Rama Addresses Forest Europe Presidency, Lake Shkodra UNESCO Designation, Zvërnec Controversy, and Tivat Summit

Prime Minister Edi Rama used the twenty-second episode of the sixth season of his weekly podcast, Flasim, to address several policy and governance matters: Albania’s unanimous election to lead Forest Europe for 2026 to 2030, Lake Shkodra’s inclusion in the UNESCO biosphere network, his visit to residents of the Zvërnec area amid the coastal development controversy, the international media campaign surrounding the project and its investors, the Bread and Heart Festival and the involvement of world-leading landscape architects in the Zvërnec project design, and the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Tivat including a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Below is an edited transcript of the weekly address, reconstructed and condensed for clarity from the original recording.

This week Albania was elected by unanimous vote to lead Forest Europe, the pan-European forest platform, for the mandate 2026 to 2030, taking the baton from Sweden. This is the most important pan-European platform where the European Union and 45 European countries address together the field of forests and the sustainable management of natural resources as they relate specifically to forests. This is a decision that carries significance, and that significance, I believe, is clear to everyone if we ask ourselves whether Albania could have been imagined as the choice to lead this organisation ten years ago. Ten years ago, when illegal hunting crackled through our protected areas and flamingos were not only killed but eaten. Ten years ago, when forests were being cut and convoys of timber trucks ran up and down from north to south. Ten years ago, when protected areas that existed were ungoverned land, while much of what needed protecting was simply prey to greed.

How many hydropower plants would have been built on the Vjosa if ten years ago we had not said stop to all that madness of Albania as the mini-superpower of regional energy? What would have happened if in these ten years we had not expanded the map of protected areas to 25 percent of Albania’s entire territory, and so on and so forth. The fact that we cannot imagine Albania having been chosen to lead this forum and taking the baton from Sweden with the blessing of all countries, and with particularly strong support during the candidacy review from the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom, tells us something about today and about how those who have made this transformation govern and lead.

And the fact that this week Albania also received another piece of good news, the inclusion of Lake Shkodra in the UNESCO biosphere network, is yet another meaningful example that no destructive forces govern Albania; what governs is a force that builds. Not a force that abuses the environment and natural or cultural heritage, but a force that on the contrary seeks to harmonise both together. To think that the choice is either to conserve or to build means to have understood nothing from all the developments of recent decades, and above all to have understood nothing from the necessity for people to raise their wellbeing by putting natural resources in the service of that wellbeing, while on the other hand ensuring that natural resources remain there for people: under their care, under their attention, to be preserved, maintained, nourished, and made ever more valuable, both for what they represent and for what they serve.

This week I went and met the residents of the Zvërnec area. At a meeting that, for all those who wish to listen, is posted on my page, and which is worth far more than any howling, any noise, any wailing, any manipulation, distortion, or speculation from the broth of recent days. There I met people who were insulted and massacred by the online flamingo-wavers as people gathered by force, people collected one by one, people who did not represent the community and so on, while they are precisely the people who live in that area. That area is not an overpopulated zone; it is an area where those people who have interests there, who work there, who claim their properties there, including in the very area where the project will be developed, who support their families from the small activities there, from services and daily work, are present. I did not go to meet people assembled from Narta below or from Vlora above. I went to meet those who are there, precisely those who have a direct interest, whether in property rights, in the right to be heard, in the right to participate in this process, or in the right to development.

And what I heard from them was naturally not a surprise to me; it was entirely different from what is heard every day. It was a conversation about concrete concerns, concrete problems, about how a claim is addressed, a property returned and registered, but where if the return and registration were done irregularly there is a court, there is a process. And in the end everything was positive, among people who discuss as people, among people who do not come at each other with stones in their bags. And what struck me most was that despite the questions, concerns, and requests they had, at no moment did I hear from them any suggestion that the investment itself should be stopped. On the contrary, I could feel their anxiety afterward when we left: anxiety that it should not be stopped, that they should not lose this thing.

And in the meantime I have something else to add about what is happening. Bear in mind one thing. All this great torrent of videos, all these journalists, all these various international media figures who suddenly became interested in Albania, in the environment, in the birds of Albania: they have nothing to do with the environment or the birds of Albania. Each of them has their own agenda in the countries where they are. Some have it in connection with Israel, which has been dragged into this completely without reason, while the lead investors are two well-known Muslim brothers in the Middle East famous for their successes and investments, who come from Qatar, a country that has no relationship with Israel. Others have it against the President of America, whom half love and half hate and toward whom media and all online systems pile on for everything. Others have it because they do not want Albania to have this project. They are competitors. Naturally, when four billion comes to Albania under these names, Albania becomes a point of reference as never before and as never again if we lose this opportunity.

And meanwhile do not forget that there is a very real possibility that all this noise circulating in the media and online networks, unlike what the reality is here, which is a crowd on the boulevard, a very biodiverse crowd ranging from the deranged who create a square circle and then call it a square circle, to all manner of characters who seek likes and live by likes, influencers who earn the money of the world through social networks and pay not a single grain of tax, to others who are delirious with a flag tied around their throat and who wear the qeleshe as a certificate of patriotic purity, to others who are genuinely concerned, young men and women who want to vent their frustrations, and so on: it is a normal crowd, there is no problem. But this normal crowd being turned into hundreds of thousands of people boiling in Albania will damage tourism. Boys and girls: some worrying signs of cancellations have begun to appear in Saranda. A few worrying signs. But if it becomes a trend, if those who have booked begin to cancel, those who would bring money that goes to small businesses, that goes to the families who are barely waiting for this season, then we will lose many tourists this year.

Perhaps that is what you want. I do not believe that is what you want, but perhaps that is the goal: to live only for the flamingos, 99.99 percent of whom those who defend them have never seen with their own eyes. But the project will be built, let us be very clear. The project will be built because it is a great good for our economy, it is a great blessing for Vlora, and it is a great epochal leap for tourist Albania and for European Albania.

Another activity of this week, which cannot and need not make the noise of bad news and amplified lies, was the second edition of the Bread and Heart Festival, the international festival that brings to Tirana an impressive number of architects and professionals of urban development, gathering around a common table extraordinary personalities, winners of the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel Prize of architecture, who come from all continents, from Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, and who numbered more than 600 here. Together with their local partners, with young men and women who work in architecture and urban planning, they are living truly unforgettable days in their careers because they are collaborating with the greatest masters in an open school of architecture and urban planning as Albania has now become. Tirana became a space for the exchange of ideas and experiences among these personalities, who have seen much, who travel widely, who do projects everywhere, who are everywhere invited and welcomed, but who are absolutely grateful for the opportunity the festival gives them to be together and to interact in a way they do not do in the rest of their journey.

Among them was Dong Juhan, the successor of the legendary landscape architect Kongjian Yu, currently the director of the prestigious Turenscape studio, one of the most valued names in the world in the field of landscape architecture. And Dong Juhan is in fact the leader of the consultancy for the protected landscape of Zvërnec within the large working group on the project which the flag-draped flamingo-wavers who speak without knowing what they are talking about are demanding be cancelled. The project is being developed, is being worked on, is being materialised step by step under the eyes and thanks to the minds of some of the greatest architects in the world. Dong Juhan is part of that group, together with some of the world’s finest environmental engineers, together with economists, together with researchers who will address the economic and social impact and the environmental impact. I have said it and I repeat: in this broth being cooked with great noise it is difficult for the word spoken at normal decibels to get through. But I have said it and I repeat: that group came to Vlora when the only thing being talked about was the arrival of the Trump representative, but it was a two-day visit with that large group, with discussions, workshops, and a special workshop in which the entire group sat down and listened to several professors of high standing in Albania, professors of history, of geography, of ethnology and so on. It is simply inconceivable. You would have to be completely unfocused to believe that those people who have come together, those ambitious investors who could go anywhere in the world and who have done many things across the world, would create this great army of dreamers and the ambitious to come here and kill the flamingos. You would have to be completely unfocused to swallow that kind of flamingo story.

That is how I see it. In any case, as I said, things are clear in a democracy. Some are elected to work, some work to be elected, some others neither work nor are elected but protest. Some work and protest, protest and work. Some others do not even know what they are asking for themselves. It is freedom, it is democracy. Rain has its work. We have ours, as the legendary Loro Borici used to say.

This week was important also for the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Tivat. I had never been to Tivat. I forced myself to go because I had refused to go before building Durres’s tourist port. That had been a fixed idea in my mind, an illogical fixation, but sometimes, as the upheavals of recent days also show, logic is not always what decides. Emotion decides too, and in a certain way human foolishness decides too. And it was a kind of foolishness on my part, to be honest, an emotional one: I did not want to go to Tivat because I did not want to see Port of Montenegro. I did not want to see Port of Montenegro because Port of Montenegro is a ball that slipped through Albania’s fingers and landed in Montenegro and defined Montenegro’s history as the history of a country without agriculture, without factories, without other productions, but with a beauty it put at the service of the economy through investments of excellence. And the one who dreamed and conceived Port of Montenegro, before it went there like a ball pushed by water through gates that were left open simply to extract profit through greed, using Albania as a property, wanted to build it in Durres. He had the conviction that a tourist port near the largest amphitheatre the Romans built outside Rome would be an extraordinary success story, which history will confirm, a history that is now much delayed through no fault of mine or the project, and it was delayed and delayed while people watched with their eyes on each other’s pockets and asked for their cut. And so it went to Montenegro, he built Port of Montenegro, and Tivat, a bay of around ten thousand residents that had been the only bay not frequented by tourists because it was a Yugoslav military base with polluted water, became the greatest economic engine of Montenegro. And Montenegro from that moment saw much good fortune because further investments followed, the only One and Only hotel in Europe was built there alone. All of these would have been in Albania if those who shall not be named had not let these balls slip through, and if they had thought about Albania.

In any case, I went, I had things to do, and I am very pleased to say that the summit was perhaps the most interesting from the overall perspective of pushing certain things forward and of accelerating enlargement. But one thing is fairly certain: Albania was assessed as a country close to membership. Albania was assessed for all that it has done and as a country that is therefore valued. Meanwhile our voice was heard clearly. I raised all those things I have been working on for some time within that circle, because we have achieved one thing: in that circle there is no longer who am I and who are you, as there once was. We all listen to each other with respect and are listened to with respect. And I have great hope that we will have very good news very soon again in that respect, and I am more convinced today than I was before this summit that we will achieve what we want to achieve. The meeting with Chancellor Merz was absolute proof that the assessment is maximum, the support is maximum, and only the work, the work, the work is what not even the Germans, not even the Italians, not even the French can do for us. We must do it ourselves. So everyone, everyone to work, each to their own work. Thank you very much.