Rama After Eight Days of Protests: the Violence Is "Orchestrated," and the Rioters Go on a Register Banning Them From Hotels and Airports

Eight days of protests in Albania, a ministry building set on fire, a Molotov cocktail thrown at the prime minister's office - and Prime Minister Edi Rama has finally offered his explanation. The violence, he says, isn't spontaneous but "orchestrated" by internal and external elements, with the aim of destabilising Albania and other European countries too. He made the statement before the heads of the banking system, and linked the violence with stones and fire to what, according to him, is also happening across Europe.

The picture from Tirana in recent days is not a small one. Demonstrators, many of them students, set fire to the building of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy, stormed the Court of Appeal and threw a Molotov cocktail at the building housing Rama's office. The red chairs labelled "Dialogue" that the prime minister set up in front of the government ended up scattered across the square.

A register, hoods and a bill for the family

"Everyone who raised a hand against the state will have the shadow of the state behind them until they compensate for the damage. We will hunt down those in hoods," Rama said. He announced a package of measures: publicly naming profiles that incite violence, tracking masked individuals, a special register of violent people who won't be able to enter hotels or airports. For damage caused by a minor, the family pays. "Italy and France did it, and we'll do it too," he said. The government, according to him, is already working with EU countries to deny the rioters travel.

Setting a ministry on fire isn't peaceful protest - that much is clear. But a register that decides who may sleep in a hotel or board a plane is a tool with a very wide reach. Who will decide who is a "rioter" and who was just standing in the wrong place? Rama himself urged citizens protesting peacefully not to stand close to the violent groups. How long will such a register stay limited to the people it's meant for?

The shadow of January 21

Rama claims the violent groups' goal was to provoke the police and repeat January 21 - an allusion to the 2011 protests in which four people were killed. He added that a drone attack with explosives aimed at his office had been neutralised. He offered no details about that attack in his statement.

For the masked demonstrators there was a different tone too: "blind, manipulated, abandoned, perhaps some even by their own families" - but still "children of this country." He rejected criticism of excessive police force with a comparison to France and Italy and with figures - "one to 2.5" and "one to 2" - without explaining what exactly they measure. And from Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had already told him not to shift the responsibility for the student protests onto foreign actors.

The scenario is familiar in the Balkans: when the street rises, the government first looks for a finger from outside. In Rama's entire statement there isn't a single word about why the students took to the streets in the first place. Will anyone in Tirana answer that question - or will the register be the whole answer?