Prime Minister Edi Rama complained while attending the EU Western Balkans Summit that Iran had attacked Albania and that the country was facing a hybrid war. While he did not say so directly, the prime minister hinted that the protests that have been going on for six days in front of his office were also influenced by this war by a known enemy.

But while pages or profiles on social media linked to Iran, or that distribute Iranian propaganda in Albanian and other languages, which BIRN has previously identified, are using the protest to misinform and have fabricated fake news, mainly with anti-Semitic content, the massiveness of the latter is unlikely to have been inspired by the Revolutionary Guard or the Homeland Justice Telegram profiles.

Three or four anti-Semitic banners or young people who believe in conspiracy theories do not make the protest a product of hybrid warfare. But on the other hand, they point out, first, the great crisis of trust between citizens and the governing majority, and second, the failure of the latter in its plans to adopt a strategy for protection from foreign interference that was voted on at the end of the last legislature.

The first and most important reason is easily understood in the protest. If a 30-year-old young man chooses to believe an anonymous Instagram page that the prime minister is selling the country, the prime minister and the majority should ask themselves what they have done to be seen as land sellers. And the answers are in the protest where participants list corruption scandals in the government, one more shocking than the other. Incinerators, AKSHI, expensive roads without standards, lack of medicines in hospitals, problematic education and lack of basic things like water and a multitude of stories that some live on their backs, some see them happen.

The Prime Minister has now been busy clarifying the "project", which, as he says, on the one hand does not exist, but on the other hand will bring in billions from where it is unknown. But for over two years, from the idea to the time when Pishë-Poro Narta was surrounded by barbed wire, Albanians received information about it through foreign media.

So "secret" and so "secretive" was the project that none of those planning it went to spend an hour explaining it to the residents of Zvërnec. Even when the caravans accompanying Ivanka Trump with architects and investors first passed through, no one stopped in the village, which, regardless of whether or not it has rights to the properties, is directly affected by the alleged investment.

For two years, aside from renderings that talked about 10 housing units and a marina inside the shallow lagoon, no one sat down with the environmental organizations and activists who spend their days counting birds in the lagoon and tracking turtle nests on the dunes and who were shocked by these ideas. (Now Rama says that these plans that Jared Kushner presented to Bloomberg are not true).

For months, through requests for information and questions, journalists from a variety of media outlets attempted to learn about the plans and received mostly long messages about trade secrets, personal data, and excuses denying access to information.

This silence and enigma continued until the day when excavators flattened the dunes and the protected area was surrounded by barbed wire, even though there was nothing inside it that needed to be protected with security measures like a prison yard. And when this happened, the government did not go to communicate with those who were concerned. The first thing it did was lie and relativize. “There is no construction site,” local and territorial protection officials told BIRN over the phone, when asked after the environmentalists’ denunciation. “It is private property,” Rama said, when barbed wire surrounded beaches and natural monuments that the law recognizes as inalienable public property.

For its part, the company that received the permit hid offshore with shareholders under 25%, just enough to avoid being declared. They even tried to stay hidden even when their presence was clear and the documents revealed that they were accompanied by a lot of controversial characters.

When a mob of strongmen, dressed in black and posing as security guards hired by the company, took hostage, beat and dragged away without any reason one of the protesting villagers, the first reaction of the police was a lie. “They escorted him”, said the police. “He was violent”, said the police. Thousands of citizens who saw this happen on social networks reacted immediately in waves of comments, which beyond language testified to the loss of trust. Nationally licensed and public television channels were silent about everything that was happening.

But it didn’t stop there. When the anger erupted in the streets, along with conspiracy theories, the government neither apologized nor shared information. On the contrary, it launched its own hybrid war. As if thousands of commentators attacking the pages of activists and opposition politicians who supported the protest weren’t enough, government MPs and spin doctors immediately invented fake protesters and buses coming from Greece. They used AI photos and surveillance cameras to intimidate citizens not to protest. Labeling them practically as traitors and opponents of a development for which, apart from the appearance of barbed wire that is dated, there is neither a project nor any other information.

The government-affiliated media, and ironically the opposition media, which remained silent about the protest in its first two days, were and are being used to attack the protesters. They have been labeled with all sorts of names by television studios by people who have not even bothered to talk to any of them.

Now, while this was happening, from the beginning of the siege, to the attacks on nationally licensed media against the protest, the fake news spread on social networks by those profiles that have been sharing Iranian propaganda in Albanian for years or the mass distribution of these products in foreign languages, was forgotten by the government and the majority.

Just as BIRN found during monitoring that the strategy approved with much fanfare "against Foreign Intervention and Disinformation" had been forgotten. The Albanian Parliament, controlled by an overwhelming majority by the Socialists, and the Prime Minister's Office, which were tasked with setting up mechanisms to protect themselves from precisely this type of war that Rama and his MPs are complaining about and which they want to use as a reason for the protest, had done zero work to implement it in the first 6 months after the strategy was approved.

A zero that translates into a lack of structures dedicated "to identifying and responding to foreign information interference and disinformation, foreseen in the Strategy as an inter-institutional coordination mechanism". The first consequence of this is of course citizens, who, in addition to being lied to by the government, are also misinformed by propaganda networks. The second consequence is representatives of the majority who look ridiculous when they shout that we are in a hybrid war and sometimes blame the neighbors and other times Iran.

In the end, this government's inability to protect the country from disinformation, while spending recklessly on propaganda production and media control, to which it has also given strategic investments, is just one more reason to protest./Reporter.al