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German media: Greece can block Albania's EU membership

2023-09-13 09:12:36Politikë SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
German media: Greece can block Albania's EU membership
Mitsotakis and Rama

The Prime Minister of Greece, Mitsotakis, is in a fight with the Albanian Prime Minister, Rama. But this could have great implications for Albania's foreign policy.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently traveled to Athens for talks, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis organized an informal Balkan summit attended by all but one of the region's heads of state and government. The Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama was not invited.

This is so far the most visible sign of a dispute between Athens and Tirana that has been simmering for three months and could also undermine Albania's hopes for swift progress in EU membership negotiations.

According to Tirana's interpretation, Greece's lack of respect for the independence of the Albanian judiciary is the cause of the conflict. According to Athens' interpretation, Albania's treatment of the country's Greek minority is the crux of the matter.

This minority constitutes almost 1% of the total population of Albania. One of its main representatives is the 51-year-old local politician Fredi Beleri, who was arrested on May 12 in the small town of Himara in the south of Albania, under Greek influence, on the charge of buying votes for the upcoming local elections.

An assistant of Beler is said to have tried to buy the votes of 14 voters for 50 euros each. Two days later, Beleri, already in custody, was elected mayor by the local population.

The "war" between Rama and his ancestors

However, he has not been able to take up his duties because Beler is now in custody for more than 3 months without his trial yet to begin. The Albanian legal deadline for the inauguration of the elected mayor has already passed.

Nothing reliable has been revealed yet regarding the evidence that the prosecutor has in this case. Athina talks about persecution for political reasons and describes the accusation against Beler as fabricated.

Rama objects that the judiciary in Albania is independent and that he has nothing to do with this issue.

His claim that he had nothing to do with this issue would be more convincing if Rama had not denounced Beler as "scum" or "illiterate" during the election campaign.

Such attention was surprising, since Himara does not even have 8,000 inhabitants and therefore is not "big" even by Albanian standards.

There are at least two answers to the question of why the prime minister of a state works so intensively against the candidate for mayor of a provincial city.

One is that Beleri joined a coalition around former Albanian president Sali Berisha in his election campaign.

He is also Rama's predecessor as head of government and is considered his enemy. A kind of proxy war took place between Berisha and Rama in Himare.

Is real estate the real cause?

The second and, at least according to Greek observers, the most important reason is that Himara is located on the so-called Albanian Riviera, a rapidly developing tourist region with fabulous beaches and sought-after building plots.

Rama is accused by Athens of needing a loyal political following in the Himarjot community so that he can pass on the most attractive properties to his political and business friends.

It is about quite a few properties of Greeks in the area, which Tirana seeks to remove from their owners using all legal tricks or has already seized them to hand over to strategic investors.

Unlike his staunch predecessor, Beleri will no longer allow this, has promised absolute transparency for future real estate transactions and wants to reinvestigate old dubious cases, according to the Greek side.

It suits the government that in the absence of a newly elected mayor, his ousted predecessor continues to have his say in Himara - because he belongs to the Socialist Party of Rama.

The Greek claim that the conflict in Himara is mainly about real estate and the expropriation of the Greek minority is not as likely to be raised in court as the claims of the Albanian public prosecution against Beler.

However, it has become clear, not least since Rama was not invited to Athens, that this is more than just a local farce. In mid-August, Mitsotakis sent the mayor of Athens, his nephew Kostas Bakogiannis, to participate in a protest for the rights of the Greek minority in Himara.

The government in Athens threatens, sometimes indirectly and sometimes more clearly, that talks on Albania's EU membership, which are still at the beginning, will be blocked if Beleri is not released. After Bulgaria's veto against North Macedonia, this would be the next blockade against a country in the process of EU enlargement in the region.

Rama is not worried at the moment. "It is important to wait for the court session in which the public prosecution will present its evidence", he said in a recent interview for the Athens newspaper "Kathimerini".

He pointed out that the Special Prosecution Against Corruption of Albania, which sued Beleri, was created at the request of the EU and is under its strict supervision. He could not be involved. Since the start of justice reform in his country, there has been only one government intervention in the process – and that was from the Greek government, Rama noted. / Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung


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