The Fortieth of the Flamingo Revolution

In Albanian custom, the fortieth day is when the dead are commemorated. The flamingo revolution has just reached its own, and the flamingos have taken their holidays elsewhere.

By Ylli Manjani, former Minister of Justice of Albania

There are revolutions made for bread. There are revolutions made for freedom. And there are revolutions made for… flamingos.

These last ones have now reached their fortieth. May they live as long as the mountains!

In truth, and for truth’s sake, the flamingos are not residents of Narta. Nor of Zvërnec. Look closely and they are residents of nowhere at all. They are migratory birds. They arrive, take a few panoramic photographs, eat the odd shrimp, rest a while and move on. Exactly like the tourists stepping off a charter flight: nice place, two selfies, onward.

The flamingos of Narta, in other words, are tourists. With beaks.

Naturally they must be protected. No normal person wants to destroy the habitat of a rare species. The environmentalists are entirely right to demand care for the lagoon.

But from there to the conclusion that we must not serve the human tourists for the sake of the flamingo tourists, there is an entire swamp of logic to cross.

Can we not, in the end, serve both?

A man can drink his coffee while watching the flamingo. The flamingo can eat its shrimp while watching the man. Nobody loses.

Think about it coldly, in fact, and the people who want to build a resort at Zvërnec have no interest whatsoever in driving the flamingos away. Quite the opposite.

A resort without flamingos is like a hotel in the Maldives without the sea. Who would pay a premium for a room with a view of… the car park?

Flamingos are free marketing. They are natural décor. They are five stars that draw no salary.

The irony is that the flamingos’ greatest enemies are turning out to be not those who want to invest beside them, but those who love them so much that they will allow no one else to come near them.

A love of that kind recalls the man who keeps his flower under a glass jar so that no one can touch it. Within a few days there is no flower left either.

And so we arrive at the fortieth of the flamingo revolution.

Except there is one small problem.

It is said that this year the flamingos themselves did not come.

What remains is a Dalmatian pelican, some wild ducks, a beautiful lagoon and a fenced property waiting to be developed. This I saw with my own eyes.

In Tirana, and above all on social media, the revolution carries on with full enthusiasm, while the object of the revolution, the flamingo, has taken its holidays somewhere else.

Rather like protesting in defence of someone who left long ago.

On the boulevard we go on celebrating the revolutionary fortieth, with the coffins of the dead at our side.

The world has other worries. Old man Trump goes on showing the globe which territory he will take tomorrow. FIFA, with old man Trump’s intervention, even withdrew America’s red card, restoring it to the centre of world football. The great powers are drawing new maps in pencil.

And we…

We carry on heroically guarding the tourist flamingos from the human tourists. We dream of the KLA, of traitors handing land to Trump. And then we convince ourselves that if anyone big should ever set his mind on Zvërnec, we will tell him, firmly: no!

Ha!

Ha-ha!

Very well…

Let us believe that too.

It is, after all, another rare Albanian species: revolutionary optimism.

Ylli Manjani is an Albanian lawyer and former Minister of Justice (2015–2017). Since his dismissal from government — after which he publicly accused the Rama administration of protecting corruption — he has returned to legal practice and become one of Albania’s most persistent critics of prosecutorial overreach and judicial dysfunction.