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Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Prime Minister Edi Rama delivered a speech to students at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Rama stated that Albania, during the communist period, was a North Korea in the middle of Europe.
He added that the country is preparing to join the EU and called on students to carry forward the European spirit.
“ I was born, I grew up half my life in Cold War Albania, isolated from the West’s persuasion. A North Korea of Europe. For me Europe was not real, it was a myth. Imagine a dark sky and suddenly a faint star catches your eye. Europe was a constellation that we saw through a hazy screen.
Then came 1989, but Albania did not join the celebration. The Berlin Wall fell, but our wall remained intact. Ours told us: 'We are not like them, we are different. We are the real ones, they are fake, degenerate.' In 1990, thousands of desperate people in Tirana scaled the walls of the embassies to leave. The transition that followed was messy, painful and often chaotic.
A dictatorship can collapse within a week, but democracy takes decades. I will never forget an episode with Jusuf Vrioni, a translator of Ismail Kadare in France, who spent years in prison during communism. In one of our conversations, I said to him: 'Jusuf, why don't you seem happy about the democracy that has come to Albania?'. With a smile, he said: 'No, democracy has not come to Albania, freedom has. Democracy is more than freedom, it is a state of law'. I often think of Jusuf, he was right. Thank God, the EU exists , "said Rama.
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