On the 15th anniversary of the tragic events of 21 January, a commemorative gathering was held today at the Prime Minister’s Office in honor of the four Martyrs of the Fatherland, in the presence of their family members and relatives. In his address, Prime Minister Edi Rama emphasized that the need for justice for this grave tragedy remains unchanged, and that the justice missing for 21 January will be delivered, despite the long delays.
Afterwards, Prime Minister Rama, together with the families of Ziver Veizi, Hekuran Deda, Aleks Nika and Faik Myrtaj, laid flowers and paid tribute at the site where four plaques immortalize their memory on the “Dëshmorët e Kombit” Boulevard.
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Fifteen years ago, here in this building, an armed horde had barricaded itself inside, a mixture of the regular force of the Republican Guard and the gang of the Prime Minister’s notorious paramilitaries.
The building had been reinforced with barbed wire, stretched everywhere behind that ugly fence and the iron railings that had surrounded the Prime Minister’s Office ever since the armed attack of 14 September 1998, in which some of those barricaded inside the Prime Minister’s Office on 21 January 2011 had also taken part.
The man placed by the people in the Prime Minister’s office to lead Albania had issued the call for a response with a bullet to the forehead against the protest of the united opposition of the time. I recall that as we, together with Pandeli Majko and several other friends, were crossing the boulevard bridge to come here in front of the building, an armored vehicle appeared on the horizon and a wave of tear gas was released over people’s heads before the protest had even begun, pushing us back towards Rinia Park. The turmoil provoked by that blind police charge against the protesters who were gathering turned the protest into a chaotic tangle between the demonstrators and the forces of order, ultimately forcing us to return to the party headquarters.
No witness on the scene, and later no video footage of the event, revealed anywhere the presence of even a single weapon among the protesters.
Meanwhile, thousands of live rounds were fired into the air by the security forces to restrain a crowd that was struck and drawn into physical conflict with them only because of the latter’s attempt to disperse the protest even before the extraordinary mass of protesters had fully gathered. But in any case, everything unfolded beyond the radius of any imaginable risk to this building.
And precisely when, after several hours, the crowd, significantly reduced on the boulevard, began to disperse entirely peacefully, the rifle barrels were lowered towards the bodies of the protesters and took four innocent lives, wounding several others as well: the fatal consequence of a criminal mind which, most likely, did not want to let the moment pass without showing political opponents and all Albanians that it truly killed.
God knows what that man said to himself, and what he said, who ordered it, and those who carried out that state crime, unprecedented for democratic Europe, scorching the souls of the parents, spouses, children, mothers and brothers of four young men who never returned home. But only God knows with what stone in my heart I come to this building when the daylight of 21 January breaks. It is a stone that grows bigger, and through a deep anguish it shows me how, with every 21 January, the disappointment of you, the dear family members of the four martyrs, becomes greater: your grief, your pain, your torment over the absence of justice.
Fifteen years without justice for 21 January are fifteen years of a great injustice, not simply for some, but over Albania and over the Albanian people. Whereas for you, the families of the martyrs of 21 January, fifteen years of this irreparable void are like an entire lifetime lived in anxiety, despair and humiliation. For those among you who were grandparents, the time has come to become great grandparents. For those who were children, the time has come to become parents. Meanwhile, for those four parts of your soul whose bodies have dissolved beneath the earth, the time has still not come to rest in peace, because neither the overturning of the old justice system, nor the emancipation of the judicial power, nor the collapse of the cult of impunity of individuals clothed in political power has been enough, to this day, to remove the shadow of injustice over 21 January.
Not even the chilling decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg more than two years ago has been enough for the special prosecutors of this Republic to have, by now, sought from the Special Court justice for the four state killings of 21 January, while in the name of justice and only justice, equal justice for all and equality of each person before the law, for a full six years we have done nothing but build walls and sing hosannas for them, and we pay them salaries far higher than our own and even higher than the President of the Republic, without even counting the patient and silent justification on our part of their sometimes deeply disturbing mistakes as “growth pains” of a new and vital institution for the rule of law.
But the problem is that whenever this day of tragic remembrance comes for you, the families of the four martyrs of 21 January, and for us, your friends and those who stand by you, the stones of resentment and sorrow carried by many in this country fall upon our backs. And they fall with full justification, because many feel betrayed in their endless expectation of justice, feel used in their faith in the new justice system, and feel scorned in their need for justice for 21 January to be delivered.
I fully understand them, and I do not claim reciprocal understanding from those who comment and accuse without restraint, pointing the finger at us and at me whenever it comes to the impunity that holds 21 January hostage.
But I tell you that I too feel just as empty in spirit and weak in position when I see that another year has passed and 21 January has returned, with the mocking shadow of this great injustice on its back.
Today, Albania’s prisons hold, at the expense of Albanian taxpayers, more pretrial detainees, meaning people thrown into cells without trial, than people convicted by a final court decision. And a large part of these detainees are victims of the shocking arrogance towards human freedoms and rights by prosecutors at every level.
A sad panorama of a violated justice system, where 21 January is the other side of the medal: the side of delayed justice. With the principal perpetrators of the tragedy having barely been summoned to be questioned for the first time only in recent months, after almost fifteen years, because fifteen years is what it becomes today.
I have known it and I have said it; it appears in many reports and interviews, from the very beginning: that 21 January, as a state crime, falls into that category of crimes for which history teaches us that justice takes a long time, but it never forgets. The history of state crimes is very interesting, because there is no state crime that remains unpunished; but on the other hand, the records of that history show very clearly how long punishment for a state crime takes. Yet even in the attempt to find consolation in the history of the democratic world when it comes to state crimes, I never imagined that the truth would be this: that the justice reform, of which 21 January, as our priority need for justice, was one of the sources of our energy and determination to carry that reform forward, and then the new, fully independent special structures created within that reform, would not bring a single real charge for 21 January, not even after fifteen years from the brutal killings on Albania’s main boulevard.
Unfortunately, for years even SPAK itself acted as if this case did not exist, even though it is the core case among the cases linked to abuses of political power in Albania, cases that SPAK deals with directly. Meanwhile, when it has needed to, it has investigated and brought charges without losing a single year for cases opened even with an anonymous letter, or it has consumed time and energy for years, holding hostage work of state interest and state employees, with cases so forced that satirical novels could be written about them, not final court convictions.
It was the tireless Mark Nika, the uncle of the late Aleks Nika, who took the core case of 21 January to Strasbourg and in this way placed the stone back on the grave where justice had locked 21 January after an ugly criminal farce, like that so called trial that was conducted regarding the killings. Only in that way, and only thanks to the persistence of the families of the victims through Mark, the file of the most brutal crime in the history of Albanian democracy was placed back by force on the table of SPAK, where Mark also submitted an authentic material of recorded voices from the scene, from the communication channels of the security forces, which he had kept hidden for years out of total distrust in the justice institutions and naturally out of fear that the material would “disappear”, as so many traces have “disappeared”.
The Strasbourg Court underlined very clearly, as violations of the European Convention, both the unjustified use of lethal force and the lack of a legitimate basis to defend the Prime Minister’s office with lethal force, calling on the authorities to clarify the event.
Hope dies last, but the need for justice never dies, even when hope dies. And although I do not know how many more years it will take for the end of the screaming injustice over 21 January, over your families, over everyone who wants justice for Aleks, Ziver, Hekuran and Faik, I know with certainty that the scream of this injustice will never be silenced, and that the need for the missing justice for this great tragedy will triumph, no matter what.
Allow me to close by sharing with you sincerely my truth regarding our responsibility towards the sacrificed lives of our four martyrs and our commitment to deliver justice for 21 January. We have carried that responsibility with high dignity, and we have in no way betrayed our solemn pledge, because by freeing justice from political power and by establishing SPAK and the Special Court, we have created, for the first time since the creation of the Albanian state, the conditions for the end of impunity by law, not by custom, through the organs of justice, not through the party and the government.
We will be here, and here we will welcome the placing of this cornerstone, because 21 January, as an open case, is “an open pit in the foundations of the new justice”, it is “an open pit” that strongly calls into question the moral integrity of its own justice; just as justice for 21 January is a moral foundation for the new justice and for the rule of law.
Thank you very much!
