Albania’s flamingo protests hit parliament with eggs on day 100
Police blocked marchers from the chamber as the house returned from summer recess. Crowds threw eggs, tomatoes and water bottles. Several people were detained. Edi Rama still backs the Kushner-linked coastal project at Zvërnec and Sazan.
Tirana2 min read
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Police in Tirana stopped anti-government marchers from reaching parliament on the evening of 8 September, the first sitting after the summer recess and the 100th day of protests against a luxury coastal project linked to Jared Kushner. Demonstrators threw eggs and tomatoes at officers in riot gear. Cars carrying lawmakers were hit with plastic water bottles before police opened a path. Several protesters were detained. It was not clear how many were charged.
The movement calls itself the flamingo revolution, after the birds that nest in the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape near Zvërnec. Affinity Partners, the firm Kushner founded, is part of a group that wants a large resort on that coast and on Sazan Island. Planning papers reported by CBS earlier this year described hundreds of rooms, villas, a golf course, a casino and a water park. Qatari-linked Assets Group, run by Moutaz and Ramez Al Khayyat, appears in the same paper trail. The development vehicle sits behind Dutch-registered companies.
The daily phase in Tirana began after 30 May, when private guards at a newly fenced beach dragged a protester in front of cameras. The government cancelled two security licences, sacked a local police chief and ordered the fence down. The marches did not stop. They widened from the lagoon to corruption, land law and Prime Minister Edi Rama’s long hold on office. Crowds in June were counted in the tens and then hundreds of thousands. Diaspora rallies copied the flamingo sign. On 8 September the chant outside parliament was “Arrest Rama.”
Rama says the investment would pull a poor Adriatic country out of the isolation it lived under until 1991. Critics say a protected landscape is being treated as a plot, that public access to the beach would shrink, and that the ownership chain is built to hide who signs the cheques. Albania is a candidate for European Union membership. A nightly confrontation on the capital’s main boulevard is now part of the file Brussels reads.
Kushner has spent the same week as a US envoy in Moscow and Kyiv. The Albanian project is a separate commercial track. It does not need a White House statement to stay alive. It needs Albanian permits, and those permits sit with a government that the people in the street want gone. Day 100 did not produce a resignation. It produced eggs on shields and a reminder that the recess did not reset the argument.
What happens next is a function of two calendars. Parliament can move bills that lock the project in. The street can keep the boulevard closed at night. If the detentions of 8 September produce charges, the next march will have names to read. If they do not, the flamingo signs will be back tomorrow in the same place.
