The Flamingo Revolution
The prime minister insisted the project will not “pour concrete on the head of flamingos,” but rather prove that development and nature “can coexist.” (CNN)
Albanians have been more bold than US citizens in taking to the streets in an uprising up against politicians involved in questionable real estate deals. It seems that Albanians are upset that a sensitive nature reserve (flamingoes and other creatures) is being eyed as the next private luxury development by the Trump/Kushner Clan. Although the project proposal has been around for a couple of years, matters rose to a head after Ivanka Trump told a podcaster that, “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim, effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the islands, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated,”(CNN) How Christopher Columbus of them.
Being the sensitive couple that they are, Trump and Kushner decided that they just had to “develop” that island and keep it for themselves and their super-rich friends as a luxury resort. Trump also made sure to clarify that, “Not only the island, but we have 5 miles of beachfront directly across from [it],” in case we were to think that they were not being ambitious enough at colonizing sensitive natural areas in a foreign country.
To be sure, this story is actually more about alleged corruption in the Albanian government and the intransparent dealings of the prime minister as it is against Kushner and Trump. Albanians appear to be fed up with decades of corruption since the fall of Communism. The street protests are against both the current prime minister, Edi Rama and his allies, as well as against the opposition leader and former prime minister, Sali Berisha. As seems to be the modus operandi of leaders who have lost touch with the population, the first reaction is obfuscation (no construction has started, but there might be a construction road built through the forest) (NYTimes, paywall). Then comes violence against protestors, which is what really triggered locals to become more active (Guardian). Finally, the next step is to blame outside agitators like Iran and Greece (NYTimes, paywall).
Albania is far away (at least from the US; less so for me in Italy) and one of the poorest countries in Europe. Although protest movements such as the one that has been going on for a few weeks now in Albania have a lot of intertwined threads, it seems that there is a genuine disgust on the part of citizens that rules protecting environmentally sensitive areas can simply be changed to allow billionaires to get their way. For hundreds of years, one of the chief goals of the wealthy and powerful has been to confiscate and dominate the ownership of land and natural resources and to exclude others from the right to those resources. We can hope that the activism of Albanians shows that we don’t have to accept colonialism as inevitable in the 21st century.
(Flamingoes seen from a distance, as it probably should be. Not Albania, but across the Adriatic in the Po Delta region of Italy. Better and more geographically accurate photo here at The Guardian.)