Chaos begins in the DP. Meksi and Shehu are the signposts. Brojka, the last cursed one Bank scandal: A specialized office for money laundering. Its staff reports only to the President President Signature REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA 1991 President Firmë

. Even leave is sacrificed out of fear of those in power. The old habit of civil servants in state administrations and agencies has been pettiness, while the feeling that has historically dominated this group in Albania has been fear. Such a characterization does not arise from the imposed subjugation of a logic that divides society into classes and groups the officials of a state as hermaphroditic as ours under the label “petty bourgeois,” but from the very reality that has shaped this group and the laws that inspired it. More than the civil servants, those who command their category are to blame for this reality. Having judged themselves to be classes that rise and fall in the waves of great upheavals, Albanian politicians have consistently viewed power not as a real institution that merely administers the “obedient army” of civil servants, but as a cynical jailer of officials turned into inmates and of officials transformed into prisoners. It is too little to say that reform does not begin with people, but with laws, just as it is excessive to say that corruption or incompetence are attributes of every class of civil servants operating in this country at particular times, because the truth is that the people are still Albanian, and the standards and conditions in which they were formed are more or less the same. While such a thing does not truly guarantee that the PSS members will be more honest than the PD members, it gives you no grounds to think the opposite either. Even if you refer to what PS militants are doing today, with the rewards they are demanding and with which they have put Nano in a difficult position, as they say that today’s civil servants changed sides, going from communists to democrats. Ultimately, this means that if changing positions is in the nature of most officials, then the least harm that can come to the state administration is their return from democrats to socialists. If that happens, the “apparatchiks” will receive a minimum salary, while the state will be relieved of wasting time and energy recruiting a capable, experienced staff for its administration. The best of all possible outcomes would be for civil servants no longer to be seen as eternal cowards, trembling with the fever of their own incompetence. This mindset has now driven almost all of them to the “sublime sacrifice” of giving up their regular leave. Because it may happen that, after the freshness of the beaches or a modest rest at home, returning to work results in unemployment, where not only will the belly feel the burden of the other hardships, but the lock may also have been changed so that the door cannot be opened by its former official. Apparently, communist cynicism toward the “petty bourgeois” “apparatchiks” will continue to persecute Albanian civil servants for a long time, never allowing them to be seen as neutral specialists, though that is what they truly are, but rather as beads of reward around the neck of power. [Initials at the end: I. Sa]

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President Signature

President Firmë

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