one rises, the lower one risks falling.

Today he stands as one martyr among others of a justice reform that has produced mountains of case files, levels of pre-trial detention unseen elsewhere in Europe, contradictory political arrests, but no real solutions.

This should not surprise anyone. The reform itself was presented as the solution. History has repeated often enough that when one option is offered as the only solution, it eventually becomes the problem. And lest these lines be mistaken for a form of pessimistic antidote, it can be said without cynicism: no final solution is likely to come.

At best, there may be a kind of reckoning. And it will reach even those who designed the reform as a weapon against others and a shield for themselves.

Among the four principal leaders of Albania’s transition era, each in his own way has tasted punishment. Rama remains untouched. That is a matter of time and limits — neither of which can be erased by financial power, however much the prime minister may hope otherwise.

It is also a matter of place.

And Albania is precisely that place. Especially for those who claim to love it so much that, in their hatred, they would turn it upside down to build another Albania. From zero. In their own image.

Albania can not be reborn. At most, it can be reimagined.