After the "Cuban Package", Rama in Theth with the "Mountain Package"

Alfred Lela

One season after he brought down both the guesthouses they had built and the promises he had made to them, Edi Rama climbed back up to Theth, the village that is still licking the wounds inflicted by the organized assault carried out by that very same prime minister. Much has changed since then, however.

Rama, who flattened the labor and livelihood of dozens of families in Theth with excavators and bulldozers, now finds his own political fortunes darkening in the face of a wave of protests that is slowly entering its second month: it seems that the flamingos of Narta are taking revenge on behalf of the eagles of Theth.

This time, Rama no longer has at his side Majlinda Koçeku, the area's MP, herself a daughter of Shala (Theth belongs to the historic bajrak of Shala). Apparently repulsed by his stance on Narta, her dissatisfaction, at least according to her own account, actually began with Theth a year ago.

Instead of the area's elected representative, Rama had surrounded himself with a sort of United Colors of Benetton: beginning with Benet of the Becaj clan and a few other wanderers who spoke as though they were from Theth simply because their wives happened to come from the village.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history could not help but be reminded, watching Rama's scenes in Theth yesterday, of the Communist officials who, after 1946, would travel into these mountains to register the population—or, more accurately, to place them under political surveillance. Their sense of superiority (or perhaps contempt) toward the highlanders manifested itself even in changing their ancestral Catholic surnames, replacing them with local toponyms or mocking labels improvised on the spot by the Party's emissaries.

Yesterday, Rama and Benet looked like reincarnated Communists—version 2.0 of the officials of 1946—pretending they had come to put Theth in order. Yet the more likely outcome is that they will disfigure, perhaps for the last time, that village which seems as though God Himself placed it in that valley, in the palm of His hand, so that it might reflect Him to the world—not reflect the world, and certainly not the world of Rama and Beci.

In this sense, Rama is committing one final betrayal of Northern Albania. He is throwing at its feet the so-called "Mountain Package," which, apart from being questionable in its objectives, may prove even more damaging in its consequences. The North, despite having less land than other parts of the country, has historically been the only region free from disputes over borders, land ownership, and pastures—and for reasons deeply rooted in tradition.

Every resident, every family, has preserved through generations—not on paper, but in collective memory—the boundaries of its own land and that of its neighbors. It is this shared understanding that has sustained social peace. The "Mountain Package" risks introducing an entirely unknown source of conflict into these regions. It threatens to transplant into Albania's mountains the chaos, disputes, and land grabbing that for years have plagued the Western Lowlands and the country's coastline.

This may well become Edi Rama's final gift to the North, one among many bitter gifts he has bestowed since coming to power in 2013. It could usher in the North's second criminalization. After the "Package of the Bandits"—filling Parliament with gangsters from Gegnia, from Kruja to the northern border—he is now proposing the "Mountain Package": the opening of a Pandora's box, the creation of a conflict where none has existed until now.

Anyone who has read the reports of the Jesuit missions in Albania from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will recognize in Rama the same attitude displayed by Ottoman administrators toward the Catholic regions of Albania.

Of course, one cannot simply call Edi Rama a Turk, since he presents himself as many things—and, at the same time, as nothing at all.