Opinion
The Jan. 21 plaques are not a battlefield
The desecration of a memorial calls for an investigation and repair, not accusations without evidence from one side and silence from the other.
By ANN Newsroom · Newsroom
October 25, 2026, 18:45 · Updated 18:40 · 2 min read
On Deshmoret e Kombit Boulevard, four plaques commemorate Ziver Veizi, Hekuran Deda, Aleks Nika and Faik Myrtaj, the protesters killed on Jan. 21, 2011, in front of the Prime Minister's Office. On Sunday evening, the head of the Socialist parliamentary group, Taulant Balla, announced that the plaques had been desecrated.
Who did it is unknown. His reaction said neither how many plaques were damaged nor who carried out the damage, and by the end of the day there was no announcement of any official investigation. Yet Balla went straight to a culprit: he accused Sali Berisha of having paid for and ordered the damage, without presenting any public evidence.
This is the worst way to honor the dead. The events of Jan. 21 remain one of the most sensitive wounds in Albanian politics and a case investigated by SPAK, the Special Anti-Corruption Structure. When the memory of four people who were killed becomes material for social media posts, we risk the memorial being seen as the property of one side and its desecration as a “response” to it. The plaques do not belong to parties; they belong to the families and to the city.
PD's silence, on the other hand, is no answer. Even if Balla's accusation is baseless, a party that calls citizens into the streets has a duty to say clearly that memorials and commemorative plaques are off-limits, just as Culture Minister Blendi Gonxhja condemned the damage to monuments during the protests a day earlier. Violence against memory does not become more acceptable because the target seems to belong to the opposing camp.
We propose three steps. Police and prosecutors should make public whether they have opened an investigation and whether there is camera footage from the area. The plaques should be repaired within the week, in the presence of the victims' families. And the two parliamentary group leaders, Balla and Bardhi, should condemn the desecration in a joint statement, naming no culprits until justice finds them. It would be the only gesture this week in which both sides say the same thing.
