. P. 3

. P. 5

. P. 5

. P. 6

“At the death of the Sparrow, a tear fell,” Shakespeare says. All the more so when a person is killed. Tolstoy weeps after he “urges” Anna Karenina to lie down on the railway tracks. As a writer, I would close my eyes and turn my head if someone were executed in a stadium or at a shooting range, or against a firing-squad wall. I understand Europe when it calls on our lawmakers and public opinion to abolish the death penalty in Albania too. But let Europe allow me to recall a saying of our people in this case: the owner knows where the roof leaks. But our roof does not leak in just one or two places. The floor of our house is covered with trays and pots, cauldrons, cooking pots and chamber pots, to avoid the fatal consequences of a roof that does not drip but pours. As an intellectual, I have the right to speak out against a stateless state, where fragile democracy is at risk of collapsing. In Albania, the population is armed with weapons capable of outgunning the army, while every day more of those who uphold the law are being killed than those who break it. We often say that judges and prosecutors make mistakes in the sentences they hand down to criminals, but it also happens that they are intimidated by criminals and feel unprotected by the state. There are cases when they are even killed before the ink has dried on the signatures they put to an ordinary sentence, let alone a death sentence. All these factors and many others are both the cause and consequence of this reality. It is clear that the effect always comes first. But sometimes the cause follows the effect, just as the murderer follows the funeral of the murdered person. I believe that the death penalty, although it is written into Albania’s laws, has not been applied by the Court and the Prosecutor’s Office. And despite this, the death penalty in our country is carried out every day through vigilantism. This is shown by the ever-expanding graveyards, where more and more innocent and unprotected people are laid to rest. To forgive criminals or give them lighter sentences is just like sentencing a shark to drown and forcing it to jump into the sea for that purpose.

NATIONAL LIBRARY TIRANA. IDEAL. REVERIE. © MUNAT[?] Cartoon: a lamp hanging by a rope, inscribed “IDEAL”, above a chair marked “REVERIE”.

. P. 3

. P. 11

. P. 5

. P. 9