ALBANIA LETTER:The Balkan country's first female prosecutor has a track record that would put the Irish legal system to shame
IN THE political satire Wag the Dog, Robert De Niro’s character – a political fixer – suggests a plan of going to war with Albania to divert attention from an American presidential indiscretion, on the grounds that nobody knows anything about Albania.
As a small Balkan country with a proud but complex history, perhaps the only thing that galls Albanians more than anonymity is the cliche of being referred to as genetically criminal.
According to Transparency International, Albania is one of the most corrupt countries in the western Balkans, in what is an admittedly rather full field.
Yet, when setting out to meet Albania’s first female prosecutor general, Ina Rama, you get the distinct impression, from the enormous amount of media attention she has had, that you are about to meet a person who could smash that negative Albanian stereotype into smithereens.
Prosecutor Rama’s track record would put the Irish legal system to shame. Her performance speaks for itself: the scalps of two of her own prosecutors, charged and removed from office for accepting bribes; and the request for removal of immunity from two sitting ministers, in order to prosecute them.
The first immunity case concerned the misappropriation of €120 million of state funds in the tendering of a road to Kosovo. The other high-profile case involved a massive explosion resulting in the deaths of children who were illegally employed at a munitions depot situated just outside the capital, Tirana.
You could imagine that justice might begin to prevail in Albania – were it not for the fact that both high-profile ministerial cases have been dismissed by the supreme court for “procedural reasons”.
The final straw, in terms of the government’s tolerance of their new prosecutor general, came when Rama attempted to call in a Bosnian businessman, Damir Fazlic, for questioning.
In spite of Fazlic’s reputed links to the region’s “energy mafia”, prosecutors were unable to apprehend him before he fled the country.
Only after a television expose in which the chief of police was filmed escorting Fazlic on to an aircraft did the ministry of the interior admit it had deployed the police in order to prevent Rama’s prosecutors from questioning Fazlic.
And the grounds given by the minister for obstructing the prosecutor general’s request for questioning? That the request was unconstitutional, because it was made by telephone.
In the ensuing debacle, the opposition accused close family members of both the prime minister, Sali Berisha, and the minister of foreign affairs, Lulzim Basha, of facilitating the sale of a Cyprus-based shell company.
The company, owned by Fazlic, had no assets, but was sold for €1.75 million – raising suspicions of money laundering.
All concerned have strongly denied any wrongdoing. The prime minister publicly described Fazlic as a “dear friend”.
Rama went from being a person whom the prime minister said “enjoyed the trust of the entire parliamentary spectrum” to being a “tool of the opposition”. Action to curtail the scope of her work followed swiftly.
When I asked Rama how this pressure has affected her family, she said her mother collects all her press clippings, but when her father asks how work is going she always says: “‘I am good’.
“But sure, sometimes I am lying, because I know he cannot help me. I believe in doing good things but maybe I am one of the few.”
The prosecutor general is not without allies. The US ambassador to Albania, John Withers, has been unstinting in his public and vocal support of the prosecutor general’s work, declaring: “When the history of Albanian democracy is written, there will be a special chapter in it for people like Ina Rama.”
Unfortunately, it seems the challenges faced by the prosecutor general are symptomatic of a deeper malaise in Albanian democracy. A recent EU parliamentary initiative failed to encourage Albania’s main political parties to reach an agreement to overcome the political gridlock that has plagued the country for almost a year.
In a joint statement, commissioner for enlargement Stefan Füle and high representative for foreign affairs Catherine Ashton said Albania stood at a crossroads on its path towards EU integration, and warned that “a range of domestic challenges require political courage”. Sadly, one of the people with exactly that political courage has been severely curtailed.