To see or not to see?

Us and Them

The sofa is communist. The people, no.

Next week, on November 28th, is Independence Day in Albania. The public holiday marks the day in 1912 when the country became a state in its own right, finally breaking free from centuries of Ottoman rule. The day after, November 29th, is Liberation Day, which commemorates Albania's liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944. Bookended by an Italian occupation and a long communist dictatorship, the anniversaries mark two of many points in the little nation's long struggle for independence.

In our times, Albania is best known for tourism. Blogs and travel guides gush about its unspoilt countryside, quirky cities and friendly locals. They talk of the stunning beaches that make up the “Albanian Riviera”, the low prices and the lack of crowds compared to the holiday resorts of neighbouring Italy and Greece. Behind this talk lies a tacit awareness that “something” created an under-developed country in the heart of Europe desperate to welcome foreigners. But there's not much awareness of how Albania’s half a century under a uniquely isolationist form of communism made it the country it is today.

Despite producing a lot of travel writing and being widely published as a journalist, I have never succeeded in getting a piece into the travel pages of a newspaper, with their razor focus on the needs of the consumer. In 2006, I had a commission to write such a piece for The Times ahead of the publication of my book about Lebanon. Then the bombing started and the country's on-off war with Israel was on again. The travel editor was good enough to phone and explain: “I just can't”. Beirut as a lively Arab capital of the Arab world, the Levantine country which built the World Heritage site Baalbek … oh yes. Lebanon in all its put-upon, bombed-out, vibrant reality – the nightlife's great in times of war, by the way – no thanks.

This summer, when I took a box of books to a trading circle at a festival (aka the Tiny Travelling Bookshop) there was plenty of interest in Foxes and a little in Ghosts. But I didn't sell a single copy of Spyless in Tirana, a short travelogue aimed at getting under the skin of the place despite several people picking up the book with a surprised “I've been to Albania”. After a short discussion of their holiday, they put it back down. They didn't need to know any more about Albania, and perhaps didn't want their image of the place disrupted.

I get it. The places we choose for our holidays are a blank canvas, providing a precious opportunity to get back to the basics of being alive, appreciating the elements, food and cultivating a sense of ease and spaciousness.

I also don't get it. Foreign countries, like other people, offer us opportunities to learn about ourselves as humans, to witness and experience different ways of doing this life-on-earth thing. The people who populate them are both us and not-us, and their daily routines, customs and constructions testify to the creativity of the human species. When we spend time in such places, with their different geography and climate, we begin to understand why the people there work, rest and play in the way that they do. But there's always an element of mystery which can't be fully resolved and which exerts a pull of fascination. This is perhaps the impulse behind long spells of travel or time spent volunteering abroad.

Other countries offer us echoes, warnings, reflections and points of comparison. We come home thinking, perhaps at an unconscious level, “thank God” or “why on earth do we do X? We could be doing Y, like the humans of the Other Land”.

They're a mirror, or a lens – IF we want to look in or through it.

So here, briefly, are three things Albania brought into focus for me. Their choice has been governed by what's top-of-mind given where we are in Britain, the place from where I'm holding up my mirror-lens.

The mechanics of power

Albania introduced me to the idea of state capture. Previously, I'd understood the realm of the political in a more clear-cut way (the Middle East is another story, more of which shortly) where interests and actions were visible on the surface.

All around the capital of Tirana towers were springing up, huge constructions obviously out of keeping with a city whose low buildings afforded plenty of sky and mountain views. It was strange – nobody I spoke to liked the towers. And then, through interviews with an editor and an architect, a fuller picture emerged. The towers were a sign of the corporate capitalism that was driving government decisions. Building permits that flew in the face of planning regulations were granted so that projects funded by the taxpayer could benefit business.

Skanderbeg Square in Tirana

The main politician responsible for Tirana’s towers was the major of Tirana Erion Veliaj. Earlier this year, concerned about the disproportionate influence mayors were having over the lives of citizens in London and Bristol, I did some research into the connections of British mayors and the institutions to which they belong. The results horrified me, revealing a network of interests and influences extending far beyond those of the communities which had elected them. Crucially, it looked as if some of the policies the mayors were promoting – the big, life-changing ones – were being set by well-funded international organisations with their own agendas. So much for local democracy!

In the course of this research, I came across City Mayors, a think-tank which runs the 'world mayor prize'. The first prize this body awarded in 2004 was to Edi Rama, the current prime minister of Albania who was then mayor of Tirana. As mayor, Rama designed a masterplan for the city in which the construction of towers was central which Veliaj, a mayor belonging to the same party as Rama, has gone on to implement. In 2016, the masterplan was republished under the name Tirana 2030. There are plans for a congestion charge to “reduce private motor transport”. Now what does that remind me of?

I am writing this during the week in which British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tweeted what many have suspected for some time – the UK is effectively in a partnership with the corporate giant Blackrock which invests heavily in property and, along with Bill Gates, agricultural land.

Bill Gates explaining things before the Budget

With Blackrock CEO Larry Fink after the Budget

Different system, same behaviour

Part of my interest in Albania lay in its recovery from dictatorship and progress towards becoming a full-blown democracy. I visited Estonia, a country which had also emerged from communism in 1991, in the same year but which had developed fast, becoming a prosperous nation and a pioneer of things digital. Albania, by contrast, remained poor and riven by corruption.

It takes more than a transfer of power to change a country. Modern history is full of revolutions which haven’t delivered on their promise. Political systems only provide a framework; for lasting change the humans within them have to change.

The student-protestors I met in Tirana showed me this. Thirty years after the end of communism, the student accommodation was still squalid, overcrowded, without heating and with rats. Sometimes there was no running water. Meanwhile, tuition fees were rising and the government wanted to impose extra fees to resit exams. To add insult to injury, government reforms of higher education had redirected public funds to institutions in the private sector.

Mirela and Flavia at the student centre

The student protests got a lot of support from ordinary citizens who were quick to recognise that the corruption of times past was resurfacing in a new form. But the government responded with insults, claiming the protestors were “bad students” who didn't know how to study. Prime Minister Rama had even used his social media presence to publicly call them “dummies”.

Neither was he reluctant to use the sheer force of the state. The students took me to see the houses being demolished to make way for a new road. They had been built after the fall of communism when no planning laws were in place and their owners had embarked on the process to give them legal status. But the Prime Minister had cancelled the process and refused the homeowners compensation. Bulldozers came at daybreak and police threw tear gas into the houses to smoke out the residents. Journalists were forbidden entry to the site.

It was one of the strangest scenes I've ever seen, the piles of smoking rubble and half-demolished homes, their inhabitants picking out what they could. And yet it was also an echo of what I’d seen in another time and place: demolitions carried out by Israeli bulldozers.

“They’re coming back tomorrow to do the front”

The human spirit

The students were very young and had no background in politics. Yet they were focused and savvy enough to resist being manoeuvred into a corner by seasoned politicians. Compared to them, adults in Britain two or three times their age seem like babes in the wood as they continue to be manipulated by politicians and their associates. Where did the young Albanians get their understanding of the dynamics of power? Was some sort of epigenetic handing down from the struggles of Albanians who'd gone before them going on?

There's a mystery there.

Uran was another mystery. He was a former political prisoner who'd lost much of his adult life to the Hoxha regime, a quarter-century that would normally have been spent on building a career and raising a family. Uran spent twenty years in prison and then a spell in one of the remote villages that served as Albania’s answer to Siberia.

He'd gone to prison for writing poetry critical of the government, where he’d continued to write poetry. When I met him as an old but free man in Tirana he was still writing poetry. He loved to read Shakespeare and seemed delighted to meet a writer who had studied literature, a “Gentle Lady”, as he called me.

I would have liked to have spent more time with Uran in a way that's hard to explain. He had both fire and culture. Despite the sacrifices he’d made, he had lived his life well. He had risen to the challenges of the times when so many around him had given in to cowardice and wrongdoing. He was a full human being.

Using my mirror to reflect back what these encounters showed me, I think we badly need more of this spirit in Britain. We need the ability to see, as embodied by the Albanian students, and the ability to speak up and stand up, as exemplified by Uran. Writing in the week of the farmers' protest about the inheritance tax which threatens to put family farms out of business, I’m struck forcibly by the echoes of how, in its early years, Albania's communist regime took land and property from the people through a series of new laws and taxes.

Are we able to see the actions beneath the weasley words? Can we see how one thing connects to another to form a destructive trend?

Seeing is very much about choosing to see or not to see. The latter, more commonly known as denial, was a major factor in what enabled Nazism to take hold, to pick an example from my background. As Stanley Cohen points out in States of Denial, this avoidance takes many forms, much of it less obviously dangerous. It’s part of how we see other peoples and countries: we're eager to see stories of democratic revolutions, but we don't have much interest in the long slog that usually follows, full of confusion and contradictions.

We like to see Albania as a holiday destination, but we don't like to see the corruption and poverty which creates the conditions for the trafficking that ends up on our soil. In a noisy, angry UK, some of us like to see illegal immigrants as bad people without also seeing humans so desperate that they are prepared to leave everything they know, indenture themselves to smugglers and undertake dangerous journeys for the chance of a better life.

Only a small minority in contemporary Britain is prepared to see what is going in the Middle East. Since the time I was writing about Lebanese and Palestinian affairs, the geopolitical dynamics have intensified and a tight, homogenous narrative is now conveyed by the media. Public opinion has also shifted into a silence that is either condemnatory or bemused. It could be described as a kind of non-seeing, a refusal to see the Arab world in human terms.

Unless physically impeded, I'm going to Lebanon next year to pay a long overdue visit to my Lebanese friend and godson. I'll probably get a strong impulse to write about what I see, but despite the fact my lapsed journalist career is in renaissance, I don't know where I could publish the material.

A recent video call with my Lebanese friend was interrupted by fireworks. Because of the culture difference, I often explain things to her in very simple terms: the Church of England began because Henry VIII really fancied Anne Boleyn, for example. As the sound of explosions died away, I told her that every November we in Britain re-enact the night Parliament was nearly blown up by a terrorist.

Craig Murray reporting from Baalbek on 22 November