Albania is in flames. Of course we don't know how the character of this revolt will turn out. We cannot say whether it is a libertarian rebellion or heated by mafiosi or agents of the old regime. We cannot know about the connection between organisations and people in rebellion. For sure we cannot trust the things the media says. But that's not the point.
To label a revolt means wanting to usurp it, and that is a kind of acting not interesting to us. What is interesting and cannot be faked is the fact, that - after decades of violent dictatorship, first a communist one, later the democratic - priests, workers, students, men and women stormed the banks that exploited them all the time, that they stormed the barracks and armouries, that they unarmed the soldiers and police that treated them like slaves. They entered the places of the secret service that spied and reported them. Without to and fro they attacked the very responsible structures of dominion. They took the weapons formerly pointed at their freedom in the name of exploitation to retarget them at the State's exploiters and torturers. Sure, we know there will be people trying to make the glow extinct, to redirect the revolt, to propose the same old and wrong solutions.
But the first tries to dam the revolt by means of politics failed miserably: the installation of the opposition's government is nothing but a farce, meaning nothing. The vultures of politics try to save the maximum by founding the national committee for public health. As brazen as they are they act as self-appointed privileged mediators to "solve the crisis." But no attempt to negotiate, no plea to gather under the patriotic flag helps the smallest bit to disarm the insurgents. Not even the president - on a socket of authority visible to him only - trying to offer mercy and forgiveness to those that will give up will help. Better he should pack his things and disappear.
A revolution is not a gala dinner, and its dark aspects are connected with the exciting. The perspectives offered by such a revolution should motivate everybody to think, especially those acting as grave-diggers of each possibility of social change. The facts are much clearer as any theory. We have to deal with them with the outlook to widen the conflict to come to forms of rebellion without rulers and armies. Those once tasted freedom and self-determined live are not willing to loose it and to be subordinates again. We want to express that freedom, with all its uncertainties is just around the corner, you just have to risk taking it. The rulers are looking for protection for they know about this risk. Italy, being complicee of Berisha as well as of Ramiz Alia formerly, was that convinced of disposing of Albania to make it a province to exploit. Italy is now trembling. It is arming its coasts.
What we are dreaming of? That an unlimited revolt flares up in any dominion's stomach.
(L'evasione March 1997)