FLASH
Shkruar nga Roland Lami
SPAK does not caress the system out of love, but out of dependence because any institution that depends on a rotten government ends up smelling of it.
At first, SPAK was the great national dream. A disappointed people who no longer believed in God believed in the new prosecutors. The myth of the "light at the end of the tunnel" arose, as a kind of Saint John of Justice Reform who would atone for all the political sins of the transition.
But like every Albanian myth, this one was quickly consumed because reality turned out to be stronger than propaganda. Now the light at the end of the tunnel is simply a prosecutor starting an investigative process.
Of course, SPAK has been heroic in the fight against organized crime. With the help of the FBI, Europol, DEA and a handful of patient internationals, it has achieved concrete results, arrests, seizures, convictions. But gangs are easier, they have no immunity, they have no power, they do not give press statements. When the law faces weapons, it wins. But when it faces officials who hide behind the law, that's where justice begins to stutter.
While where hope was very high, SPAK has been left without allies. Local auxiliary structures, audits, high control, "anti-corruption" agencies sleep soundly. Here there is no Europol to bring evidence, nor the FBI to wiretap the minister. Here justice must investigate itself, in a system that feeds it with salaries, but suffocates it with fear. And any prosecutor who dares to touch the "big ones", quickly realizes that power in Albania is not hidden in basements, but in tenders.
Meanwhile, Brussels wants balance sheets, not justice. Every annual report needs figures, not closed files. The public wants something else, a moral guillotine. They want to see “someone” fall, not hear about an “investigation in progress.” And SPAK, sandwiched between the pressure of cold bureaucrats and the anger of the crowd, has remained the perfect sandwich of a structure that doesn’t know what it wants – justice or spectacle.
The result is already known, investigations that last longer than the governments' mandates, detentions that look like preliminary sentences, and files that are opened with a drum and closed with an archive. In this country, justice has learned to walk like a bureaucrat, slowly, carefully, for fear of disturbing the corrupt who pay their salaries. And when the people see that after so many years of "historic reforms" no one has yet been severely punished, they begin to think that perhaps the problem is no longer the lack of justice, but the excess of waiting.
From 70% public support, SPAK has fallen below 40%. Not because people have become more unjust, but because they have become more realistic. Now they know that justice is no longer a savior, but an official with a deadline for investigation.
Ultimately, SPAK is no longer a hero or a culprit, it is the clearest reflection of the society that created it. A country that seeks justice only for others, not for itself, cannot produce more than a careful, tired and procedurally honest justice. SPAK does not caress the system out of love, but out of dependence because any institution that depends on a rotten power ends up breathing its scent. And until the air changes, justice will continue to breathe with a mask, scaring the gangs, but not daring to touch the breathing of the system itself.
Lini një Përgjigje