FLASH
Shkruar nga Joel Sucher
Albanians have consistently shown a rare historical resilience in the face of invasions and external pressures. At crucial moments, they have preserved their identity and code of honor, and this is also happening with the protests of recent days.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love Albanians. Proud, fierce, and guided by a code of honor that most of the world has never heard of and wouldn't know how to pronounce.
This code is called Besa, an ancient Albanian principle, rooted in something older than Christianity or Islam, older than the Ottoman Empire, older than anything the West can claim to have taught the Balkans.
Besa means, roughly, keeping one's word. Protecting those who need protection, even at the cost of oneself. That's why what's happening now along Albania's Adriatic coast, the mass protests, the flamingo flags, the crowds filling the streets of Tirana night after night, doesn't surprise me at all.
The immediate spark is a $4 billion luxury resort project, backed by Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and linked to Ivanka Trump, planned for Sazan Island and the Zvërnec coastal wetlands, an ecologically precious area that happens to be home to flamingos, sea turtles and nesting seals. The Albanian parliament quietly approved a ban on construction in the protected areas by 2024, laying the legal groundwork for what critics now describe as a bona fide deal with powerful foreign investors and politically connected domestic interests. Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into how the land was bought and sold. When bulldozers appeared on the beach and private security guards began beating up local residents and environmental activists, Albanians did what they do best: they showed up.
What began as regional resistance in the villages of Zvërnec and Nartë has turned into a national movement, with thousands of people holding inflated pink flamingos, the symbol of threatened wetlands, and banners reading “Albania is not for sale!”
Solidarity demonstrations are planned from Vlora to Milan, London, New York and Toronto. The movement has been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution, and its decentralized leadership and Gen Z aesthetic have been compared to other youth-led protest movements internationally.
Prime Minister Edi Rama has responded by calling it a “hybrid war.” And know that when a politician uses that phrase, it usually means that the protests are working.
But to understand why Albanians react this way to perceived injustice, why this small mountainous nation of 2.6 million produces people who simply won't be forced to bow their heads, you have to go further than this tourist offering. Much further.
During the Nazi occupation that began in 1943, the Albanian population refused to comply with orders to hand over lists of Jews living within the country's borders. State agencies gave Jewish families forged documents, allowing them to blend into the local population.
This was not a small act of passive resistance. It was a systematic, deliberate, and dangerous challenge to the Nazi killing machine. Albania ended World War II as the only European country with more Jews than it had at the beginning, the only Nazi-occupied nation that can make that claim.
Besa, that ancient duty of protection, was the inspiring principle behind this extraordinary act. I have known Albanian-Americans in the New York metropolitan area for decades. Some of them were not exactly exemplary boys.
In 2004, the Albanian Rudaj Organization, "The Corporation," as its members called it, was labeled as the sixth crime family in New York City, along with the five traditional Italian-American families.
Operating from the Bronx, Queens, and Westchester County, my hometown, they were considered by the FBI to be more ruthless and harder to infiltrate than the Italian families they displaced and, at times, humiliated.
But I'll leave the moral accountability to others. What I will say is this: Even in that world, the code remained in effect. You didn't betray yours. You kept your word. You didn't make a deal and then sell out the people who trusted you.
Which brings us back to Zvërnec and Jared Kushner's bulldozers on a protected beach. Jared Kushner, buoyed by his relationship with Trump, navigated the labyrinthine politics of Manhattan real estate and tried to do the same while pretending to put his own stamp on events unfolding in the Middle East.
With many claims, he set out with Ivanka on a quest for new challenges. They found one on a beautiful Albanian island, where they disembarked from a yacht, swam to shore, walked barefoot to the top, and, as she puts it, were "enchanted."
In the world they live in, glamour plus capital equals buy. You see it, you love it, you buy it. But what they apparently failed to explain is that this particular island lies off the coast of a country where the code is older and deeper than any investment prospectus.
You can't buy Albania! The Nazis tried to break it. Enver Hoxha tried for 40 years to isolate it from the world. No one succeeded. And not even a groom with a checkbook can change that./ Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "Freedom News"
Lini një Përgjigje