Prime Minister Edi Rama has reacted after a video shared on social media by the former Vlora police chief, Dritan Zagani, in which the prime minister appeared in Switzerland with friends in a local environment, consuming something.
Zagani wrote in the video caption that “The squares of Tirana are full, this guy eats and drinks here with your money… continue to protest peacefully because you are a cultured people, just like this guy wants to,” and Rama responded to this comment, calling it slander and inaccuracy.
The government’s number one says he was in Basel at a private invitation, and that according to him he has never traveled with state money on occasions when he was invited privately and not on official visits. “I shared a video where someone caught me drinking water in Basel, Switzerland at state expense.
In almost three decades of public service, I have never traveled privately with state funds, and the same goes for my family.
In 13 years as prime minister, my family and I have never gone on vacation abroad.
In Switzerland I was privately invited by ArtBasel, the annual fair of the most prestigious art galleries in the world, where my works were also presented. We traveled and stayed for a day and a half with my wife, as always in these cases completely at our own expense.
But this is a good opportunity at the right time, to put a clear dot on the “i”:
About twenty years ago, when my skin was not yet covered in the mud of slander and unjust accusations, I publicly declared that “there is no son of a mother or son of a father who can find a penny in my pocket that was not earned through honest work”!
Today, two decades later, I am no longer that 40-year-old man, still unaccustomed to the muddy arena of political life, who lost sleep over the burning wounds of slander and criminal accusations.
But I say with pride that that sentence, uttered at that time out of pain and shame in front of my people and all those who had entrusted me with the leadership of Tirana, remains 100% untouchable in its content even today, in front of all those who have entrusted me with the leadership of Albania.
And never forget it:
Whoever slanders or accuses you without evidence has either done what he accuses you of or would do it if he were in your place, so jealousy or hatred, or both, make him believe every farce he utters.
“When I see how the world we live in has become increasingly, thanks to social networks, a meadow where the endless thorns of lies multiply at the speed of a click, while the flowers of truth are often choked by thorns, my mind always goes to the Holy Books, where the slanderer appears even worse than the murderer,” Rama writes.
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