Here’s why Albania is a failed state

With many eyes on Macedonia’s political situation which has been made worse by foreign interventions from the EU and NATO which both support the Tirana Platform which would effectively destroy the unity of the Macedonian state, internal events in Albania itself may soon jeopardise stability in the region.

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Protests throughout Albania have been going on for months as the main opposition Democratic Party and other activists have called for the Prime Minister Edi Rama to resign prior to elections scheduled for 18 June, 2017 . Many want a technocratic government to oversee the process, having lost all faith in democracy.

We have reached an impasse wherein self-proclaimed Albanian democrats no longer trust that their country is democratic. Impartial observers have been warning of this for years.

One can tell that the genie is fully out of the bottle when even the neo-liberal Financial Times admits that half of Albania’s GDP comes from drug sales and cultivation.

The truth of the matter is that Albania is a narco-state, built on top of a mafia state where the illegal drugs trade, organ trade, weapons trade, human trafficking and blatant corruption are the guided forces of business in both the private and public sectors.

The fact that this impoverished, broken state has imperialist ambitions, threatening to annex neighbouring states including parts Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro is not only illegal and irresponsible but also deeply frightening.

Many in Albania are openly calling for a ‘Greater Albania’ which would encompass the sovereign territories of each aforementioned nation. But as it stands, Albanian leaders cannot even run the state that they have according to its current borders.

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A lengthy report from a US based anti-corruption website, citing a variety of mostly western sources has found that corruption exists at almost every level of the Albanian state, including in private business dealings.

The EU is all rather confused about this. Albania’s corrupt mafioso elite are staunchly pro-EU and Albania is an enthusiastic member of NATO.

Some realists in the EU however realise that Albania’s cringe-worthy levels of corruption would be an economic and security disaster for the EU. More worryingly though, many EU officials prefer to look the other way or simply lie about the dire situation in order to continue promulgating a narrative that Albania is an EU country in the making.

While the EU itself is deeply corrupt, Albania’s corruption is far more ‘old school’ in the sense that money talks and when it doesn’t, the bullets do the talking.

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Albania’s terrorist proxies and violent separatists threaten to break up Macedonia and violate Serbia’s territorial integrity. When one realises that these people cannot control their own country, it puts things into perspective. The perspective is in a word: grim.