Altin Dumani’s Anti-Corruption Crusade: How to Fight Fire with Fire

Altin Dumani, the outgoing head of the Special Anti-Corruption Structure (SPAK).

For 45 years of communist rule, the Albanian citizen knew that there was one entity capable of enacting limitless violence upon him: the state and everything it held sacred. In the post-unshackling period beginning in the early 1990s, the sources of authority one had reason to be afraid of became, to put it far too mildly, multipolar. The tightly controlled monopoly of violence was no more.

It could be the head of the local toughs, the unscrupulous plenipotentiary local  administrator or elected official, the businessman connected to the point of being untouchable, or the remnants of unchecked state violence, often manifested through vengeful or excessive law enforcement actions.

The Albanian citizen, in short, perceived himself at the whims of multiple currents of power he could not durably protect himself against. Yet as the decades went on, the toughs began to either kill one another off (Naim Zyberi, Altin Dardha, et al.) or wind up in prison for the remainder of their lives (Myrteza ‘Zan’ Çaushi and his ilk).

The political elite, on the other hand, which the Albanian citizen knew full well had profited off their societal collapse, remained untouched. This persisted even in the most flagrant of cases, such as in early 2011, when the then-Deputy Prime Minister Ilir Meta was caught on nationally broadcasted tape urging his party comrade, then-Minister of the Economy Dritan Prifti to award a hydropower plant to a previously determined bidder in exchange for €700,000.

It remained so even when the ensuing anti-corruption protests resulted in the infamous events of January 21, 2011, which saw four demonstrators executed in cold blood by snipers firing from the heights of the Prime Minister’s Office – the physical pinnacle of power in the country. No official ever saw prison time for either what the tapes revealed or the deaths of four citizens. Meta was acquitted on charges of bribery and abuse of power in 2012 and Republican Guard officers were cleared of murder charges the following year.

This dynamic remained fundamentally unshaken until the establishment of the Special Anti-Corruption Structure (SPAK) in 2019. SPAK was the successor institution to the Serious Crimes Prosecution Office, creating further independence and placing new resources behind its focus on official corruption and major organized crime.

This is not a tale, molded in the old epic tradition, about the might of a single individual singlehandedly transforming the status quo. Indeed, the series of events that led to Altin Dumani’s election as head of SPAK in 2022 is long and complex, owing much to the judicial reform process the European Union demanded of Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government if it wished to advance the accession process. Nor was Dumani the first Chairman of the Special Structure; that spot in history belongs to another veteran prosecutor, Arben Kraja.

But something has noticeably kicked into gear since Dumani’s election by the High Prosecutorial Council in December 2022. For one, the institution he leads enjoys an unprecedented 76% approval rating in Europe’s lowest-trust society. This time last year, he was voted by Albanians the most influential public figure of the year and named one of the ten global recipients of the 2024 Champions Against Corruption Award by the US State Department, with then-Secretary Anthony Blinken recognizing him for leading the institution “with integrity, professionalism, and courage.” What gives?

Impunity, Until Now

Albanians developed a term these last three decades to describe the reality of their political leaders: pandëshkueshmëria; literally, unpunishability (a stronger sense than impunity).

With a process this deeply rooted, it takes both institutional development and personal leadership to shift course. Though the latter has almost always been exaggerated at the expense of the former in Albanian historiography, it is nonetheless necessary to include if we wish to see a fuller picture.

What do I mean by Dumani showing himself willing to fight fire with fire? Put simply, it is his dual recognition that the deeply entrenched power structures that made corruption the Albanian modus operandi for decades requires an even greater uprooting force while at the same time keeping politics out of the prosecutorial process.

The former half of the equation is best exemplified by the common knowledge in Tirana’s political circles that Dumani describes himself as “the Americans’ prosecutor in Albania.” A perceived endorsement by “the Americans” has long served as a significant boost to an Albanian official’s status and credibility, especially in law enforcement. The US has long been among the key investors in Albania’s institutional development, having directed over $1 billion in total assistance since 1991. For the nation’s best-known prosecutor, this has been solidified by a close connection to American emissaries and crowned by the State Department recognition toward the end of his term.

At the same time, SPAK has built invaluable confidence and goodwill through their close and highly effective collaboration with international, chiefly Western European but also South American, law enforcement agencies in the long-running battle against ethnic Albanian-led drug trafficking networks. In appearance, Dumani is closer to the Albanian toughs for whom he has been the chief headache for the last several years than the blue-blooded prosecutor in the style of Eliot Richardson. It is with this intensity that he has brought institutional combat to the criminal networks which control an astounding portion of Albania’s economy.

Dumani, in short, seems to have identified – and what is far more difficult, relentlessly pursued – the exact antidote to the crippling phenomenon of Albanian impunity: building political capital through actively demonstrating reliability to international allies also invested in combating criminality, while maintaining the rule of law as the sole prosecutorial criterion.

There is a truism in Western politics that if someone receives attacks from both far ends of the political spectrum, they are doing something right. A more intense version of this can be observed in Albania, as the old opposition that largely supported the judicial reform process turned about-face once it began prosecuting the crimes of its leaders, chiefly former Presidents Sali Berisha and Ilir Meta. The accusations that the institution operated on the orders of Prime Minister Rama were quick to come; some even took the distasteful step of testing their wit through word play invoking the similarity of the institution’s name with that of Spaç, the most infamous of the communist regime’s political prisons.

More recently, the ruling Socialists have also changed their tune, as an ever-expanding roster of ministers and mayors – now, remarkably, including Tirana's Erion Veliaj, the heir apparent to party leadership, and Belinda Balluku, the powerful Deputy Prime Minister –  have found themselves on the receiving end of SPAK indictments.

The irony is that the longevity of this transformation depends on whether it will move robustly beyond the realm of the individual leader and secure a long-lasting institutional foothold. The one certainty in politics is change, and here the coalition of international allies, determined and capable law enforcement, and overwhelming public support must not only remain stable but prepare for new potential threats. Klodian Braho, who was elected SPAK’s new chair earlier this month, faces pressures on several fronts. For one, an increasingly prevalent sentiment within Albania is that SPAK must secure convictions of political leaders – not merely high-profile arrests which allow them to make prompt returns to the political scene. Another, of course, comes from a political elite which finds itself in a situation more precarious than many likely imagined at the beginning of the reform process.

Threats from “within” the coalition come as the Trump Administration has gutted America’s commitment to international anti-corruption efforts, dubiously framing them as threatening US business interests abroad. The European Union, as has been capably noted by Andi Hoxhaj, the Albanian legal scholar working in Britain, found itself dithering over stronger internal anti-corruption standards for its own member-states this year, though this does not seem to have altered its stern stance towards candidate countries. This opens up space for a trend that has been observed elsewhere in Eastern Europe, of countries easing up on rule-of-law and related reforms once they have reached their primary objective of EU membership. We must note the centrality of this trajectory in Albanian politics, particularly as the successful parliamentary campaign by Rama’s Socialists earlier this year focused on little other than their promise of EU accession by 2030.

New politically motivated attacks could come from a ruling government on an unprecedented fifth term or a vengeful opposition-turned-governing party. Some concerning signals have come from Fatmir Xhafaj, the once zealous communist student leader turned ultimate Socialist Party insider. Having led the judicial reforms at the end of the last decade, he has spoken of the need for changes to the new structures. In his capacity as chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Institutional Oversight, he has spoken against the narrow technical request by judges that their retirement age be set at 75, which the latter claim would alleviate the prevalent problem of high unresolved cases. There is no guarantee, however, that proposed changes would remain technocratic and refrain from expanding to questions of political independence. It would also be hard to predict how a full attack might look, whether quiet and gradual or public and dramatic.

The last few years have granted Albania the once-unthinkable role of serving as a successful anti-corruption model for its neighbors and developed Western allies alike, who seem to be losing sight of this crucial pillar of their democratic foundation. What is clear is that if Albanians and their international partners wish to secure and expand their vital victories on this front, they must not take the vital ground already gained for granted.

Enri Lala is the founder and Chief Editor of Arbanon Magazine. A fourth-year student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is pursuing majors in History and Global Studies alongside a minor in French. He is interested in Albanian and European history, American foreign policy and various  literary traditions.